Arts & Events

Portuguese Fado singer Ana Moura returned to the Bay Area for a concert Friday, April 22, at San Francisco’s Nourse Auditorium sponsored by California Institute of Integral Studies. To my taste, this concert was a disappointment. I have heard Ana Moura twice before, and both previous times I was enthralled by her dark, dusky voice and impeccable phrasing in the musical genre of Fado, which explores the Portuguese sentiment of saudade, a potent mix of yearning tinged with sorrow. Lately, however, perhaps beginning with her 2012 CD Desfado, Ana Moura has begun ‘de-constructing’ traditional Fado and mixing it with other musical currents. Where Fado is concerned, I am a purist. I was first introduced to Fado at a club in Lorenco Marques (now Maputo) in Mocambique way back in 1963. Here was a middle-aged woman in a black dress with a black lace shawl, accompanied only by a Portuguese guitar, singing her heart out in songs of deep, almost bitter longing. Soon I bought up all the Amalia Rodriguez recordings I could find, reveling in the intense expressivity of this the greatest Fado singer in recent history.  

When Ana Moura first came on the scene, she struck me as a worthy successor to Amalia Rodriguez. In CDs such as Aconteceu (2004), Para além da Saudade (2007), and Leva-me aos fados (2009), Ana Moura’s deep, dusky vocals provided an intriguing contrast to the bright-voiced vocals of Amalia Rodriguez. I found Ana Moura infinitely preferable to a singer like Marisza, whom I heard at Oakland’s Paramount Theatre some four or five years ago. Granted, Marisza has an amazing voice, with incredibly bright, clear high notes. But I was turned off by Marisza’s over-amped sound at the Paramount Theatre and by her instrumentation, which included electric keyboard, a drum set, and the usual combination of Portuguese guitar, Spanish guitar, and bass guitar. Moreover, Marisza ventured far outside the Fado tradition, singing a lot of cross-over material.  

Well, the tables have now turned, and Ana Moura performed this time with exactly the same instrumentation and over-amped sound I had previously encountered (and hated) in hearing Marisza. To make matters worse, the Nourse Auditorium sound was muddy, with way too much bass. This made it almost impossible to appreciate Ana Moura’s impeccable phrasing. In Portuguese. I couldn’t even understand what she said when she occasionally spoke to the audience in English! Moreover, Ana Moura now sang more cross-over material than Fado. In fact, there was only one song that deeply moved me as an example of pure, traditional Fado, and that was a song in which all the other musicians left the stage and Ana Moura was accompanied only by her outstanding musician on Portuguese guitar, whose name I don’t know because this concert offered no program notes whatever. 

Suffice it to say that the audience, which included many Portuguese speakers, seemed to love everything Ana Moura did. She has become a kind of cult-figure; and she played to the audience with coy invitations to sing along and/or dance as she herself sang and danced from one side of the stage to the other, reaching out to the audience with her charm and beauty. She left the stage at mid-point in her two-hour concert, and during this interval her band played songs featuring different instruments – one for the bass guitar, and one each for the keyboard and percussionist. I would gladly have done without the keyboard and drum solos. When Ana Moura returned onstage, she had changed into a long white strapless dress, which showed off her figure as she danced to the up-tempo songs featured in this second half of the show. After some confusing interaction with an audience member who seemed to submit a written request for a particular song, Ana Moura just shrugged and sang something else, yet another up-tempo cross-over song. At least that’s what I think happened. By then I was too disappointed to care.