CPR Performance Archive

GIVING VOICE - FATIMA MIRANDA(SPAIN) [March 2008]
VOICES OF THE VOICE II: A CAPELLA CONCERT FOR SOLO VOICE

THURSDAY 27 MARCH, 8.30 PM

Presented by Instituto Cervantes Manchester and Giving Voice.

Those who LISTEN to this concert say that their imagination travels to Africa, to India to Japan, to the sea, to the forest, to a temple, to a market or to a electroacoustic music studio. Why not?... All of us have in some form an unconscious memory of the sounds and music of the past and of feelings associated with them, a store of all that we KNOW, but of which we are not conscious. A subtle way of listening helps the more or less hidden, to emerge.

From a deliberate position of rupture, combining western and eastern techniques and vocal resources of her own invention, Fátima uses her voice as a wind and percussion instrument, and lavishes us with unusual acrobatics, on a range of four octaves, with multiphonic sounds and with fascinating shapings of breath that surpass the limits of what is possible, going from the most transparent and angelical string of voice to the most savage cry, diffusing the boundaries between singing, poetry, theatre, composition, improvisation and interpretation.

Fatima “sings” the cry again, the weeping or childlike, retrieves the lost, delights in the forgotten, casts aside the stale, ‘as a way to contribute modifying forms of perception and so of listening and communication, so of music and art, so of ignorance... and of course of attitudes towards those who wish us to be alike, conforming to the GREAT DEAFNESS’. Whether it’s the microtonal character and demanding rythmic sense of Flamenco, the Galician aturuxos and Basque irrintxis mountain cries, the Balearic yodels, the gomero whistle or gutteral, dark, deep, hoarse, brilliant or screeching timbres present in the music of India, Japan, Mongolia, some Arabic countries, Korea, China and Africa, in one way or another Fátima Miranda has been able to bring these into a rich and unprejudiced partnership with bel canto. Her concerts-performance present a single voice supported by an important and refined poetic, gestual, visual, dramatic and humoristic component, enough to touch the deepest in us.

Tickets: £10 (£8 conc)

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