Legado de Carlos Paredes ao Mosteiro dos Jerónimos

If you are familiar with Portuguese guitar, you should have by now come across the names of Artur and Carlos Paredes (father and son). Taking up his father's extraordinary craft, Carlos Paredes would further explore the instrument's possibility of being artistically extricated from its dependent relationship to fado. In the second half of the 20th century, Carlos would almost single-handedly invent a repertoire for the Portuguese guitar as a concert instrument, and while doing so in such a brilliant way he would decode the Portuguese soul in compositions like ‘Canção Verdes Anos’ or ‘Variações em Ré Menor’.

But of course Carlos Paredes benefited from the path his father had already carved in the instrument's Coimbra style (more erudite, in opposition to Lisbon's more popular approach). And that's precisely what the trio Alvorada (António José Moreira, Ricardo Dias and Pedro Lopes) address in the live recording of Legado. In this excellent introduction to Artur and Carlos Paredes’ work, admirably executed, it is easy to be overwhelmed by the intricate and technically demanding pieces we find in ‘Canção Verdes Anos’ or ‘António Marinheiro’. The only thing lacking, by comparison, is the intense emotional drive that possessed Carlos Paredes as he struck each string, but that's always the tricky part when the bar is set so high.