Cristina Branco, Portugal
Within the World music program of IV International Platonov festival Voronezh – premiere of fado live in Voronezh. The festival audience will discover fado music in their city thanks to the great singer from Portugal – Cristina Branco.
Fado music (Port. fado from Lat. fatum - fate) is a special style of traditional Portuguese music, which emotional dominant is loneliness, nostalgia, sadness and love languor complex combination, called "saudadi" in Portuguese ( Port. saudade). This music represents a genre which is a type of lyrical solo songs (male or female) with Portuguese guitar accompaniment. The peculiarity of fado, performing by Cristina Branco, consists in bringing elements of other music styles into traditional forms, including such revolutionary ones as jazz and blues as well as bossa nova. Interpreting fado in a different way, Branco gets the unique Portuguese musical genre out of the national boundaries and actually makes important contribution to its global popularization.
Cristina Branco is one of the best contemporary fado singers and the soul voice of Portugal.
She was born in 1972 in Almeirim, Portugal. Nothing indicated that she might be a fado singer until her adolescence. When her grandfather gave Cristina a major work by fado music greatest diva for her 18th birthday, she had no idea of how it would change her life. As it happens, several months before Cristina stepped on stage for the first time even though she had never regarded herself as an amateur singer before. A decade passed since she debuted at the Portuguese Cultural Center in Amsterdam and her peers came to recognize her powerful emphasis on poetry as an emblem of her humanity and artistry. She has released 12 albums since that time and during the last years she toured with more than 100 concerts around the world, from South América to the Middle East and all over Europe.
With regard to her life and music, one can say that she lives and breathes fado.
Don’t miss her unique performance in Voronezh!
