Grammy Award-winning singer Corinne Bailey Rae is preparing a new stage in her career and is coming to Portugal to present her next album, Black Rainbows, in which she explores surprising and original musical ideas.
In 2005, Corinne Bailey Rae introduced herself to the world with the classic – and appropriate – “Like a Star” and, the following year, she took the whole planet by storm with the best invitation of all: “Put Your Records On”. In fact, millions all over the planet put her record on, turning the eponymous Corinne Bailey Rae into a mega hit that sold more than 4 million copies worldwide. Her name has become synonymous with sophistication, soul and good taste. Good news: in 2023, Corinne Bailey Rae is back with an incredible new album entitled Black Rainbows. With a release date set for September, this new work has already been scheduled for Portugal, as one of the headline concerts in Misty Fest’s 2023 programme.
Corinne released new albums in 2010 and 2016, but the new album, which has been carefully prepared for the last decade, is an ambitious conceptual work that promises to make its way onto the lists of this year’s best records. Inspired by the works of Chicago artist Theaster Gates, who has made a name for himself in the world of contemporary art for the way he rethinks abandoned spaces. Corinne found his work at the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago and was blown away: “When I walked through those doors, I knew my life had changed forever,” says Bailey Rae. “Getting involved with these archives and finding Theaster Gates and his practice changed the way I think about myself as an artist and what the possibilities are for my work. This music came about through seeing. For me, seeing has been like listening. While I was watching, the songs/sounds appeared”.
From this impact came a dense album of marvellous songs – starting with the first single, “New York Transit Queen”, a lesson in energy that seems to draw on the spirit of punk (that’s right) to make an affirmation of power in the present. There’s also a book, Reflections/Refractions, in collaboration with photographer Koto Bolofo, and, above all, a new show, which opens in Chicago at the beginning of September and then goes on a US tour before reaching the UK and Spain. Portugal will be the next stage in this tour in which Corinne Bailey Rae once again claims a prominent place in the present.
This is the story of a return to his origins. It’s also the title of a solo piano concerto, as well as an album due out by the end of this year, 2023. When I was 5 years old, I accompanied my father to an antique auction where there was an old French-made upright piano with a wooden frame. I opened the lid and started playing Catrina’s Doves with one finger of my right hand. My father murmured: “The kid’s good. I must get him to study music.” And he bought the piano.
At the age of 9 I entered the Conservatory of Rua dos Caetanos and that’s how I started my piano adventure. However, the harsh pedagogical methods of the time did not win me over and it was painful to have to study daily on a piano that was not even tuned. When I was 16, I got into symphonic rock music and began to fall in love with electric keyboards. I managed to buy a Yamaha organ with two keyboards and a pedalboard and joined a group that played at high school socials. It was the early 70s. From then on I surrendered to the synthesisers that were starting to come out at that time and never cared about the piano again… until the 30th of March 2018, when the quarter-tail arrived at my studio.
Carried by four men, the heavy piece of furniture enters the room that was designed for it 11 years ago and which has been waiting for it ever since. Legless, heavy, it enters through the widest door. I myself helped him to put foam on the floor so that it would not scratch the parquet. Moved, I welcome him with a silent look, trying to hide my excitement, aware that these men make this their life and are just focused on finishing another transport, like so many others. As one of them ties his three legs together, I decide on his placement in the room. We straighten it out and there it is: the Grotrian-Steinweg quarter-tail made in 1920 is standing. Black and silent for the time being, you can already see that the room is his.
After a little small talk, the men say goodbye and disappear in the direction of the van. I close the door. The afternoon is cold and rainy, and inside I admire the new landscape: a piano in the middle of the shale and stone hall. The dream come true. The cats come closer to inspect the new object and the smells that waft from it. They carefully circle the huge figure until the Persian jumps onto the top and stays there, enjoying the unprecedented observation point. A few hairs spread across the shiny surface and I realise that from now on I am the owner of an object that needs to be dusted regularly.
Since that day, I started, besides cleaning it, to compose for it. The result of this solitary adventure is in the sound of these pieces, which wander in a kind of assumed neoclassicism, the fruit of varied feelings and a musical life already quite long.
Carlos Maria Trindade.
Rodrigo Cuevas repeats his presence at Misty Fest with his new work La Romería. Both in Lisbon and Porto there will be double concert dates (Bandua and Rodrigo Cuevas). The same ticket gives access to both shows.
Queen of the 2023 edition of FMM Sines, as proclaimed by the daily Público, Rodrigo Cuevas will bring a new show to Misty Fest: La Romería is the title of the new work by the artist from Oviedo, Spain, born in 1985, who presents himself as a source of “folk and electronic agitation, country star, humour, elegant eroticism, hedonism and celebration of non-negotiable rights”. Cuevas is part of a new generation of Spanish artists who are looking to tradition for arguments to present to the future. And it seems that those arguments have the right weight. The author of the show Trópico de Covadonga won the Arcoíris 2022 Prize awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Equality, as well as the Ojo Crítico Prize from the RNE in 2021 and, among several other honours that reflect wide acclaim, the MIN 2020 prize for Breakthrough Artist following his debut album, Manual de Cortejo.
There is new material in this show designed for 2023 and beyond: “Como YÉ?!” or “,Mas Animal” are some of his most recent hits and clear evidence that his original combination of traditional modes and modern production, of humour, irony, eroticism and criticism at the tip of the tongue has guaranteed him a place of growing importance not only in Spain but in the wider Iberian context. Aplaudi-lo é importante e necessário.
Veja aqui o vídeo oficial de Más Animal
BANDUA: O duo Bandua, que tem merecido a atenção da crítica pela originalidade das suas canções, apresenta no Misty Fest alguns temas inéditos e o aclamado álbum de estreia.
Os Bandua, duo formado por Tempura, the Purple Boy e Edgar Valente, seguem para a estrada com um novo espetáculo. O alinhamento contará com vários temas inéditos, Bandeiras – tema que levaram ao Festival da Canção – e canções que integram o primeiro disco da dupla, um dos mais aclamados pela crítica em 2022. O êxito desse ano refletiu-se em mais de 30 concertos e na presença do seu álbum de estreia em inúmeras listas de melhores álbuns do ano.
Nesse disco, o homónimo Bandua, a dupla agarrava no cancioneiro popular da região da Beira Baixa e reinterpretava-o em jeito de folk eletrónico, à moda do downtempo berlinense. Por sua vez, Bandeiras amplia esse imaginário da música de raiz popular portuguesa, para lhe acrescentar os ritmos da música eletrónica global, com novas influências que vão desde o breakbeat ao dubstep, convergindo num estilo que a dupla apelida de “tugastep”.
After several sold-out concerts, Piano Para Piano is back in Lisbon and will perform for the first time in Porto. This show brings Rodrigo Leão and his daughter Rosa together on stage in a dialogue between two acoustic pianos.
Rodrigo Leão is the first to say that he is not a pianist, but the truth is that the piano has appeared in his work as a complement to the synthesisers that he has used many times to write memorable melodies and to think about the engaging arrangements that he has created with the ensembles he has created. Now, the remarkable Portuguese composer is preparing for a new adventure: Piano Para Piano is a project that was born after a commission from the Piano Festival in Vila Nova de Cerveira, a challenge that led him to compose two new pieces that are also the beginning of a new path.
“I find it interesting”, Rodrigo reveals, “that I, who have no training as a pianist, can establish a dialogue with those who have studied and seriously study the instrument”. In this first moment at the event in Minho, his interlocutor was Rosa, his daughter, who is 19 years old and will also accompany her father in this show. It will be interesting to hear these pieces as I hear them in my imagination. Imagination doesn’t have the same limits as my hands,” explains Rodrigo. “It can go as far as creativity dictates”.
Piano Para Piano is therefore a journey into the marvellous unknown signed by one of the most celebrated Portuguese composers.
Hauschka is one of the most respected contemporary composers. And also one of the most honoured: in 2023, he won an Oscar and a BAFTA in the category of Best Original Soundtrack for West of Nowhere. The music for the film Lion, which he composed in collaboration with Dustin O’Halloran, has been nominated for several awards, including the Oscar for Best Original Soundtrack, the Golden Globe for Best Original Soundtrack and Best Film Music at the BAFTAs.
Hauschka’s work has proven perfect for accompanying images. We’ve heard his compositions in several major films and TV series, including the soundtrack for Patrick Melrose, Showtime’s Emmy and BAFTA-nominated miniseries, and Gunpowder, HBO’s miniseries starring Kit Harington, as well as the 2020 film Ammonite, co-written with O’Halloran, which was shortlisted for an Oscar nomination in the Best Original Soundtrack category.
An innovative pianist who goes by the name Hauschka in his solo work, Volker Bertelmann has worked with the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra, where he was resident artist, and with Grammy-winning violinist Hilary Hahn. In 2018, he accepted an invitation to join the Academy of Film, Arts and Sciences, of which he is an active member.
For Hauschka, the essence of his work lies in the fact that he constantly challenges himself to new musical experiences. His object of study is the grand piano, which he approaches as an acoustic body. At the beginning of his solo career, he specialised in preparing the instrument with tape, felt and other materials. He transforms clubs and concert halls into sonic laboratories, where audiences can experience the interplay between analysis and intuition. For his albums, he has repeatedly ventured into new experimental arrangements – from electronica to the purist approach of his work A Different Forest (2019). It is the diversity of our existence that he makes audible in his songs, whether it is global questions about the future in his album What If (2017), or the proliferation and decay of urban life in Abandoned City (2014).
Her live performances are special moments, appreciated by audiences and critics around the world. Filled with evocative melodies and characterful arrangements that give it profound originality, his music is undoubtedly one of the treasures of these times.
