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Genre
Portuguese traditional folk music. What one should seek in Cantares da Beira is intimacy with the roots, the non-adulteration of primordial gestures and cycles, the childlike purity of expressing in the active voice what the soul sings when the body works. The programme gathers the work songs, harvest chants, religious "cantares", and dance melodies of the Beira Alta region in their most unmediated form - captured without orchestration or arrangement, exactly as they are performed in Manhouce.
Release
Released in 1982 by EMI-Valentim de Carvalho, Portugal - the group's debut LP, presented officially at Hotel Roma in Lisbon on 7 December 1982.
Production
Produced by Mário Martins of EMI-Valentim de Carvalho, who was responsible for the group's exclusive contract with the label. The opportunity to record arose after a performance at the FIL in Lisbon, where a representative of the label approached the group; Mário Martins subsequently visited Manhouce in person to help select the repertoire. Cantares da Beira was recorded in a single session without mishap.
Reception
The album is regarded by critics as one of the finest records in Portuguese traditional music - one of the best ever produced in Portugal - for the purity of its approach and its faithful preservation of a living oral tradition. The group toured Brazil in 1983 and was received by President Ramalho Eanes at the Palácio de Belém.
Grupo de Cantares de Manhouce
The Grupo de Cantares de Manhouce is a traditional music group founded in 1978 in Manhouce, São Pedro do Sul, Viseu, whose origins trace back to the Rancho Folclórico de Manhouce, created in 1938. The group formed shortly before the recording of Cantares da Beira, motivated - in the words of its principal soloist Isabel Silvestre - by "the people of Manhouce's love of singing": a vital function woven into every agricultural task, from the harvest to the threshing floor, and nourished by proximity to the convents of Arouca and São Cristóvão de Lafões. Isabel Silvestre, the group's defining voice, consistently resisted any pressure toward external arrangements: "If anyone does that, I leave immediately. We have the right to take what was handed down to us and present it exactly as it is." The group's subsequent discography under EMI-Valentim de Carvalho includes "Aboio" (1984), "Cânticos Religiosos" (1985), and "Vozes da Terra" (1991).
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