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Sunday, April 24, 2005 at 7 pm

Crossing Over: An Interview with Luciana Souza

by Victoria Looseleaf

As her career skyrockets (Down Beat Magazine named her the “Top Rising Star Female Vocalist” in last year’s Critics Poll) Brazilian-born singer/composer Luciana Souza nevertheless manages to keep her feet on terra firma. Born to a pair of songwriting parents in Sao Paulo, Luciana, the youngest of five children, gave up studying sociology and politics in her native country to pursue the decidedly more artful field of music. Jazz music.

But a funny thing happened to Luciana, who earned a bachelor’s degree in jazz composition from Boston’s Berklee College of Music and a master’s degree from the New England Conservatory: In a kind of reverse cross-over feat, she has become an in-demand singer of contemporary classical music. Living in New York since 1999, the two-time Jazz Grammy® nominee first came to the attention of internationally renowned composer Osvaldo Golijov in 1996.

“It was brilliant, exciting and completely life-changing,” says the honey-voiced Souza of performing the world premiere of Golijov’s Oceana that same year. “Osvaldo had been commissioned to write a piece for the Oregon Bach Festival.  He heard me on the radio and called my agent. But the classical world is a different world, a different sound. I thought I didn’t belong and declined. He was insistent, though, and I’m glad, because he finally convinced me.”

Working with Golijov, says Souza, opened her ears (no pun intended) to new worlds. “With Osvaldo’s music you need stamina,” explains the 38-year old musician, “and you need to come up with the goods. I’m used to singing with guitar, or piano, bass and drums. I was placed next to the cellos and there’s this woody sound, very dark and round and beautiful that I tried to look for in my voice.”

Souza obviously found that sound, and Oceana, which was recorded last November, will be released next year on Deutsche Grammophon. Working with text also proved an inspiration to the artist whose singing style was once said to be the Brazilian equivalent of a Hitchcock blond. In 2000, Souza not only performed in Golijov’s world premiere of La Pasion Segun San Marcos, in Stuttgart, but she recorded The Poems of Elizabeth Bishop, which reached number five on the New York Times Top Ten List of Jazz and Pop. Adding to her literary canon, last year Souza released Neruda, her setting of ten poems by Chilean Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda.

With her own composing career in high gear, Souza, nevertheless, revels in the prospect of a world premiere. Next month she will be the soloist in Billy Childs’ large-scale new cantata, The Voices of Angels. Forty-eight year old Childs, a four-time Grammy® nominee and celebrated jazz artist, is also making a leap with the 45-minute work. Set to six secular poems written by children in the Terezin concentration camp, Voices was commissioned by the Los Angeles Master Chorale and will be accompanied by full orchestra. 

Souza, who hadn’t worked with Childs before, regards the project as daring. “Bill wanted a popular sounding voice to perform this work that’s descriptive of the suffering these children had, which is hard to sing about. But there’s an elegant way to write about pain,” she continues. 

“It’s profound, it’s precise and transcends the pain of racism and genocide. I can’t go there in my music sometimes, but I’m glad to go there with my instrument.”     

Souza points out that some of the poems are graphic, but pure. “Words such as ‘blood’ and ‘darkness’ and ‘filthy’ are sung,” she explains. “These are hard words to set, but the way Billy did it is so musical. He’s completely immersed in these poems and their meanings, and trying to create a universe. Using the orchestra as another instrument is a way that complements everything that’s happening.”

Souza’s musical relationship with Childs, as with Golijov, has been rewarding. “He lets me see what I can do with the material and asks me to sing things on the phone. I think this piece is going to put Billy on the map in terms of going beyond jazz,” adds Souza. “A composer of that caliber needs to speak in any language, be it jazz or classical. That’s what happened with me.”

Download a guide to the season: chorale-seasonguide0405.pdf, 808KB