Halfway through the concert, the Galician singer launched into No me importa nada with everything ---including her band. The varied audience carried her aloft. A while earlier, Luz Casal had promised she would open up completely. And she did. To enjoy her delicate acoustic impact, that sweet voice that seems to stop every two or three syllables to pause the notes from silence. It was a shared joy.
Luz Casal displayed a consistent voice and an ethereal gesturality, assisted by a high-level rhythm section, plus keyboards. She occupied the central part of the stage, dressed in strict black, complemented with elements of color, which gave a stylized theatricality, nothing forced, to her performance.
In Casal's duty, there is the insistence on continuing with that very eighties rock, which carries that already unnecessary heavy varnish, and even more so knowing the ductility of the ensemble. A few syncopations from other styles would do good to her voice and her songs. When she introduced the musicians, the renowned and versatile drummer Tino di Geraldo did not hesitate to revel, from the groove, with Sex Machine, and Peter Otero, on bass, swayed in a brief and powerful jazz-funk that referred to Marcus Miller. The night continued illuminating the audience with Un pedazo de cielo, Te dejé marchar and Negra sombra, among other interpretations.
When the performer glides through the verses of Piensa en mí, a transversal bolero ---that genre is characterized by not defining the sexual option of the longed-for, scorned, tarnished, or unloved person---, sparks of emotion emerge from the singer's lips. An antioxidant against any sorrow. In 1935, Agustín Lara and his sister María Teresa wrote those bolero and inflamed particles that detach from a burning heartbreak.
The vocalist had already let loose and began to curl with the syllables until Loca arrived, a piece she co-authored. That song defines her, she is the boss of the show from head to toe. She radiates a resilient feminism. Life's blows push broken dreams onto the track. Sixty is not the new thirty. Mature age is founded on the antipodes of past naivety. There is no room for shyness, reason is the watchtower of a life squeezed on the road, illness, and serenity. Others are libertine, divine, and superficial. The answer is offered by herself when she gets excited during the aforementioned bolero.
At different times, some of those present gave her bouquets of flowers. After almost two hours of concert, when we thought we would be left wanting, Luz Casal appears on the video screen in a respectful version, which suits her frankly well, of Radio Futura. The itinerant theater performers of El canto del gallo bring the evening to an end and open the night to an empty Diagonal.