★★★1/2 At 55 years of age, her time in the group Tribalistas, her more than 10 published albums and a well-earned recognition from colleagues, the press and the public, Marisa Monte from Rio de Janeiro has become an artist of catalog. And in Argentina, without being a massive singer, she is enough to fill a very large theater like the Gran Rex.
This woman with an attractive smile and a powerful and always neat voice has gone through many things, from the most traditional Brazilian, samba, carnival music, the aforementioned passage through Tribalistas to funk and, above all, rock and pop. . And with this presentation, which had her most recent album “Portas” as its central excuse, all those things were repeated.
He divided his show into blocks marked by costume changes: flashy, different, but at the same time subtle and elegant. She did 10 of the 16 titles on the new album but also went back to her past. From “Infinito particular” from 2006, she chose “Vilajero” and the song that gives the entire album its name. Or the much further back in time “Ainda lembro” from “Mais” from 1991. She added her recent partnership with the Uruguayan Jorge Drexler for “Vento sardo”. And she did not deprive herself of a memory for Tribalistas with “Velha Infância” nor of doing a cappella, at the request of the public and outside the program, “Amor I Love You” to cover a small pothole while a technical problem was solved that had her mistreat
Marisa is essentially a pop singer who shoots for different
sides. That’s why she feels very comfortable in the catchy song, the one that generates choruses that invite the public to chant and move their bodies. But at the same time, she poses her show as a performance, both Brazilian and international. This time, to her wardrobe changes, she added a background screen on which images were projected, sometimes in 3D. For the rest, and also as always, his thing was the concert format where there were almost no digitally produced sounds and a lot of “real” sound in a band in which the pop base of guitar, bass and drums coexist with Latin percussion and the cavaquinho by Prestinho Da Serrinha and a trio of brass and woodwinds for flute/sax, trumpet/flugelhorn and trombone.