Dulce Pontes
She could have been a dancer, had the dance school board not thought that, at fourteen years of age, she was too old to start a great career. She could have been just a pretty voice in commercials, if someone had not discovered very early on that her voice did a greater service to music than it did to advertising.
Dulce Pontes, born in Montijo, Portugal, in 1969, might have never gone farther than a career within the borders and compatible to the size of this small country located in the westernmost part of Europe. In 1991 she won the Portuguese National Song Festival and in the same year, representing Portugal at the Eurovision Song Contest, she achieved the 8th place out of 22 contestants, and the prize for the best singer, with the song “Lusitana Paixão”. This was the first time that Europe heard Dulce Pontes sing, and from that moment onwards, her voice no longer belonged to the Sunday afternoon television programs, where she sang 60s and 70s hits in English or to the audience of the theatre where she set out as a singer.
It was from that moment onwards that her life turned around. She immersed herself in the roots of Portuguese popular music, including the traditional “fado” - at that time declassified as defunct - and managed to reinvent something that seemed to be dead. She was quickly seen by some as the successor of the mythical Amália Rodrigues - the soul of Portuguese fado, and of whom Dulce confesses herself to be a great admirer. But this classification would prove to be limited: as later years and records would reveal, what she was doing was much more than just reinterpreting what had already been done. Her brilliant voice cannot be categorized within any style that limits her; it knows no national boundaries that can stop her. Her voice and singing are her very own style and, for that reason, it doesn't matter whether she is singing rock, fado, or a song from Angola: it is a style that is unique and unmistakable.
In 1992 she released her first album, “Lusitana”, and from the following year - when she released her second album “Lágrimas” - onwards, Dulce Pontes became a citizen of the world. Spain, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Italy, the United States, Japan, Brazil, Dulce Pontes was everywhere, singing in a strange language on the stage, and achieving the miracle of proving that great music is a universal language. She sang in the “Yes for Europe” televised concert, in the World Food Day concert organized by the FAO in Rome, in the United Nations 52nd Anniversary Concert in New York, in the Amnesty International Concert in 1997, in Madrid, and in the 1st Solidarity Festival in Barcelona. The album, “Lágrimas”, became one of the best-selling records of all time in Portugal, and one of its tracks, “A Canção do Mar”, reached Hollywood, in the film “Primal Fear”, starring Richard Gere, and whose producer, Gregory Hoblit, included the track four times in the soundtrack of the movie. She also recorded “A Brisa do Coração” with Ennio Morricone.
This was followed by the albums “A Brisa do Coração” (1995), a double album recorded live, “Caminhos”, in 1996, and “O Primeiro Canto”, in 1999. There are also a series of experiments in singing duets, joining her voice to singers such as José Carreras, Andrea Bocelli, Cesária Évora, the Brazilians Simone, Caetano Veloso and Daniela Mercury. Since 1998, Dulce Pontes performs as guest soloist next to Maestro Ennio Morricone; some of the highlights of this collaboration were at the mythical Arena di Verona, Academia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and Barbican Centre, and on the theme song of the movie “La Luz Prodigiosa”, winner of the 25th Moscow International Film Festival.
Dulce first worked with Ennio Morricone in 1995 on the song “A Brisa do Coracão”. Now she is back with the Maestro to interpret some of his best loved compositions vocally for the first time, and to sing five completely new compositions, written especially for her.
Morricone, a great admirer of Dulce’s versatile vocal style, says he wanted her to be able to express her vocal range, but also to keep the connotations of the Portuguese fado. “In that way she keeps her personality. However, she has qualities on this record which are so chameleon-like, so complete, so incredibly varied, that I have to say she touches all the aspects of singing, all ways of singing.”
This new album was released worldwide on October 2003. According to the famous Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho: “…This album holds the mystery of things that have never been said out loud. It urges us to share them with the ones we love, but also with the rest of the silent and intense universe that surrounds us.”
In the last eleven years, her life has been one non-stop digression, from concert to concert, city to city, around the whole world. But she is not one of those who complain: “Concerts are the most happy and intense moments of my life… It is the sensation of having a gift. I have a reason for living my life.”
And her gift never runs dry, neither in terms of her voice nor in her search for new ways of interpreting traditional songs. Always a perfectionist, she has learned to accompany popular songs on the piano, to recreate them, and she has begun to compose some of her own songs. She is constantly searching for new tones, the sound of new instruments, however strange they may appear or however much they have fallen into disuse - even when they only exist in museums. She experiments with other voices next to her own, other tongues, other popular song traditions, and if we ask her to, she can even sing in Berber. To accompany her in her recordings she goes to the most diverse of places to find musicians that she admires and who she once heard play and has never forgotten. With the tape recorder in hand, she traveled all over Portugal, to gather sources for her last album, “O Primeiro Canto”. For her, singing is a form of freedom, which does not fit within countries or frontiers of any type.
In 2004 Dulce has released “Focus” her collaboration with Ennio Morriconne, where Dulce sings his music in three languages. The album went gold in one week in Portugal.
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