The Bottom Line
Diana Navarro's 24 Rosas features a wonderful vocal performance of Andalusia's resurging 'copla' ballad form. These stories of love are sung to music that echoes with the breezes of the Middle East and Africa - as does much of Spanish music. An exceptional performance that gets bogged down in a less stellar, repetitious-feeling track list.
Pros
- Virtuoso sylistic singing of Andalusian copla
Cons
- Less remarkable track list that gets less interesting as album goes on
Description
- 14 tracks of Spain's Coplas, sung by Andalusia's Diana Navarro
- 12 tracks composed by Navarro and Chico Valdivia and Manuel Illan
- Released Oct. 2007 by Warner Music Latina
Guide Review - CD Review: Diana Navarro - 24 Rosas
In the 1930s, Spain embraced a ballad style they called 'copla'. The copla was a torch singer's dream, usually a story of happy or tragic love performed with intense musical emotion. The copla has recently seen a resurgence of popularity and Diana Navarro is a modern diva of copla's 21st century form. Her 2005 album No Te Olivados De Mi won 20 copla awards and was nominated for a Latin Grammy. Now Navarro is back with 24 Rosas.
Navarro has an amazing vocal facility with the arabesques inherent in these Andalusian songs. Clear, versatile and expressive, her Latin "Madre Mia" is angelic while "Mira Lo Que Te Has Perdio" is both passionate and a tour de force of vocal gymnastics. If an album's rating depended only on vocal excellence this CD would surely rate 5 stars.
Most of the songs on the album were co-written by Navarro and well-known composers Chico Valdivia and Manual Illan, with lyrics by Luis Gomez Escolar. If you listen to each track in isolation, they're all quite good. But as the album goes on, it starts feeling repetitious, without enough variation to sustain an hour's interest.
While this is a solid album, if you are new to copla you might try the earlier album, No Te Olivados De Mi for that great Navarro voice with a more interesting track list.