Concert Hall, March 3
8/10
The lights go down, and Luis Guerreiro’s dazzling Portuguese guitar splinters the silence. Mariza first appears as a silhouette: only her platinum hair and sparkly gown catching the dim light. Then she unleashes the phenomenon that’s her contralto voice; a voice that may have darkened slightly in the 18 years since she was last in Sydney, but that’s lost none of its ear-pinning power.
This time the Mozambique-born Portuguese singer, who has taken Lisbon’s fado music to new audiences around the world, was chattier than I recall, telling us how she began singing in her parents’ taverna when she was five, and that her first album, recorded 26 years ago, was intended as a gift for her father, not a commercial release.
The world had other ideas.
Mariza immediately hits an intensity most singers would aspire to reach at their concert’s pinnacle, and then she sustains it for song after song. Sometimes it could seem as if all the sadness and despair in the world had been given voice, or as if she were conjuring up the ghosts of all who have ever suffered. Meanwhile her willowy arms and saucer eyes emphasised every note; compounded every emotion.
She could discard her microphone and still fill the Concert Hall with her voice, making one suspect that, despite the exemplary sound quality, she and her quintet were slightly over-amplified. And what a band. Besides Guerreiro (who was here 18 years ago), Carlos Phelipe Ferreira played equally dazzling acoustic guitar and Gabriel Salles contributed sparse, apposite bass. Joao Frade’s accordion offered a contrasting, swirling sonic world to the guitars, with its unusually rich low notes particularly evident in the introduction to Meu Fado Meu, and drummer Mario Costa coloured and dramatised the music with a hybrid kit offering a wealth of sounds, which his virtuosity expanded further.
But the band’s primary purpose was to launch Mariza’s spearing voice; to let her bare her heart on such songs as Beijo de Saudade (roughly Kiss of Longing), fado being Portugal’s blues or flamenco. Its slow tempos underline the desolation often present in the lyrics and in the singing of the likes of Mariza and her great predecessor, Amalia Rodrigues, to whom she again paid tribute.
When she has veered closer to pop music on her records, the songs can sometimes seem emotionally limp compared with those in the fado tradition, or with those reflecting by her Mozambican roots. Yet in concert there’s no sense of this because her commitment is unwavering and her presence compelling, while her band lends to every song the kind of authority that a great orchestra does to classical music. Besides, she knows the importance of lightening the mood with her occasional party pieces, such as the enthusiastically received encore, Maria Joana. The spell was only broken – and repeatedly so – by those audience members who rudely and fatuously insisted on filming her.