NATALIA LAFOURCADE - Cancionera

With "Cancionera," the Mexican artist returns to the elegant narrative style that once again blends past and present with profound poetic sensitivity and an impressive orchestral architecture. From the very first notes, "Apertura cancionera" stages an elegant portrait of her homeland, Mexico, while also paying tribute to Chavela Vargas, the Costa Rican-born, Mexican-naturalized singer who is a true legend of ranchera music, often featured in the soundtracks of Pedro Almodóvar's films, and also a friend of Frida Kahlo (Chavela Vargas even appeared in Julie Taymor's film "Frida").

Symbolism and surrealism go hand in hand in this poetic journey through the history of a musical genre that emerged in the early 19th century in the post-revolutionary period, representing the aching soul of the Mexican people. The masterful arrangements by conductor Gordon Hamilton highlight the album's almost theatrical structure, fitting every piece together into a potential mini-symphony.

Having shed the guise of a potential pop artist and accomplished interpreter of traditional Mexican music, Natalia Lafourcade fully embraces a less comfortable musicality, one that's nonetheless artistically worthy of a twenty-year career that has earned her major awards. Consider that she has won five Grammy Awards and nearly twenty Latin Grammys, even surpassing Shakira, to stay within the Latin American sphere.

Once again Adan Jodorowsky is by her side in the not-so-easy making of an album recorded in analog and using the live-in-studio technique, featuring no fewer than eighteen guests spread across the fourteen tracks and the generous seventy-six minutes of "Cancionera."

It's a musically less adventurous project than "De todas las flores," but no less incisive for that. The lightness of the festive rumba "El palomo y la negra," the Cuban flavour of "Cocos en la playa," and the folk-pop interlude of "El coconito" are counterbalanced by the poignant, restless "Mascaritas de cristal," underscored by an elegant instrumental accompaniment of cello and double bass, and the even more tormented "Amor clandestino," a sensual bolero tempo sung as a duet with renowned flamenco singer Israel Fernández.

The evocative touch of Lafourcade's nylon-string guitar on "La bruja," the exotic space-folk of Los Hermanos Gutiérrez on the romantic "Luna creciente," and the remarkable instrumental staging of strings, winds and piano on "Lágrimas cancioneras" restore the intimate, poetic tone with a breathtaking elegance, before the acoustic versions of "Amor clandestino" and the title track bring down the curtain on another important chapter from an incomparable artist.