Joan Manuel Serrat begins her last tour in New York: what she sang and what she said

Spanish singer Joan Manuel Serrat said goodbye to New York on Wednesday at the start of the last tour of her career “El vice de cantar”, with a dedicated audience which forced the interpreter to carry Penelope on stage and thus tells some stories in which he amused the audience.

This Wednesday they met at the Beacon Theater in New York –one of the emblematic areas of Hispanic artists– all Latin American accents, which within a few days left the “sold out” sign hanging.

There are many middle-aged people who have proven to know a large part of the Noi del Poble Sec repertoire by heart.

Casual look and good mood

The singer, wearing faded jeans, shirt and jacket, was accompanied by a group of seven musicians -organ, double bass, violin, clarinet and drums and guitar, in addition to his inseparable pianist Ricard Miralles-, and he exchanged songs standing in his performances sitting on a stool or in a low seat.

Joan Manuel Serrat, who is in good shape, wants her concert to be a hymn to life, without getting caught up in nostalgia, and said if his stories are full of characters that don’t age, “you have to give the characters their place.” And “we occupy ours, more fucked up, but I prefer it that way,” he added.

The concert began at give it give it and proceeded to My youth and other subjects less known to the public and when he just sang Madam the audience stood up and began to sing a chorus they know by heart.

Consecutive classic

they followed Lucy, I did nothing but think of you Y Something personalbefore giving way to the musical poems of Miguel Hernández, the poet who died in a Francoist prison and where he said that “This remembrance is a duty of Spain and of the world”.

Singing The onion lullabyin a very prominent tone, but then chained for freedomYes, in his anthemic air, he again lifted the public from their seats.

Songs from his “Latin repertoire” are missing from the concert, because other than an allusion to Atahualpa Yupanqui, he did not interpret, for example, Mario Benedetti’s songs which gave him so much fame on the American continent.

The public did not stop praising the Catalan singer: “Great”, “Maestro” or “I love you”, to which a woman replied “and more me”, and Serrat replied “You’re a liar, you told me that four years ago” (date of his previous concert in New York).

The art of making songs

Serrat rambled on what it meant to make songs, which he was referred to as “a musical with a scene and some characters”and said that some songs, his or others, have achieved the magic of “staying behind our souls and staying there, forever and ever.”

Of course, this is what the Big Apple public has now shown, who have insisted on accompanying the singer to his most popular tunes and who have been obsessive to request one or another song, but above all Penelopeone of his oldest hits.

Serrat didn’t just sing Penelope, but sat down to explain two stories: one, the best known, Ulysses’s wife weaving and taking off a cloak while waiting for her husband for twenty years; others, of an unknown woman whom Serrat spotted at Calatayud stationbetween Madrid and Barcelona, ​​clinging to a bag – as in the song – that he had never dreamed of speaking but had not forgotten.

It’s hard to imagine Serrat leaving the stage forevera place where he moves like a fish in water and where he enforces that “a song only exists when someone sings it and someone else listens to it”.

What the public wants now is more than just listening: I want to sing with Serratand so did he with Today could be a great day, the little things and Mediterranean, to reach apotheosis with songswhere Serrat provided the floor so that people could sing at the top of their voices “Caminante no hay camino / el camino se camino al andar”.

And when he was gone, he had to go back to encore with Party and remember that, as the lyrics say, “Let’s go down the hill / up my street / the party is over”.

Undeterred, the public asked for “another-another,” and Serrat returned and finally sang the crazy little onesa nod to the self -farewell tour as it ends with “Nothing and nothing can stop their suffering / Let the hands move on the clock / … Let them grow and one day / they said goodbye to us“.

Source: EFE/Javier Otazu

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