Portugal's diva Mariza offers beautiful voice in 'fado' music

By David Singer

Portugal's first musical diva to make a worldwide mark sang at Proctors on Friday night, introducing her native language and music, known as "fado." Mariza has been traveling the world, selling out places like London's Royal Festival Hall and New York's Carnegie Hall.

While the music is beautiful, it is sparse -- three acoustic instruments and Mariza's voice -- and challenges the attention of any non-native listener after a few songs.

Mariza sings with great force, and draws you in when booming and when whispering. Friday night we couldn't know what she was singing about, and often it didn't matter.

But just as often you felt left out of the song, particularly at the end when you could feel her resolving the central conflict of the poem.

Songs like "Maria Lisboa" and "Chuva" she explained before singing, which helped a little. But the real enjoyment came from her strong stage presence.

Clearly Mariza is a pro on stage. Rather than toy with the audience, she treated them with great respect, singing as best as she could, speaking with them sweetly, and sharing stories of her childhood.

Fado is a sad music, often about longing. Loosely translated, its sentiment refers to the emotion of homesickness. Mariza sang with very little lightness -- emotionally and literally.

Even the more zippy songs -- and there were few and they weren't quite zippy -- offered a sense of loss.

Mariza is physically exotic. Tall and thin, she wears her blond hair cropped short, matted down and parted to the side.

She wore a long, black, ethnic dress with horizontal stripes in primary colors. She moved carefully and gracefully through her songs, occasionally dancing lightly.

Whether from northern Portugal or the center of Lisbon, the songs were all pretty, some magnificent, but none sounding too far from the other.

While she is here to educate a U.S. audience on Portugal's fado, it might have been entertaining for her to do a familiar tune in English, if for no reason but to break up the night, or generate a quick laugh.

Between songs like "Duas Lagrimas," "Loucura," and "Meu Fado Meu," she offered general lessons on her culture and music.

She spoke slowly and gently. "Fado means destiny and fate: what I was, what I am, and what I would like to be," she explained. "Fado is an oral tradition. We don't have schools to teach this type of music. We learn it on the streets, passed down through the generations."

She called her numbers "poems" rather than "songs."

Perhaps the most beautiful song she sang was the final song "Primevera," which had a feeling of Spanish folk and Italian opera.

Those who came Friday night -- the theater was impressively three-quarters filled -- clearly have adventurous taste in music. Some seemed familiar with the music, clapping when she named a town in her home country. Maybe others wanted to simply demonstrate their enthusiasm, and loyalty, to their community's wonderfully enhanced venue. For everyone, though, the night ended in a standing ovation.