Theatrum
This album of the
co-founder of Madredeus shows itself to us in a colorful and
tasteful graphic suit. This is the first album of Rodrigo that I
have the possibility to listen and I have to confess that I
approached it with a certain diffidence. I knew that Rodrigo made
strange music making the singers sing in latin, but I didn't knew
the colour that he ga ve to that music. Though, I trusted the
strong melodic instinct that characterized that artist since the
beginning, letting him write unforgettable songs as
"Milagre" or "A Vontade de Mudar". I inserted
then the cd with fear mixed with curiosity.
At the first
listening I remained a bit stunned by the strangeness of the
music, by my inability to categorize that musical ambient that
was being created in my room: erudite music? new age? holy?
classic? No answer. I had to listen a second time the cd in order
to find the treads, the bonds, the meanings of what I was
listening: I found quotations, the melodies cleared themselves,
the harmonies unveiled and everything appeared as well built.
But that atmosphere remained unknown and, for that reason,
fascinating. Though, with great pleasure, I started to discover
in that music the inevitable influxes that the wrk with Madredeus
must have had on Rodrigo. The bonds are many and intense one. We
should almost say that Rodrigo, in that project, distils from
Madredeus the most mystical components, taking from them the
taste for traditional sonorities paired with instruments like the
strings. A strong bond that I see is in the use of the voice that
I feel strictly linked with that of Teresa. It is a voice that
gives significance to words with its sound more than with their
etymological meaning of them. From the melodic point of view I
think that this is a very simple album, of an almost disarming
simplicity. It is as Rodrigo wants to search new ways to explore
that melodic terrains that we consider already known. There is no
melodic or harmonic experimentation, but there is an
experimentation of arrangments, of the use of the sounds, of the
coupling of atmospheres. In this album I see the research of the
maximum simplicity of expression; a simplicity that characterized
all the songs of Rodrigo in Madredeus, a simplicity that knew how
to go directly to heart without passing through the filter of the
brain.
Rodrigo confessed in the past his great passion for
Michael Nyman and sincerely I found this influence much more in
the atmosphere than in the playing technique which remains
completely different. I think that here resides the main limit of
Rodrigo: the technical one. This evident limit that maybe impedes
him to explore new melodic terrains (as it is possible to José
Peixoto), force the composer to a maybe more physiologic return
to the emotional core of music, the simple one, the direct one.
And Rodrigo succeed easily to play with his limits using one of
the most contagious moelodical instincts that I know.
This album
as some characteristics of "O Espirito da Paz", in the
sense that it much more appreciable if it is listened in its
entirety, and this fact witness a great authonomy of this work
that starts, lives and finishes in the last notes with leaving
nothing untold.
Music
Institutional