Exquisite literary songs for chamber ensemble, with lyrics (mostly) by the novelist António Lobo Antunes that read like micro stories (starting with song titles like "All men are wusses when they have the flu"), capturing and highlighting, through a wide-angle aesthetic lens, the historical bind between certain musical forms and specific social contexts, types, and imaginaries; in this case, mostly set in the pre-tourist-fodder city of Lisbon - from the "Bolero of the sensitive colonel who made love in Monsanto" to the "Tango of the cheating husband in a boarding house in Beato", by way of the "Fado of the prostitute at the St. António da Glória street".
Lyrical and dramatic, witty and gritty, metrically challenging and always delivered with aplomb, the whole delivers a lesson in sophistication from a man hailing from a provincial village in Alentejo; a region whose polyphonic folk music he never ceased to cultivate. That makes this an impeccable reminder that your origins can be an invaluable cultural asset, but need not be a limitation.
