Miniatures contemporaines pour braguinhas

Description

In Miniaturas Contemporâneas para Braguinhas, the braguinha - a small string instrument from Madeira with a crystalline soprano voice - is freed from its ethnographic confinement to become a true laboratory of the present. Alongside pieces by composers from the island, new commissions invite outside perspectives to enter into dialogue with the instrument, to test its tuning and its gesture, sometimes in conversation with the guitar, its historical companion.The deliberate brevity of the pieces concentrates invention: imitative traces, echo figures, resonance games, bursts of virtuosity and dancing shadows of the bailinho. Beneath the surface, a migrant memory emerges: the braguinha, which in 1879 contributed to the birth of the ukulele, here speaks again in a renewed idiom.