Saudade - A Portuguese Songbook

**My friend Amanda Cole has just released a new CD, please support her wonderful work**

This groundbreaking recording features the Australian mezzo-soprano Amanda Cole in a program of fascinating and evocative Portuguese art songs. Now based in Dunedin, New Zealand, Cole conceived the project after discovering the little-known songs in music archives during a trip to Portugal in 2007. Using her gift for languages, she researched the literary, historical and cultural background to the songs, securing support from the Jack Straw Foundation in Seattle, USA and the Camões Institute in Portugal in order to perform and record them. She is joined on the album by the noted New Zealand pianist Sandra Crawshaw.

The pair worked extensively on the repertoire and ensemble with Cathy Madden, Alexander Technique teacher and performance coach in Seattle.

As the extensive album notes explain;

"saudadeis a wistful melancholy caused by the absence or disappearance of people or things to which one has become emotionally attached."

It also describes a sense of deprivation of pleasant experiences previously enjoyed. We might call this feeling “yearning” “longing” or “nostalgia”in English, but the Portuguese concept has a deeper cultural significance. Many of the poems from which the featured composers derived inspiration are representative ofSaudosismo, an early 20th century nationalist movement that was closely linked to a revival of the Portuguese Golden Age.

For the poets of this movement (thesaudosistas),saudadewas proclaimed as nothing less than the spiritual lifeblood of the Portuguese race: at once a sentiment, an idea and an emotion where all existence, body and soul, pain and happiness, love and desire, heaven and earth become one. It is a concept that still defines the Portuguese temperament.

Cole brings her own interpretation ofsaudadeto the album. The cover, also designed by the singer, depicts a painting she bought on the streets of Lisbon on her first extended trip to Europe as a student in the 1990s. Cole’s voice – dark, sensuous and suggestive – captures the yearning quality of the music and the hopes and longings of the Portuguese soul that animate it.

Saudade: a Portuguese Songbookis not only a musicaltour de force. It is also groundbreaking in musicological terms, linking the exploration of cultural and historical themes to performance in a way that enriches the enjoyment of the listener. The result is an original and deeply moving evocation of a little known poetical and musical tradition that is sure to surprise and delight.

Enquiries:amandina@xtra.co.nz