Marta Pereira da Costa interview: “It’s difficult to be the first one, it’s difficult to open doors…”

“It’s the best vehicle for me to express my feelings, my emotions… It has a very special timbre, and the way we play the strings; anyone who listens to it just feels emotionally attached,” offers Marta Pereira da Costa on her symbiotic connection to the lute-like guitarra portuguesa, the 12 steel-stringed fado staple with which she has made her name.

Since launching her professional solo career in 2012, Costa’s convention-defying command of the Portuguese guitar has taken her everywhere from Japan and Macau – where her mother was born – to London and Washington DC, where last year she performed for NPR’s smash-hit live music series, Tiny Desk Concerts. “It was incredible, and I enjoyed every second of it,” she gushes. “That’s what I want to do; take the Portuguese guitar and Portugal name and culture as far as I can.”

Requests poured in following her appearance on Tiny Desk, but Costa has been wielding her star power on both a national and international stage for over a decade now. In 2012, she was jointly awarded the Amália Rodrigues Foundation’s Best Fado Album prize for her guitar work on Fados de Amor, recorded with her then-husband Rodrigo Costa. However, more significantly, it became the first album in the history of fado where the guitarra portuguesa was played solely by a woman.

“It’s difficult to be the first one, it’s difficult to open doors… So I feel that responsibility, I also feel proud for doing that,” she says of her work in a genre traditionally dominated by male guitarists. Costa is keen to point out that she may have been the first woman to blaze a trail, but others have since followed, including Mariana Martins, who in 2021 became the first woman to graduate in Portuguese guitar from the Instituto Politécnico de Castelo Branco. “I feel very proud that history is changing, and more women are playing in fado halls… We need to be fighters to do that against the prejudice,” she asserts.

Costa was working as a civil engineer when she decided to switch careers in the 2010s, though fado was never far out of sight. Growing up in Lisbon, she was regularly taken to the city’s fado houses by her father and learned piano and classical guitar as a child, later going on to hone her guitar playing with Carlos Gonçalves. Her critically acclaimed self-titled album arrived in 2016, a mix of sprightly plucked original compositions and reimaginings of Portuguese composers that also packed in a raft of guest vocalists such as Rui Veloso and Camané.

On her latest album, Sem Palavras, Costa’s guitar playing shares the spotlight with ribbons of pristine piano from Latin Grammy-winner Ivan ‘Melon’ Lewis. Together, the pair put a fresh, bucolic spin on piano standards such as George Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’ and Chick Corea’s ‘Spain’, as well as ‘Verdes Anos’ by guitarra portuguesa icon Carlos Paredes.

Interest in this centuries-old art form has surged in recent years, from the appearance of Carminho in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Oscar-winning film Poor Things to hybrid experiments like Slow J’s 2023 melding of hip-hop and fado, Afro Fado. “The sonority of the Portuguese guitar is atemporal, but we can improve and try new things, new connections, and all these experiences work very well,” offers Costa. “There’s a whole world to discover.”

This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue, read the magazine online – subscribe today: magsubscriptions.com