The opening concert last night of the Mercat de Música Viva de Vic, now in its 36th edition, set some of the guidelines that govern popular music today. On the one hand, the revisitation of folklore from unprejudiced and free angles, typical of generations that have been born with all music within reach of the click of a mouse. On the other, the strength of women as active subjects of music, a role that they have been occupying for some time in almost all styles. Finally, and as the outgoing director of the festival, Marc Lloret, pointed out, once the opening concert was over, the performance was a demonstration that young people do not only have the option of urban music to show contemporary discourses with possibilities of success. Lucía Fumero, daughter of the double bass player Horacio Fumero, twenty years in the service of Tete Montoliu, who can no longer be known as her daughter but simply as Lucía Fumero, was the protagonist of lighting that fuse that announces that new times are already here. If one of the missions of the Mercat is to advance them, its start could not have been more fortunate.
Folklore This is the album that Lucía presented on the same day it went on sale. It is her second solo album (she released another one with her father). She is a singer, composer and pianist, although she also occasionally played the guitar, and her performance was an example of complicity and permeability. Complicity with the list of guests who appeared on stage, particularly striking was the heartfelt hug she gave Rita Payés once the show was over. Nothingone of the tracks on the album. No less complicit is the relationship with his two supporting musicians, the double bass player Margalí Datzira, present at the Mercat to also present her own project, and the sinuous drummer Juan B. Berbín. This trio articulated an open show with an instrumental jazz track, Phoenixto give way to twelve compositions that draw on Argentine folklore and jazz with hints of pop. Hence the permeability and capillarity of a repertoire open to surprise. Lucía’s way of playing, cheerful and easy-going, without flourishes, very direct, fit in with the simplicity of some compositions that could also evoke Mexico – it sounded Black Dove-, beautifully performed a cappella by four female voices. Because the basic trio also had the support of the smooth and full-bodied voice of the Mexican Fuensanta Méndez and a brass trio (clarinets, trombone and saxophone) that could also do vocals. A plot.
The lack of prejudice for mixing, for interweaving disparate influences and styles, was already evident with the suitability of a song whose title says it all: Viennese Waltz. The rhythm of the repertoire, which had an air of celebration of complicity and musical joy, was already perceived in the change of pulse between the first piece, soft and landscape-like, with the second, Tournesol, with the more marked accentuation typical of a repertoire where folklore was diluted into jazz, or vice versa, or it doesn’t matter who dilutes, nuances or expands on whom. It is true that the basic language seems jazz, but with its contours open enough to accommodate everything, like the splendid bass clarinet solos that punctuated pieces like Forever or the final Death awakens.
And since Lucía has been Salvador Sobral’s pianist, and considering that this year the Mercat has Portugal as a guest country, the Portuguese performer appeared as a sign of the confabulation of wills that was the concert. With two of his own pieces to mark his interpretive personality, ductile, passionate, sensitive, Sobral put on stage Sadness Two Two and Go ruin my plans. Previously, during the institutional moment of the speeches (the mayor of the town, Albert Castells, and the Councillor for Culture, Sònia Hernández, spoke) there was the emotional and surprising detail, unknown to its protagonists, of the tribute to the outgoing directors after 14 years of managing the event, Marc Lloret and Oriol Roca who received a long and warm applause that was finished off with the presentation of bouquets. The Mercat, with countless performances throughout the city until Saturday, has been their thing. Next year a new team will be its patron.
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