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Rating: Who knows what the hell nostalgia is. Maybe it's truly a demon, an evil serpent that teases you with the rotten apple of a past that will never be again. Perhaps to keep you from living a present you don't like. Or maybe it's a muse, a beautiful woman with luminous, melancholic, and intriguing eyes. A woman for whom to write verses, for whom not to sleep at night. Or to sleep only to dream of her, always and only her. Nostalgia, an embrace of two clouds, a moment that cannot perpetuate itself anymore, something that follows you like a shadowless ghost, but like a shadow you can never shake off.
Here, this album by Antonio Carlos Jobim is above all nostalgia. A truly "posthumous" album played and sung in life. Where the tribute to the eternal friend Vinicius de Moraes is primarily a yearning for reunion, something that sublimates into a burning desire for reunification. But it is also a splendid homage to friendship. That friendship made of dialogues without words, of telepathy, of coincidences. And above all of trust and presence. That friendship that when it is missing leaves you with a void that seems to suck you in. And against which you have to fight every day armed with a smile and a desire to relive.
Entirely played on essential and chamber-like sonorities, with the intimate timbre of flute, piano, guitar, and cello, the album opens with "Soneto da Separação", a poem that transfigures into a song, where the music struggles to fit the rigid metric of the sonnet. A sort of musical metaphor for the soul's difficulty in adapting to detachment, to separation. And it is only Paula Morelenbaum's splendid voice that softens with its sensuality this all-encompassing feeling of "saudade." And so "Valsa de Eurídice" and "Serenata do Adeus" are rendered precisely and heartfelt, two tracks soft and fragrant like peach skin, with that "Adeus" that wounds your soul like the present that has already slipped into the vortex of the past. And with these premises, it is no surprise that the version of "Insensatez" on this album is the most piercing ever heard, a duet between Tom and Paula suspended in an eternal limbo where melancholy is the most accurate measure of time.
But this album is not just nostalgia. It is also sweetness. As in "Eu Não Existo Sem Você", transformed into a splendid and dreamy lullaby of love. And it is also irony. Biting, cathartic. With a spectacular version of "Garota de Ipanema" with a surprising ending, lingering even in a touch of the orient, and Jobim thanking the delirious audience with a Nipponese "arigato." The album closes splendidly with "Pela Luz dos Olhos Teus", a tender and passionate waltz, reminiscent in sound and delicacy of many moments from our Nicola Piovani. And with Jacques Morelenbaum's cello, usually lyrical and poignant, which in the end even mimics the call of a siren. A surprising album that intrigues and amazes you with each listen, with a rain of lyricism and "saudade" to remind us that Brazil is much more than samba and carnival.
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