Rio de Janeiro
The singer Lana Bittencourt died on Monday (28) at the age of 91 as a result of cardiac and pulmonary arrest. She had been hospitalized at the Alcides Carneiro Hospital in Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro, since late July.
The information has been confirmed by the artist’s family.
Watching Lana Bittencourt, who left us today at the age of 91, has always been an amazing experience. It was common for audiences to give her a standing ovation for one of her melodramatic and apotheotic interpretations, not at the end but still in the middle of her shows.
She belongs to the generation of radioage singers who became famous for their voice and opera interpretations, but didn’t stop with the times. Being very musical and up to date, she knew how to be a good interpreter of MPB by Ivan Lins and Vitor Martins like “Bilhete” and by Gonzaguinha like “Sangrando” and “É”.
She was fortunate to start her career because she was one of the rare singers of her time who was not prevented by her family from becoming an artist, which was a marginalized occupation at the time. His father, although in the military, was a poet and composer. Her Italian grandmother encouraged her early on to study lyrical singing. When he grew up he enrolled in the faculty of philosophy and later switched to literature as his dream was to work in the library field at Itamaraty.
Meanwhile, he recorded a jingle composed by his father for a truck company, which played over the loudspeakers of several northeastern cities. Then people began to draw attention to her voice, leading to her first experiences at Rádio Iracema in Fortaleza and at TV Jornal do Comércio in Recife.
Back in Rio he was a crooner at Copacabana Palace nightclub MeiaNoite, sang in several languages and worked as a freelancer on some Rádio Tupi programs until he landed his first radio contract with Mayrink Veiga. From there to the disco it was a jump.
It debuted in Todamérica in 1954 and moved to multinational Columbia the following year under the direction of Roberto Côrte Real, who needed a versatile performer to record international hits, such as the ItalianFrenchGerman singer Caterina Valente, from whose repertoire she chose a few pearls .
Dubbed “the international” by presenter César de Alencar, it recorded a bit of everything. From versions of Cuban classics by Ernesto Lecuona such as “Malagueña” and “Andalucia” to theme songs from American films such as “Johnny Guitar” from 1954 and others in the foreign original such as “Hymne à l’amour” from Edith Piaf’s repertoire as well as boleros and tangoes.
Among the national songs, she set the samba canção “Se algo telefonar” and the baião “Zezé” with verses in several languages but it was only with the version of “Little Darlin'” that she was consecrated. He sold 700,000 78 rpm records of this calypso rock in 1957, taking advantage of the delay in the arrival of foreign records in the country, in this case the American group The Diamonds, who released the music there.
This caught the attention of Nat Shapiro, Columbia’s international director, who came to Brazil to present her with a trophy for her historic sale, in addition to inviting her to the United States.
Between 1958 and 1960 he recorded the LPs “Musicalscope” and “Intimamente”, acted in three films, two of them directed by Mazzaropi, who was his fan, and sang the rock “Alone” and the rerecording of the samba singing ” Ave Maria” from the repertoire of his favorite singer Dalva de Oliveira, who also sang in the television program “Noite de Gala” by Flávio Cavalcanti
Tupi, at a picturesque event in support of PróMatre, just before the birth of her first daughter, with an ambulance on stage taking her to the hospital for delivery.
Lana had her own radio show “Audições de Lana” on radio stations Mayrink Veiga and Tupi in Rio and sang a lot on TV in Rio and São Paulo. In the 1960s he recorded a tribute to two thenupcoming composers: Luiz Antonio, sambalanço master, and Tom Jobim, bossa nova (the LP “Sambas do Rio”); also another featuring only sambas from Bahia (“Exaltação ao Samba”) and the eclectic “O Sucesso é Lana Bittencourt” in which she sang the gospel song “I Will Follow Him (Chariot)”, a hit by Petula Clark. At the end of the decade, she took a career break to look after her teenage children.
Lana returned in 1977 and never stopped, constantly renewing the repertoire with more contemporary songs, including Angela Ro Ro’s ‘Karma Secular’, which she was allowed to release in 1986 and christened one of her independent LPs.
Despite unjustly straying from the mainstream media, her performances always drew attention, particularly among LGBTI+ audiences, who gave her multiple honors and delivered impassioned onstage speeches to, after all, being a mix of divas like Dalva de Oliveira, Judy Garland and Shirley Bassey, with delightfully over the top and emotional interpretations.
On the eve of my 80th birthday, I couldn’t bear to see Lana without recordings for so long and her voice still perfect. At that time I produced the double CD and DVD “A Diva Passional, ao Vivo” which came from two shows at the Teatro Rival in Rio and included 28 tracks and which featured Alcione, Ney Matogrosso, Rogéria and granddaughter Mariana Braga. who inherited her great voice.
The mixing engineer informed me that there was no need to repeat anything on any song or change her voice as she had absolutely no slipups. A phenomenon I have never seen before. I then invited her to take part in the show “Two nights for Dolores Duran”, another show that became a live CD and DVD in which she sang “O que É que Eu Faço?” among others. in duo with Leny Andrade.
Her last appearance to the general public was in another show I produced at Imperator in the Rio de Janeiro suburb of Méier, performing “Over the Rainbow” at the age of 87 in 2019. During the 2020 pandemic she was still musically active with her second husband and loyal squire, the guitarist Mirabeaux.
Sometimes Lana made up stories she wished she had lived and told them as the truth. It took me a while to understand that this was part of her personal folklore, but eventually I realized that it all made sense in this theatrical universe full of enchantment that she offered in her shows.
Deep down she was an actress in another world, where she also liked to use strong words, unusual for a small lady, as if to emphasize that she had never lost her passion for music, for her partner and for life. Lana is gone today, but Brazil have yet to live up to one of their greatest voices of all time.