Construção

Albumbeschreibung

In 1971, while he was recording the album Construção, Chico Buarque had just spent 18 months in exile in Italy because of the dictatorship. He returned to a Brazil still under military rule. Censorship was rife, and every song to be broadcast was inspected. So as not to risk a ban, Buarque, who had no intention of mincing his words, used metaphors and roundabout stylistic methods to describe his peers' feelings towards the forced march that the government was leading them on. And so, the title piece, beautifully orchestrated by the foremost arranger of the Tropicalia movement, Rogerio Duprat, describes the day of a construction worker who leaves his family to work on the building site where he will die. The scene is repeated three times, varying slightly each time, to underline the alienation of the working class. Elsewhere, the polished words describe the dark feelings created by the times. These literary merits come alongside melodic and orchestral deftness that makes this a truly capital work. Modernist but fundamentally Brazilian, Chico Buarque elegantly deploys samba, romantic song and bossa nova. In this period he built fertile working relationships, producing co-compositions with Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes: and here we see some of the fruits: Olha Maria and Samba de Orly. But these solo compositions stand up quite well by comparison and, thanks to Robertno Menescal's painstaking production, every piece is rendered with subtlety, and the whole thing forms an indispensable and inspiring work. © BM/Qobuz