As soon as I started, I realized the challenge. He invited the public of (FIS), 74 years of history, a scenario of legends through which the greats of classical music have passed, to strip pomp, to disagree their altars and imagine that they were in a kitchen, singing to the fire, some romances. It was like descending from a sacred place to touch the sky on earth. And everyone was happy, accompanying stanzas and starting to chant coples that touch any heart in need of thoroughly vibrate.
The idea of programming two days in a row to that new symbol of the male modernity based on the root and tradition that is Cuevas was from Cosme Marina, new director of the FIS after the most dignified and healer Valentina Granados and Jaime Martín stage. Result: exhausted entries. An eclectic and daring vision that has achieved its goal: to renew an audience away from youth and cause an urgent shaking in the stands of the Festivals Palace.
Cuevas was impressed by the challenge. But he destroyed the parameters based on spontaneity and, of course, pure art. He did it black, without paraphernalias, with a guitar and sitting to the piano. With both instruments he reviewed his private songbook from Asturias to Galicia or Sanabria, in Zamora, to Andalusia among his medium skills, his kind and spicy impudence, his extraordinary vocal capacity, the contagious wisdom with self -confidence from his study of traditions and a portentous charism of Eclectic diva.
With those skills, he warned as soon as you start: “You will hear these sad, boring and long songs …”. And from there, he undertook a trip to the past with clean and eloquent versions that started with Mine serranite y The seronero’s wife, Sones for the contemporary Spain of a land that already lived for centuries with different cultures, as demonstrated in The captive, or from a country that suffered the stigma of hunger as it emerges from Baskets, A letter that Cuevas worked alongside Raül Refrece in that great joint album that is . In it they approach a trauma whose footprint is still in the recent memory without, as the musician confessed, he can understand how having it so close, some call that today the barbarity is committed to subdue the Gazatis with that torture.
He deployed all the opposite weapons to the rigid conventions of a festival overturned to classical music. He improvise songs to the public at all times, from Sanabresas Rondas to Manuel is called my lover, He extended his interpretations with monologues that laughed at the world or appealed to local wink A Frenchman came from France or own interpretations of letters with double senses of mecano.
But in the middle, Cuevas managed to hear the messages that interests him to transmit: the return to the origin, the need to maintain alive traditions and popular echoes stalked by the screens, the dangerously self -absorbed isolation produced by social networks, the rupture of generational ties that, as denounces, destroy the transmission belts. Consequently, he encouraged the granddaughters who went to the concert with their grandmothers to learn what they were singing and not forget what they told them, while challenging those present to preserve popular art based on new languages.
He has already demonstrated it in large and small dimensions, alternating formats such as pilgrimage, delimiting own schemes such as folk cabaré or waste authenticity as it does with this show that has titled At the foot of the Llar and premiered the cycle of the National Dissemination Center for Music (CNDM) of Madrid.
In it, apply its imprint in the simplest and most direct way possible. More in tune with the nakedness of Bruce Springsteen on Broadway than with Lady Gaga’s airs. If the majority of the public knows him for his electronic arrangements and the application of rupturist trends to folk, who came to see Santander found a close artist, who knows how to waste empathy and drag. The paradigm of the road to an armed modernity of consciousness, endowed with emotion and continues mischief, delivered to pure oral communication. It was an hour and a half of pure authentic and transgressive talent that the public ended up rewarding after closing with Rambalín based on deserved applause standing: the noblest way to recognize and celebrate good taste.
