Alain Oulman – As Mãos Que Trago

5 June, 2009 to 31 December, 2009

Exhibition Alain Oulman – As Mãos Que Trago
Opening on June 4th 2009, at 9h30pm
Performance by Camané and Mario Laginha
Free entrance

At the beginning of the 1960’s, throughout the consecration and renovation path of the urban song, Alain Oulman’s (1928-1990) eclectic personality – composer, stage director, and editor – played a core role, along with Amália Rodrigues, in one of the most important moments of the history of Fado, marked by the final encounter of the erudite and classical poetry with the fado universe.

From June 5th will be open to the public the exhibition As Mãos que Trago, a show devoted to the figure of Alain Oulman (1928-1990).

On this exhibition one will meet the working papers of the author, his writings, his diaries and notebooks, correspondence with Amália Rodrigues and other personalities from different fields of Portuguese society, score manuscripts, or, among many other testimonies, the piano in which he composed music for poems by Camões, David Mourão-Ferreira, Alexandre O’Neil, José Régio, Pedro Homem de Mello, Cecília Meirelles, among many others.

Excerpts from the unpublished documentary titled Com Que Voz, directed by Nicholas Oulman, which will debut in theaters in the second half of 2009, are also included in the exhibition, which contain depositions of several personalities.

Alain Oulman 

A composer of enormous sensitivity, Alain Bertrand Robert Oulman was born in Dafundo, in the outskirts of Lisbon, on June 15th 1928, son of Albert and Nicole Bensaúde Oulman Calmann-Lévy.

David Mourão-Ferreira gives us note of its importance in the context of Portuguese music: It is due to Alain Oulman, right from the late Fifties, the pioneering mission to establish a specific and fruitful link between the Portuguese poetry of a "cultivated" matrix and that particular form of popular music - Fado - which until then had been the subject of an almost total disregard and overlooking from the "national intelligentsia."  (Primavera: David Mourão-Ferreira, Museu do Fado, 2007, p. 82). It will be Amália, from the beginning of the 1960s, the main disseminator of his talent.

From June 5th to December 31st 2009