Midway through her set in Northampton Tuesday night, Silvana Estrada looked concerned. “Are you OK?” she asked the audience at Bombyx Center for Arts & Equity, in Florence. “You’re so quiet!”
Well, sure: no one wanted to break the spell. Estrada was onstage at the front of a converted church sanctuary, and she seemed to reconsecrate the place with her voice during an hour-long set consisting of songs from “Marchita,” an album the Mexican singer released earlier this year. (Her performance Tuesday was the first date of her latest U.S. tour.)
“Marchita” is a traditional sounding folk album, full of songs about longing and shattered love. Accompanying herself mostly on a cuatro, a four-string Venezuelan instrument that resembles a scaled-down guitar, Estrada made her musings on heartbreak feel vital and luminous. Her voice is a marvel: she’s capable of singing with great power, yet she uses it with judicious restraint and a dazzling sense of control. She often let her vocals ring out with a quaver as though she was holding in some even more powerful feeling, before her voice subsided to a low murmur quiet enough that everyone in the audience seemed almost to lean forward while holding their breath. The effect was at once haunting and delirious, particularly on “Marchita,” when she sang (in Spanish) of her distress at remembering a former lover’s touch. She was no less invested on “Tristeza” as she repeated the anguished refrain at the end: “Tristeza, déjame en paz” (“Sorrow, leave me in peace”).
The parts Estrada played on the cuatro were deceptively simple, and deeply effective. A repeating three-note pattern on “Sabré Olvidar” quickly became hypnotic, while her pattern on “Te Guardo” carried the rhythm, and a vague sense of disquiet as she sang of yearning for an impossible love. She switched to piano for a song or two, and played one on guitar, but the instrumentation was beside the point: Estrada’s voice and her stylized sense of poetry were the reason the audience kept so still.
Aisha Burns, a recent transplant to Western Massachusetts, opened the show with a solo-acoustic set of songs about grief and acceptance that showcased a voice that was mesmerizing in its own way.