When Leonor Baldaque bought a guitar, she didn’t know that a new artistic expression, intense at this point, awaited her and became her new passion.
This joined the other two that she had practised for years, acting in cinema as an actress for Manoel De Oliveira, and writing novels as an author published by two of the most prestigious and exclusive French literature publishers.
It was only three years ago that the guitar entered her life, and the number of songs she has written since then is dizzying. Her involvement in music is not recent — she studied cello and piano — but, until now, as she says, “she didn’t know she had a voice”. This album is here to show that she has a voice, and what a voice: unique, deep, reciting like someone who sings, and singing like someone who recites. An engaging, medium-low voice that covers his texts with a disarming intimacy and an innate sense of representation.
In A Few Dates of Love, her debut album, Leonor Baldaque made a choice, partly chronological, starting at the beginning, partly narrative, telling a story, and selecting ten themes. We are faced with a poet, first and foremost. From a storyteller. And a genius interpreter. The simplicity of the guitar, in most of the songs, is constantly surrounded by melodies that seem to travel alone over these notes. Her voice is given, it is withdrawn. It reveals and hides. Her narrative is personal, using rich imagery, which is like a well of words, images and scenarios, almost bottomless. The wind, the journey, the love, the lack of it, the dusk over a guitar; Summer, the outside, the Canyons, alcohol and a palace: passengers in her world, Leonor Baldaque takes us with her, and we cannot take our attention away from what she came to tell us.
An album that, without a doubt, we can describe as “independent“, and which is like a journey within a multifaceted personality, difficult to assimilate to other artists, and where we can only glimpse the presence, somewhere, of Leonard Cohen, from American Folk, from Folk-rock, but already distant. Leonor Baldaque took what she found, and made her way. She is responsible for the lyrics and compositions and also directs the creation and editing of her music videos. A Few Dates of Love already sounds like a classic.
After a first live performance at Casa da Música in Porto, Lisbon now has the honour of hosting Leonor Baldaque’s next concert: April 5th, at 9:30 pm, at Auditorio Camões, at Liceu Camões, in Lisbon.
About Casa da Música, Leonor confesses: “Artistically, it was my most daring experience to date. There is an immediacy in the transmission of a song on stage, which is not known either in writing or in cinema. And then, I always had a great passion for risk. And being on stage, singing such intense things, without it being your everyday life, is a big risk.”
And she prepares us for what we can expect from the concert in Lisbon: “I have the impression that I will walk on a thread again at the Lisbon concert. The strangest thing is that I don’t know what’s going to happen: I know the songs, and the lineup, but I can’t say I know what’s going to happen. It will only be the second concert, and I am impatient.”
The album A Few Dates of Love by Leonor Baldaque, one of the most unique Portuguese singer-songwriters today, hits stores on April 5th.
In April, the publisher Quetzal will also publish the first Portuguese translation of Leonor Baldaque’s latest French novel, Piero Solidão.
Camões Auditorium, Lisbon | April 5th, at 9:30 pm
Always confirm with the concert hall or promoter the conditions of access, confirmation of the date or time, ticket place of sale, price, and availability.
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