The music in this album gestated for ten years, a period when Heloísa Fernandes raised young children and taught students in her studio. Throughout this time she collected thoughts and developed them into a family of new compositions, the fruto (fruit) of a decade. The time came when both her children and her compositions were ready to stand on their own, and she took the latter into the studio with her musical friends, each distinguished musicians with careers of their own, and recorded them for the first time to make the album Fruto.
The opening work, Vôo (flight), embodies not only her step forward in recording and performing her compositions, but is a microcosm of her artistic world, reflecting her love of Brazilian ideas and rhythmic drive and her way of shaping them. Colheita was written for percussionist Naná Vasconcelos, who performs as a guest on the recording. Criança (children) is dedicated to her son and daughter. And unlike all the other tracks, whose arrangements were rehearsed and brought to the studio, Suite das meninas was a duo improvisation created during a break between the recording of pieces. The engineer left the microphones open without the musicians knowing it.
The power of this work came out of nowhere and surprised the musical press in Brazil. “She enters our discography,” wrote esteemed critic Arthur Nestrovski in Fohla de São Paulo, “with impressive security and considerable daring.” He goes on to cite the recording's many strengths, as have reviews from around the globe.
In 2008, Heloísa Fernandes organized the project Melodias do Brasil – Indentidade e Transformação (Melodies of Brazil – Identity and Transformation). For twelve months she studied the research of Mario de Andrade and his colleagues who had documented Brazilian folkloric melodies in the years 1936 to 1938. They transcribed 570 melodies from all parts of the country, and published them in the first edited material about Brazilian folklore.
Andrade believed that Brazilian composers could find the soul of Brazil in the melodies of its people, and that these melodies could be inspirations to create new works. His collection included candomblé, maracatú, cateretê, samba, toada, and more. Fernandes chose a group of these melodies to be the spirits of new compositions. Their transformation into new works surprise people because they are not typical of the way Brazilian folklore is treated by today's musicians. Rather than emulating strong colors and pulse, Fernandes created a delicate and introspective world.
Like her first recording, Candeias has met with great reviews. All About Jazz called it a “flawless work from a major new artist,” and Musica Brasileira wrote that “the album doesn't serve as a history class but more as a class in how history can form the basis of contemporary music.”
Before Heloísa Fernandes sat down at the Fazioli for her rehearsal, neither she nor the instrument's owner, Thomas Zoells, understood the sound she could evoke from the instrument. The piano lives on the stage of an intimate recital hall equipped with recording equipment housed inside of Piano Forte, a piano store in a renovated three-story building in the South Loop of Chicago.
As Fernandes explored, Zoells and Fernandes's manager listened. It wasn't long before Zoells whispered, “She gets the piano.” He had heard many people play the Fazioli and knew the difference between those who understood what was possible and those who didn't. As the rehearsal and then the evening's performance progressed, it became clear that she was finding music that few, if any, had found before. Over dinner after the performance, conversation made clear that Fernandes and this piano should meet again. Zoells offered her the opportunity to record, marking the birth of the album that would become Faces. In the liner notes for the album, Zoells recounts the experience of hearing her perform.
“No one had ever coaxed such sounds out of our Fazioli piano nor had such a poetic and affecting voice as she did in her one hour program. Producing a CD for her just became a necessity for us and hopefully the world will recognize this amazing talent.”
The path to the recording, however, was less than straightforward. Fernandes wanted her Brazilian recording engineer, André Magalhães, to supervise the recording and settled on dates that would allow him to come to Chicago directly from the end of a U.S. tour for another artist. But illness put these well-coordinated plans into jeopardy, as Fernandes became sick enough to require hospitalization, battling an infection that had spread throughout her body, and nearly died.
The path to the recording, however, was less than straightforward. Fernandes wanted her Brazilian recording engineer, André Magalhães, to supervise the recording and settled on dates that would allow him to come to Chicago directly from the end of a U.S. tour for another artist. But illness put these well-coordinated plans into jeopardy, as Fernandes became sick enough to require hospitalization, battling an infection that had spread throughout her body, and nearly died.
Persuaded by his reasoning, Fernandes plunged into the composing process but with a changed perspective. Her illness had taught her to value every new day, to embrace all that each moment may offer. Unaware of its influence, this perspective drove her musical thinking. She wanted the album to have the edge and risk taking of an improvised concert performance, to be thoroughly in the moment. So she built themes and developed ideas of what she might do with them, while reserving the freedom to discover new things in performance.
To find clarity in her feelings as she worked, she sought out ideas from literature and psychology, and came upon an epigraph by the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet:
“Give each emotion a personality, each state of mind a soul.”
She saw that each composition should have a soul, that as people we have many states of soul and are of many characters. “At the beginning of its creation,” Fernandes remembers, “I gave each piece the name of an emotion.” She took this idea further as she developed the music. Drawing from Greek mythology, she named three for the female characters known as The Three Graces, and grouped them into a suite so named:
The Three Graces: Aglaia, clarity and brilliance; Thalia, the one who makes flowers bloom; Euphrosyne, a sense of joy.
Naming the works solidified their identity, clarifying Fernandes's path forward in their creative development. For a second suite of three pieces, Rios, she improvised “from zero,” letting elements of earlier themes bubble up as they might while exposing herself to the risk of spontaneous, improvised expression.
The piece Mergulho (“diving” in English) blends a composed theme and improvisation. After opening the work with percussive strumming of the piano's strings, Fernandes sings a theme while improvising at the keyboard. The inspiration for the composition came from her admiration for the work of psychiatrist Nise da Silveira, known for her struggle against the inhumane treatment that asylums inflict on the mentally ill.
Colheita and Caicó open the recording because they represent a new perspective. Her composition Colheita was recorded in 2005 on her first album, Fruto; and Caicó is a folk song recorded by Milton Nascimento and Dominguinhos, among others, here given an instrumental interpretation by Fernandes.
As she developed the works in preparation for recording, Fernandes began to think that the album would become a self-portrait. But looking back at the finished work, whose tracks were unedited with one exception, she sees that the act of making the album completed what her life's events had provoked. “I lived a process of transformation,” she says, “deep in pain and joy. Creating the album was the last part of this transformative journey.”
An idiomatic expression in Portuguese captures the overall feeling of the music. “À flor da pele” combines the images of a flower blossom with one's skin to connote a sensitivity to all that is around you. A great piano, a generous Chicagoan, and a brush with death brought one of Brazil's major talents forward to a moment of extraordinary sensitivity and profound expression, where emotions have been given their Faces.