Canción de Otoño

Now a long-term resident of Galicia, the legendary Cuban protest singer Pablo Milanés is content these days to croon about nothing more than the vicissitudes of good old romance, his nueva trova politics well in the past. He trains his melancholic gaze on the lovelorn poetry of such doomed romantics as Gabriela Mistral and Federico García Lorca for this project, which has apparently been gestating for 20 years. Milanés is aided by pianist and film composer José Maria Vitier, whose credits include the Oscar-nominated Strawberry and Chocolate among countless other Spanish-language films. The album is a fairly conservative listen, to say the least, but what it lacks in originality and variety it makes up in Vitier's consummate, classically rooted piano playing and Milanés’ hard-won way with a poignant melody. Whether it’ll appeal to many Songlines readers is a moot point but there are moments of sparse beauty here, among them the title-track's cascading arpeggios set to the words of Nicaragua's favourite son, Rubén Darío, and ‘Al Perderte Yo a Ti’, a brief snippet of epigrammatic wisdom from former Sandinista and priest, Ernesto Cardenal.