A handful of perfect, simple and accurate songs that have survived the passage of time made up the farewell recital of Spanish composer and singer José Luis Perales on Thursday night, which filled the Movistar Arena in Buenos Aires in the final stretch of “Ballads for a farewell” which has five nights left, three of them in Argentina.
In two hours of performance and through 25 songs, the 77-year-old artist gave a finished sample of a calm and effective style that, centered on the passions that love awakens in ordinary people, rekindled the connection with a crowd that worships him for almost five decades.
Perales broke down briefly due to the emotion of so much affection and due to the massive and natural choir that awoke each of the stations of an impeccable show supported by the lively and elegant sonority of his septet.but he never stopped being that measured and calm character to narrate with a precise voice the romantic ups and downs that shake even the simplest souls.
Perales broke down briefly due to the emotion of so much affection and due to the massive and natural chorus that each of the stations aroused.
On a stage supported by a screen of five cloths that at the beginning and at the end of the evening was crossed by the signature of the person who came to say goodbye but who during the show gave different sets, the balladeer and his sidekicks gave an account of a style of song generated in another sound and everyday world that, however, is still capable of moving, of speaking in current time.
Could it be that love and the whirlwinds that it awakens continue to fertilize a territory that – like fire, like food – brings people together and Perales knows the formula to tell by singing what those necessary passions of unbeatable impact are about.
Barely 10 minutes after 9:00 p.m. (the time stipulated for the start of the concert), the host came on stage with “Ballad for a welcome” and immediately promised “a night of music and encounters” that he completely fulfilled.
After “Me llamas”, the first cries came with the loving promise of “Si” but the singer-songwriter had his most moving moment when he remembered that it was in Argentina in 1973 where he got his first Gold Record and that he traveled here and bought “ a small camera where I filmed the streets with signs reading ‘Welcome José Luis’ to show my mother how famous he was in Argentina” and he sang “Jealousy of my guitar”.
The program hooked “I would like to say your name” with “El amor” and a sea of hands shook rhythmically to bid farewell to the girl who was leaving in “Y te vas”.
Perales’ Argentine farewell will continue next Saturday and Sunday at the Plaza de la Música in Córdoba and on Tuesday the 19th at the Rosario Metropolitan
The repertoire, direct and with an undisguised melodic simplicity, had the musical direction of the keyboardist Paul Álvarez Santacatalina, the guitars of Borja Fernández and David Gómez Escudero, the drums of Pablo Serrano Carballido, the winds of Carlos Sagaste Maqueda, the bass of Jacob Reguilon García and the percussions of Gino Pavone Pérez to go through the ballad and flirt with pop.
Halfway through the production, Perales decided to evoke how his main job as author put songs in other mouths such as those of Mocedades (“They called him crazy”) and Jeanette (“Why are you leaving”, who, when included in 1975 in the film “Cría cuervos”, by Carlos Saura, had a planetary reach).
The passage allowed him to replace “Creo en ti”, his first song written with four hands, in this case together with Miguel Bosé; and “Frente almirro” that he ceded to Raphael and that, as with “Qué pasa Mañana”, he took on alone, modestly accompanying himself on a guitar.
Also in private but with the guitar in the inspired hands of the young Borja, a culminating moment of the show came with the heartbreaking “Today I remembered you”.
“A muse told the other muses, ‘let’s go, this man is already very old,’ but I told them ‘no,'” he recounted as a prologue to “Lost Melodía” that integrated another honeyed segment with “Amada mía”, the acclaimed “Autumn Song” and the disturbing tale of deception in “Her and He.”
Towards the end he gave an account of what he presented as “my most beloved song”, “Let the children sing” that he composed for Aldeas Infantiles SOS” and made the parody of leaving with the piece that gives its name to this last tour.
But he saved three of his greatest milestones for the encores: “El velero”, the long chanted “And how is he” and “I love you”, to which he changed the ending and gave the phrase “I love them like the earth to the sun” , before –again guitar in hand- assuming the sad and testimonial “I’ll go quietly”.
The Argentine farewell to Perales will continue next Saturday and Sunday at the Plaza de la Música in Córdoba and on Tuesday 19 at the Rosario Metropolitano, a prologue to the end of a tour that started at the end of 2019 and with more than a hundred stages, which It will culminate in Santiago de Chile and, on the 24th, in Montevideo.
