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Written in fRoots issue 264, 2005


SEGUE-ME À CAPELA
Segue-Me À Capela
Segue-me à Capela (no number) (2004)

The music stands in the cover shot aren’t an enticement to listen to this Portuguese female folk chorale, but it’s worth pushing on past that; this is a beautiful album. Seven young women, singing acapella and sometimes adding percussion, characteristically on square double-skinned adufe. In other words, the Portuguese equivalent of a Galician or Asturian pandeiretera group.
      Most songs are arranged, as for example is the music of the Bulgarian choirs, but there’s a grand tradition of folk chorales in northern and western Iberia, and most of the present new wave of Spanish pandeiretera groups, such as Galicia’s Leilía, Faltriqueira, Ialma and Anubía and Asturies’ Muyeres, use arrangements and harmony to varying degrees.
      Accompanied only by percussion, Segue-Me À Capela, led by Cristina Martins who put the group together in 1999, sing excellently with traditional feel in sympathetic arrangements, solo and in tight unison and harmony, material from several parts of rural Portugal, and as the album progresses they get more and more characterful. In the brief Ó Ana Se Bem Me Queres from Minho the harmonies soar; Por Reiba Se Ceifa O Pão from Beira Baixa has Martins’ solo voice with just a hummed pulse and the sound of sweeping brooms. The bottle-accompanied conviviality in the Trás-os-Montes drinking song Ai Que Alegres Son might have been studio-synthetic but sounds heartfelt. Since the river Minho divides Portugal and Galicia, it’s fitting that like their Galician counterparts Faltriqueira, and being seven women, they should sing José Afonso’s As Sete Mulheres Do Minho, in this case joined by a male vocal “pom-pom” bass line from Fernando Molina. The Beira Alta song Aboio is introduced by birdsong and has strident animal-calling lead vocals from Martins, contrasting with her tenderly affecting soft rendition of the final track Embalo, joined by Cristina Rosa and accompanied by what sounds like a creaking chair.


© 2005 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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