Júlia Vasconcelos
Roberta Martinelli is the voice that has expanded the space for contemporary Brazilian music. More than a deep voice on the radio waves and a pretty face on the TV screen, Roberta is the woman whose mind and heart are behind ideas that move art and culture in Brazil.
On August 3, 2023, the program premiered, revealing another side of Roberta Martinelli: her love for literature. The Eldorado Book Club is now included in the list of programs it has accumulated on the radio scheduleEldorado 107.3 FM. Created by Roberta, the program sheds light on her readership, an adjective that has accompanied her since childhood and that her Instagram account does not deny.
With an established name in the Brazilian music market, she began her career on the radio and her first project was a music program that continues on the air despite, initially, having to face disbelief from her superiors. But a woman doesn’t live by music alone.
Unlike its other projects, mostly focused on this language, such as Som a Pino, which airs weekly, at noon, also on Eldorado radio, Clube do Livro focuses on the union between literature and radio in an unconventional format.
Eldorado Book Club
The Book Club’s proposal is to take literature to the radio, which, according to Eldorado’s artistic director,Emanuel Bonfim, is the “most personal project she has ever done”. Each program is divided into two parts, with two guests and a “theme book”.
At first, the guest is someone who, like Roberta, has read the book. That’s when she leads a conversation about perceptions about the work, exchanging notes like someone chatting at a bar table.
In the second part, the radio host interviews, ideally, the author of the book in question. If the writer does not speak Portuguese or is no longer alive, the guest is a researcher of the work and/or the author. The end of the program, of course, is down to the music – something that is mentioned in the book the program focuses on.
The Eldorado Book Club airs every Thursday at 9pm, and, like theSom a Pino Interview– extension of the Som a Pino program –, is available on digital platforms in podcast format.
As is Roberta Martinelli’s trademark, the program sounds unpretentious to the ears. The pomp of voice imposition and the robotic decorum of the absence of spontaneity are not part of the style of the curator, presenter and music researcher.
The faithful listeners of her afternoon program with a clever name, who feel welcomed and, religiously, are ready to listen to her on some device and even call her live, in order to request a song and, often, make a declaration of affection, are a reflection of this.
Every day it airs, Som a Pino has an agenda to fulfill. While Thursdays are reserved for an interview with a music artist and Fridays for “open telephone”, the rest of the week features exclusively musical programming.
Som a Pino certainly attracted part of the audience for its new program, in addition to setting a precedent for a new creation on the network. This, however, is not Roberta Martinelli’s first project. The communicator parachuted into the world of communication, starting with radio, which later began to be shared with television.
Roberta Martinelli by Roberta Martinelli
The radio host started working at Radio Cultura as an intern, while studying Radio and TV at university. It was during this period that she created Cultura Livre. The program started on AM radio and eventually migrated to TV, becoming his most prominent project, especially after the fatefulviral memeof the presenter with the group Bala Desire.
It was a college professor who saw potential in Roberta Martinelli’s deep voice and offered her the position of intern at Radio Cultura. At the age of 27, she left her job as a theater teacher to dedicate herself to Communication, where, after having studied Law and Theater, she ended up, apparently, finding herself.
Only time, however, proved the teacher right. If Roberta’s first test for radio was a failure, today, she is awarded and respected in the universe of Brazilian music, being theFree Culturethe first project (of many) designed by the communicator.
The program is contested by musicians whose career is on the rise or in its infancy, making the fight led by her worthwhile for the project to be approved and, later on, for it to remain in the form she had idealized, anchored by her curatorship and with her face in the spotlight. TV screen.
Graduated in Radio and TV, Roberta Martinelli follows a path in music journalism, playing an important role in the dissemination of contemporary Brazilian music, joining the still small team of women on radio.
The communicator, however, does not stick to Brazilianness. Conexão Itália and Prelúdio are other programs highlighted by his voice. The first, as the name suggests, is focused on Italian music. The second is a classical music program, shown on TV Cultura and Cultura FM. She also has a program that airs exclusively in Japan, Sounds and Cities.
In addition to these, Roberta joinedSarah Oliveira, another communicator from the world of culture, during the COVID-19 period of social isolation and, together, they made a podcast on Spotify called “Us”. To avoid the obvious, the project was not about music, but about human relationships and storytelling.
Considering the number of projects, it is not difficult to infer that Emanuel Bonfim has reasons to state, as he did to Estadão, that Roberta Martinelli is an “infinite machine of ideas”, although he does not always take the credit that belongs to her.
In addition to her already established name as a music journalist, Roberta Martinelli now opens up space to, just as she does with music, democratize literature, placing this sometimes sacralized language as a subject in the most accessible means of communication in the country — radio.
Martinelli’s work refers to the relevance of the role of music journalists in Brazil and, more than that, to the importance of Communication for the dissemination of culture, which is not just about artists.
If the social function of her projects already makes them important, Roberta also creates a cozy and intimate atmosphere in her projects, caused by the naturalness of her conduct, which revives the desire to turn on the radio (and TV). The secret is the common ingredient in her projects: the passion imbued in the fingerprint she leaves behind.