Moments in Dulce Pontes’ life

With two concerts in Cyprus, Portuguese diva marks 20 years of her career

Two mesmerizing evenings with Portugal's most precious voice is a proposal you can’t miss in Cyprus this September. When Dulce Pontes goes onstage at Nicosia’s D’Avila Moat on September 24 and Paphos’ Castle Square on the following day, she will flood her audiences with emotion, longing, seductiveness, bravado, desperation and strength. Her new album Momentos wraps up her 20 years long career and comes with a world tour, which started in the Spring of 2009 in celebration of the event.

In her Cyprus concerts, which make part of the Kypria 2009 International Festival program, Dulce Pontes will be accompanied by her world famous, nine piece band, performing together some of her most recognizable and loved songs to date as well as previously unreleased pieces and new versions of her songs recorded earlier in her career. Some songs will be specifically chosen for the Cyprus concerts.

All of her Momentos Tour concerts to date have sold out and the tour is gaining momentum by each new show. Momentos is inspirational and has managed once again to establish Dulce Pontes’ title as the Queen of Fado, bringing her followers even closer to the sound of traditional Portuguese music.

Over the years Dulce Pontes has evolved into a renowned star of World Music. She was born in 1969 in Montijo, near Lisbon, and was introduced to the Portuguese Fado tradition by her uncle Carlos Pontes, a Fado singer and a lover of bullfights. At the age of seven she began studying piano at the National Conservatory of Music in Lisbon, and it was here that her curiosity for music was aroused, and she acquired an insatiable instinct to research music which would eventually lead her to the multifaceted international career she possesses today.

Dulce burst onto the World Music scene with the song Canção do Mar –a kind of folk aria, rich with vast and dramatic minor chords that served as a backdrop to the sweeping power of her supremely emotional voice. Included on the album, Lágrimas, which became one of the best-selling records of all time in Portugal, this song appeared on the soundtrack of the 1996 Hollywood film Primal Fear, and is to this day Dulce’s instantly recognizable and world-known trademark song.