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Beatriz Nunes
The pairing of an innovative but sensitive guitarist with a singer who works and explores the voice is a bracing, all-too-rare format. Raül Refree perfected it with both Sílvia Pérez Cruz and Rosalía, to stunning effect. The Portuguese singer Beatriz Nunes and the guitarist André Silva, whom I saw Friday night at Drom, are of…
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Nella
Hearing the young Venezuelan singer Nella in real space for the first time felt like stumbling upon a new species. I wanted to collect specimens, come to understand it, preserve it. To the songs she sang from Spain and Venezuela she gave something familiar but utterly distinct, an Ibero-American sound completely her own, effuse with…
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Carminho • Sara Tavares
The fadista Carminho sang almost by surprise last week at City Winery. The concert was announced perhaps a week before, but she stood before a full house, following an energetic set by the Portuguese creole artist Sara Tavares. It wasn’t the only way she surprised me. I expected, from what I had seen of her…
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Lera Lynn
Start with her name and her voice. They both speak of country and its close cousins folk and Americana. The name implies a pedigree that, so far as I know, is coincidental (assuming it is not a stage name: other than that she is from Georgia and went to certain schools, her available bios are,…
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Emel Mathlouthi
With Emel Mathlouthi, I confronted the difficulty of listening to political song in a language I do not understand. In some ways this should not have been hard. She tells us what the titles mean or the lyrics refer to: freedom and justice, breaking silence with speech and putting pen to paper, not to avert…
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Sophie Auster
The personae of Sophie Auster are ever shifting, and she unites them in a persona that avoids the fatal stamp of a changeless character. To appreciate her in performance is to grasp the fluidity of the shifts and the constancy of what ties them together. She projects herself physically and visually, and who she becomes…
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Danças Ocultas • Pires
I made my way to Newark on Saturday to hear Nathalie Pires sing fado and on the way encountered a quartet of diatonic accordionists called Danças Ocultas. Artur Fernandes, Filipe Cal, Filipe Ricardo, and Francisco Miguel, who formed the group in 1989, were the first half of the program at the New Jersey Performing Arts…
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Russian Red
I opted on St. Patrick’s Day for Russian Red in lieu of Irish green. It was her shimmering interpretation of the song “Loving Strangers” on the soundtrack of Julio Medem’s beautiful film Room in Rome that first set me on this young Spanish singer-songwriter. Her given name is Lourdes Hernández, but she took as her…
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Under the Greenwood Tree
The cross-dressing heroines of Shakespeare’s comedies create a new social relation by virtue of their masquerades and the secret knowledge they hold. They are thus empowered to influence events to a degree otherwise unpermitted of their sex, and so fulfill Beatrice’s repeated plaint in Much Ado About Nothing: “O that I were a man.” The…
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La ruta de Lorca
On June 5, the birthday of the great Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, I joined LA RUTA DE LORCA EN NUEVA YORK, a walking tour of some of the poet’s haunts in the vicinity of Columbia University. We gathered at the university gate, bearing as our standard a rendering of Lorca’s face, composed,…