Pasión Vega, very involved in her role

And one more year we have passed the second Saturday of the Big Week, the last day of the eight in which the City Council programs presumably important concerts at night, all of them conservative in their style. We have lived the eight days of bowling as if it were Sunday and surprised that the stores were open. On the second Saturday there were four main official proposals: ruling out the midnight DJ session in the remote Parque Europa called ‘Fiestazo Megastar FM’ (with the intervention of the girl group Sweet California), we would have been happy to any of the three concerts at 11:30 a.m. : to the Plaza Nueva where the Cuban orchestra led by bassist and singer Alain Pérez (as an instrumentalist he accompanied Paco de Lucía), to La Pérgola before the first favorite group of our lives, Formula V, that of ‘Eva María’, ‘In the Fiesta de Blas’, ‘Vacaciones de Verano’, ‘Cuéntame’… (this is how they announced the concert on their Facebook: «Going back to Bilbao is going back to our memories. The Holiday, the Garden or the even older Arizona. It’s remembering the Hotel Excelsior, now non-existent, where we stayed so many times that our sound technician ended up marrying the restaurant’s waitress”), or the great bet of Abandoibarra with a Pasión Vega that exceeded our high expectations and who gave one of the concerts of the year (the number 380 that we have in 2022).

Let’s reserve a paragraph to review the concerts at Abandoibarra, a neat space even when the kids made a big party, and with a transversal purpose, an achievement that was achieved only or especially with La Oreja de Van Gogh. Of the eight concerts, this would be the artistic podium: bronze for El Drogas, silver for Víctor Manuel and gold for Pasión Vega. Regarding public attendance, the largest was obtained by La Oreja de Van Gogh, followed by El Drogas and Dani Fernández, and then with some 3000 souls they gathered before Viva Sweden and Bulego. Of the seated concerts, Víctor Manuel gathered many more than 3,000 spectators, and was followed by Pasión Vega and finally Mikel Urdangarin with the BOS, who was attended by some 2,000 parishioners.

And on Saturday, Pasión Vega, extremely inspired and theatrical, now languid, now smiling, often interpreting as if in a trance and looking at the sky, handling a fan and dancing with shawls and trains, singing in an exalted way (long sustained without going out of tune as Ana Mena did , melismas, coplera effects, sensitivity that is not emotional…), Pasión, we said, focused on a concert of 18 songs (including a long duet potpourri with its pianist and musical director Federico Lechner) in 132 minutes (two hours and 12 minutes) that became fleeting, very fast: before starting the encore we looked at the clock for the first time and we were amazed that two hours had passed, and that we had attended the show standing up! In fact, at the definitive end of the meeting she sentenced a lady: «It was short for me. What joy!” And going up the stairs of the Guggenheim we heard among those who were leaving the esplanade: “The truth is that it has been very good,” said a gentleman to his wife, and “it has been very elegant,” a lady told her husband.

Pasión Vega wore two dresses in a concert, we will not say that imperceptibly diminished, but with the first white she sang continuously sublime and with the second orange she sang extraordinarily. In a sextet, backed by a band that sounded like a movie, she played in a purely organic way (no playbacks!) and went naturally and seamlessly from fado to flamenco and between different Latin rhythms because her boss was exploiting the album’s repertoire entitled ‘Todo lo que Tengo’, the same one that we saw him present in February 2020 at the Arriaga with a quite different repertoire, Pasión camouflaged himself like a tortoise in the backgrounds of the changing color stage due to the lighting (green, red, pink…; by the way, the platinum-haired boss reported that all her technical team is from Bilbao: “the sound, the lighting, everything”) and, flashing on the side screen that enlarged it in close-ups and with the volume precise, she sang extremely inspired, body and soul involved in her role, and surely benefited from officiating outdoors, which is usually a handicap when it comes to acoustics.

She spent an hour in her first dress, ivory white and at first adorned with a long, polychromatic train with which she danced. He even distilled jazz in the inaugural ‘Petenera huasteca’, in which we already thought that the date pointed to being special, that is, to what was said: the best of the year. Pasión finished it and greeted Ana María Alías Vega, 46: «Gabon, Bilbao, ha, ha, ha… Good evening. We are in the final stretch of the festivities, after the fireworks. This will be a trip through the musical Caribbean. Come with us on this journey.” And the second was the zamba ‘Volver a volar’, where Pasión waved the tail of her dress, slowed down the tempo, dilated the temper and swayed to the tune of the song before presenting the third, explaining informatively that ‘Por tu amor’ is a rumba jarocha, Mexican, by the emerging Silvana Estrada, only 25 years old, and in which Pasión became stylized and very subtle until she brought this Mexican rhythm to the land of the New York Fania.

Pasión did not lose the thread or the concentration, going beyond Martirio in a highly celebrated review of María Dolores Pradera’s ‘Fina estampa’. He referred to an impressive ‘María La Portuguesa’ by Carlos Cano (“he was a journalist with a guitar, as he liked to say”), Fernando Velázquez, the director of the Getxo orchestra, ‘La Lirio’ emerged slowly and theatrically, the chacarera ‘Canto y Río’ co-written by Jorge Drexler and El Chipi, and she labeled the following two songs: a Colombian bambuco (‘Good wind and good sea’) and a Venezuelan sangueo (‘Laundress’s Lament’).

She changed her dress to continue from the tenth piece, ‘Tonada de luna full’, a sort of jazz ballad, and the long ‘ramillete’ or potpourri in duet with her pianist Federico Lechner contained critical moments such as ‘La gata bajo la rain’, which shocked the crowd on the esplanade, who sang along spontaneously, or Carlos Cano’s ‘Habaneras de Cádiz’, where Pasión incited the respectable to sing. They gave the potpourri a 9.5 out of 10, and the surprise of the evening was the revision in Basque and holding a party handkerchief of the traditional 18th century Suletin ‘Maitia nun zira’ (it seems that he sang it without a teleprompter, although he changed position and did not move during the version, so it is possible that it had a hidden cheat sheet).

And right up to the end she reached peaks or milestones like ‘Tan poquita cosa’ (a la Martirio seriously again), a salty ‘Malagueña’ where she was perceived as very involved in her role, and the two of the encore: the first as a duo it seems that due to a last-minute decision due to, or rather thanks to, a request that appointed Serrat (and that is why he sang ‘Lucía’ with Federico), and the second, as a goodbye in full sextet with ‘La tarara ‘, playful and with a boogaloo ending.

That said, we suspected that it would be fine, but it exceeded our expectations.