A Vida Me Fez Assim

In the mid '00s The Word was my favourite music magazine and I would buy it most months, provided issues made their way to the corner of Sweden where I then lived. They had an unoriginal recurring feature where a music-related personality would be invited to recommend some of their favourite media of the moment. In one of those the subject in question (I forget who it was) enthused about Teresa Cristina and about this album specifically. I don't know if I'd have had any way then of trying it before buying, so my order may have been a blindly speculative one.

It worked out well: I like it very much. These are old-fashioned, acoustic samba singalongs in which Teresa Cristina is the lead vocalist and the obvious star of the show. My copy seems to be a Spanish issue on a Brazilian label. The songs are all in Portuguese (as are the booklet and cover text). While I understand very few of the words, it's clear that TC has a beautifully expressive & soulful voice, one that sounds like it belongs to someone who has done some hard living. Her backing band, Grupo Semente, appear to be a trio, but on most tracks they're augmented by three, four or more additional musicians.

If Google Translate is to be believed, the CD's title translates as "Life Made Me This Way", which, if true, puts Teresa Cristina on the opposite side of the Nature vs. Nurture debate to Lady Gaga and her 'Born This Way'. My favourite track is the glorious 'Quantas Lágrimas', and I also very much enjoy the rousing closer 'Portela', featuring guest vocalist Cristina Buarque along with a veritable orchestra & chorus of other guests. The CD is enhanced with some additional content: specifically PDFs of the song lyrics annotated with chord charts. It also includes an installer for Adobe Acrobat version 5, should one not have the means of opening them!

Comments

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4. An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

Onslow

George Onslow was an odd-man-out among 19th-century French composers. Born into wealth and privilege, the grandson of an English Earl, he had no need to follow the operatic gravy train, with string quartets (of which he wrote 36) and string quintets (there are another 32 of those) forming the bulk of his compositional output. The present disc contains his 28th, 29th and 30th quartets, in compelling performances by the Quatuor Diotima. These quartets were written toward the end of a prolifically-creative period for Onslow in the years 1829-35. Viviane Niaux, in her informative booklet notes, ascribes this to the composer's having heard performances of two of Beethoven's late quartets for the first time in 1828, at their Paris première. Like many of his contemporaries, Onslow was at once "fascinated and disconcerted", and, although he considered them "extravagant", they seem to have been powerfully inspirational. A further spur to creativity may have been his ...

This is a Recording

Search This Blog