Product Description World Music favorite Cristina Branco embraced a career as a singer of fado (Portuguese folk music) when she received an Amalia Rodrigues record on her 18th birthday. It was at this time that she discovered the passion & emotion that grips fado music, & the close ties that bind the poems, the notes & the voice color. Now, Branco breathes new life into the fado tradition with her latest album, Sensus, in which Cust¢dio Castelo again performs. This album is a veritable ode to sensuality, to eroticism, to the senses, those of the texts & those of the body. The album is inspired by selected poems from Portuguese poets of yesterday & today, including David Mourao-Ferreira, & by Shakespeare himself, in the form of one of his most beautiful sonnets. It is in this album that the full bloom of Branco's voice is the most evident - her voice is steady, controlled, flexible, & full of emotion. This hymn to beauty & sensuality is also her most personal work. Through the poets & the music she loves, this secretive singer reveals herself in these fourteen titles with both daring & reserve. .com Branco is one of the younger divas of Portuguese fado, a mournfully sexy tradition born among Lisbon's low-class waterfront dives. Like the blues, Greek rebetika, Brazilian samba and Argentine tango, it was once considered marginal at best. But international interest grew and the style was gradually rehabilitated, losing its outsider status but none of its delirium-inducing beauty. Like the late Amalia Rodrigues, Branco is gifted with an alto of crystalline purity. Her voice has pliable, wood-dove like overtones; she is the essence of wrong-headed passion and wounded vulnerability. For this outing, Branco and her guitarist/music director/husband, Custódio Castelo, have assembled a mixed program, wherein classic fados exist side-by-side with a tune by the brilliant Brazilian songwriter, Chico Buarque. Castelo has also composed music to lyrics by bossa nova legend Vinicius de Moraes, Luiz Vaz de Camoens, a medieval Portuguese poet and even a luscious translation of William Shakespeare's Sonnet 136. --Christina Roden
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