Neruda, Luciana Souza‘s new CD, is out this week. I wrote the liner notes:
If Luciana did nothing more than sing, she’d still be a miracle. But she also writes music, sometimes to her own graceful words, sometimes to those of poets who catch her curious ear. Neruda is an hour-long song cycle based on the poetry of Pablo Neruda and the piano pieces of Federico Mompou, sung in her Brazil-perfumed English (a language she speaks with the freshness and surprise of an explorer charting a new world) and as uncategorizably protean as everything else she does. “House” dances down the street in a sinuous 7/4, spurred on by her own deft percussion playing. “Poetry” has the concentration of an art song by Faur