The leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD) appears to be on a mission to promote world music in Hong Kong, and next week it's fado's turn with the eagerly awaited return of modern Portuguese diva Misia.
'In view of the enthusiastic response to folk and ethnic concerts at the Hong Kong Arts Festival in recent years we are organising concerts this year. Misia gave two sold-out concerts during the 2002 Hong Kong Arts Festival,' explains an LCSD spokesman.
The performance at the Cultural Centre Concert Hall on Tuesday will be the final date of an Asian tour for an artist who is perhaps the most internationally popular exponent of the 'Portuguese blues', following on from engagements in Singapore, South Korea and Macau. At least in Macau a fair proportion of the audience will understand the lyrics, although in the view of many reviewers, including one writing for the New York Times, it doesn't really matter whether you do or not. Her singing, the critic wrote, is 'so expressive that you don't need to understand the Portuguese words to comprehend the bitter experience and pain'.
It's probably closer to the truth that part of the growing popular appeal of vocal music sung in languages unfamiliar to the listener is simple laziness. If you don't understand the words you don't have to pay attention to them.
Misia, however, sings musical settings of lyrics by some of Portugal's greatest poets, including Nobel laureate Jose Saramago who has written specially for her. Most of the lyrics for her latest CD, Canto, were commissioned from poet Vasco Graca Moura, who she chose because she felt his words would have a special affinity with the style of composer and guitarist Carlos Paredes who provided the music.
Fado is as much a poetic as a musical form, but the New York Times got the 'bitter experience and pain' part right. Fado is compared to the blues because its dominant emotion is sadness for which the Portuguese word is saudade. Nobody seems sure of where or when the earliest fados originated, but something recognisable as the form was certainly to be heard on the streets of the poorer areas of Lisbon by the mid-19th century. Like jazz the music was originally played in taverns and brothels.