With popular tickets (R$ 20 for full price and R$ 10 for half price) and free classification, the Centro da Música Carioca Artur Távola, located in Tijuca, in the north zone of Rio, receives today (13), at 19h, the show Cantos Fluminenses. THE show makes a link between musical compositions about the state capital and the book Fluminense Tales, by writer Machado de Assis. There is translation into Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) for people with hearing impairments.
Singers Mariana Baltar, Wladimir Pinheiro and Lui Coimbra embody the characters in the songs, accompanied by Luís Barcelos, on mandolin and cavaquinho, and Marcos Suzano, on percussion. For Mariana Baltar, “singing about our Rio de Janeiro, inspired by the tales of Machado de Assis, is to delve into certain minutiae and details of the city; is to tell a bit of our history in a delicious and special way”.
The music producer Renata Grecco, creator of the show of which she is also the director, said that the inspiration came one day, when she went down to the Laranjeiras neighborhood, where she lives, to take her son to school, and saw, in front of Rua Cardoso Júnior, a piece of train track out of the asphalt. Immediately, that referred her to the writer Machado de Assis, of whom she was always a fan, and who lived in the neighboring neighborhood of Cosme Velho.
“I am in love with Machado de Assis. He was an exceptional chronicler in his time and with texts that are completely contemporary. The characters of Machado, we identify them today in the supermarket, on the street”. Looking at the train tracks, Renata thought: “There is a story about Machado that I want to tell”. The decision then was to tell Machado’s stories about Rio de Janeiro through music.
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Machado de Assis’s Rio in Songs bridges the gap between compositions about the city and the book, one of the writer’s first. Renata selected songs from the Brazilian songbook from the 1930s and 1940s to the present day that were related to the stories and arrived at a large list that included around 40 to 50 songs. “I was making a script that gave this tour of Rio de Janeiro”.
THE show it has subtexts from stories by Machado de Assis and others that are spoken during the show by Wladimir Pinheiro, who is also an actor. In addition, images by photographer Marc Ferrez, from the time of Machado de Assis, are projected, involving the transformation that the city of Rio was going through. “Some songs have to do with the plot of some stories, with some characters”. For example, a famous short story by Machado is entitled The woman in Black and deals with infidelity, a recurring theme in the writer’s work. To illustrate it, the song was chosen kiss withoutby Adriana Calcanhoto.
Tram trips, shown in several stories by Machado, are present in the songs And the 56 Didn’t Comeby Wilson Batista, Here Comes Ipanema and in the jocular Mobile Shopping, by Luizinho To Blow and Cláudio Guimarães. “I tried to make these parallels between Machado’s time and these songs and marchinhas that also had the characteristic of making a chronicle of their time, with the current chroniclers, who are these wonderful composers”, said Renata.
The most famous of tales, Miss Dollaris represented in the show per Why argue with Madame?, by Haroldo Barbosa and Janet de Almeida, and idealized love, by I Dreamed You Were So Beautiful, by Lamartine Babo and Francisco Mattoso. Still in the script are the songs Maua Squareby Aldir Blanc and Moacyr Luz, sertaneja (Nenê), by Catulo da Paixão Cearense and Ernesto Nazareth, and handsome guyby Billy Blanco.
On the Internet
The project was initially launched in digital format, in 2020, during the covid-19 pandemic, and had an experimental presentation in August last year at Imperator – Centro Cultural João Nogueira, in Méier, in the north of Rio de Janeiro, contemplated within the Aldir Law White. Today, Artur Távola arrives at the Centro da Música Carioca, as part of the Retomada Cultural 2 announcement, by the State Secretariat for Culture and Creative Economy.
The show will now be turned into a disc. Renata said that the goal is then to throw the disc, taking the show to other cultural spaces in Rio, in addition to going to São Paulo and other cities in the country. “It’s just joy. Each time he grows bigger; each time, the show it tastes better,” he said.
