DESCRIPTION:
Amelia Farber sings "Alma Adorada" by Brazilian composer, Francisco Mignone. Steven Lightburn on piano for Amelia's Senior Vocal Recital at Stanford University, 2015

This piece may be new to all of you, as it was to me this past summer through the Barcelona Festival of Song, and I was lucky enough to perform it with our fantastic instructor, Lenine Santos, who hails from Brazil, in the audience. The composer, Mignone, is one in the canon of Portuguese art songs and also one of the most famous composers in Brazilian classical music, second to renowned Heitor Villa-Lobos, another prolific and spectacular creator of Portuguese art song and orchestral works. Mignone was born in 1897 in Sao Paulo, where he started his musical lessons at the Sao Paulo Conservatory. He studied internationally at the Milan Conservatory a bit later, and then returned to Brazil, where he began teaching and publishing more original compositions. He is an impressively versatile artist, and his musical works include ballets, opera, art songs, choral works, chamber music, orchestral works, and solo piano pieces. Mignone caught on to a popular Brazilian nationalist movement, with the result that many of his pieces have a nationalistic flare, using folk melodies, popular tunes, and elements of Brazilian popular culture. In addition to this rich style, he branched out into more abstract musical directions, following the course of international trends in atonal and polytonal music (two quite distinct styles). Despite his new and often off-putting musical style, Mignone was declared the Brazilian composer of the year in 1968.

Mignone’s Alma Adorada is one of his more lyrical works for solo voice and piano. Composed in 1918, the song’s text is also by the composer. The piece reflects more Romantic and Italian influences from his study in Milan (and from his familial relations — his father was a renowned Italian flutist). Alma Adorada is one of his earlier works, composed when he was only 21, but it has a lovely, smooth vocal line and is appropriately sincere. The poem details a blissful account of being in love and feeling enveloped in peace, fears put down under a bed of flowers. The sentiment is clear with the repeated “adored soul, dear soul” of the one he loves.