Rodrigo Cuevas ★★★★★
Place and date: Gran Teatre del Liceu (22/III/2024)
A few minutes after nine o'clock at night, Rodrigo Cuevas attacks the first song of his concert, crawling along the stalls hallway towards the stage. With all the tickets sold for a long time, the Asturian returned to Barcelona to present his second album, 'Manual de romería', within the framework of the Guitar BCN festival. With his Freddie Mercury mustache and glamorous clogs, Cuevas (voice, tambourine, castanets) appeared supported by Mapi Quintana (vocoder, vocals, percussion), Rubén Bada (guitars, percussion, backing vocals), Tino Cuesta (keyboards, synthesizers, choirs) and Juanjo Díaz (percussions). Phenomenal musicians who, in the style of Kraftwerk, worked behind desks decorated with neon lights.
“Avui will burn the Liceu again again,” this former ESMUC student promises us, still in the first bars of the gig. And although such a circumstance does not occur literally, the venerable theater will burn down more than three times. You will burn with the joy, artisticity and intelligence of a proposal that projects the traditional to the most outstanding contemporary. Diana musically and also on stage, since Cuevas masters the noble arts of cabaret like no one else, to the point of inciting the public to star in a collective striptease that, okay, it didn't quite work out, but it's something... Humor (sycalyptic) and vindication, like when the artist revealed to us: “I respect straight people. “I have straight friends, and nothing happens.” Ten points, friend.
In strictly musical terms, the spectators gathered on the Rambla (among them Ada Colau, whom Rodrigo wanted to greet) dealt with an agenda that, beyond the 'Pilgrimage Manual', also had an impact on the previous 'Courtship Manual' of 2019, without forgetting the beautiful tribute to King Peret via 'Gitana sochicera'. Between the sensational opening of the cork with 'Más animal' –with its rapped episodes and the quartet of dancers that would also give luster to the session–, and the last encore with 'Romería', we went through a few wonders. This is the case, of course, of the traditional 'BYPA' (acronym for “baxando yo pela pueblo”) doing a duet with our Maria Arnal. Also 'Tell me, green bouquet' – built from popular music, in which Cuevas tells us about the school bullying he had to suffer –, and the section prior to the encores in a techno-telluric key, so to speak, in the that songs of the caliber of 'Como ye?!', 'Xiringélu' or 'Veleno' caused unleashed and practically unanimous dancing in the audience and on the floors. Already in the 'encore', we were moved again by the delicate and mournful 'Rambalín' (chronicle of a homophobic murder that occurred in Gijón in the seventies) and the euphoric 'Muiñeira para a filla da bruxa'. What a night!
