Mondo Bizarre Magazine Concert Reviews, Concerts

Francisco Sassetti | Wim Mertens – Misty Fest, Casa da Música, Porto, 13.11.2023.

Francisco Sassetti © Mondo Bizarre Magazine/Telma Mota

Warmness and Strife for Piano

words: Raquel Pinheiro; photos: Telma Mota

It was an evening of Wimtrasts and counterpoints. Warmness, homeness, romanticism, afable communication – Francisco Sassetti – sparcity, dislocation, strangeness, non verbal speak – Win Mertens.

Portugue pianist and composer premiered his debut album, Home, Monday night. Home is a beautiful record filled with intimate, personal, homely, sacred even, pieces. It is also imbued in melancholy, joy, longing, wonder.

Talkative, Francisco told small stories and contextulized every theme throughout his performance. Opening in a nightly mood, with Home’s two nocturnes, Nocturne I and Nocturne II, moving to the journeying title track that leads us home after absense.

Francisco Sassetti © Mondo Bizarre Magazine/Telma Mota

The next three pieces Francisca’s Dream, Francisco’s Jr Theme, Sara is Happy are dedicated, respectively to his daughter, his son and his wife. A little girl with a Ballon, in a carrousel, a young boy slaying a dragon, and a wife, mother, woman litting a room with her happiness. The piano translates the stories magnificently. Or the vignettes are magnificently played, in a reverie, with intensity, upbeatness sorrow, glow.

Francisco Sassetti’s performance ends with the wonderful, slightly somber, but rich is tone and soul, Music For Her.

Wim Mertens © Mondo Bizarre Magazine/Telma Mota

Wim Mertens, , accompanied by trumpeter Ward Hoornaert, presented Voice Of The Living his album homage to all war victims. Voice Of The Living was commissioned by the Chancellary of the Belgium prime minister as part of the commemoration og the Great War (Work War I, 1914-1918).

It is an harrowing musical piece. Playing in November, with all that is going on, two days after Armistice Day (November 11,1918), the day of the end of war it was created to signal, it is sobering, chilling, beautiful, uncomfortable.

Wim Mertens & Ward Hoornaer © Mondo Bizarre Magazine/Telma Mota

Mertens way of playing, more minimal leaning, heighlights the theme of the composition. The Piano runs free, is sound pointllism, while the trumpet holds it filling the atmosphere with a certain joy, at times, verging on exuberant happyness, but never fully crossing into glaring bright light.

In Mertens Voice Of The Living we feel the sense of loss, of desorientation, the discomfort, the wasteland. There are also glimpses of hope, of a better time among uncertainty.

Libreto:

Francisco Sassetti:01 – Nocturne I; 02 – Nocturne II; 03 – Home; 04 – Goodbye; 05 – Filipa’s Dream; 06 – Francisco Jr.’s Theme; 07 – Sara Is Happy; 08 – Inocência II; 09 – Music for Her

Wim Mertens: 01 – Too good, too loose; 02 – Glossary raisonné; 03 – Escape and recapture; 04 – Pondichéry; 05 – On the Zephyrous Peak; 06 – Continuous pushforwards; 07 – Nota notae; 08 – Watch!; 09 – Phaedra; 10 – Constance; 11 – Prudence; 12 – Far; 13 – Struggle for Pleasure; 14 – Close Cover

Wim Mertens © Mondo Bizarre Magazine/Telma Mota

Mondo Bizarre Magazine Concert Reviews, Concerts

Corinne Bailey Rae – Misty Fest, Casa da Música, Porto, 05.11.2023.

© Mondo Bizarre Magazine/Marcos Leal

British singer Corinne Bailey Rae didn’t lie when, right before playing A Spell, A Prayer, invited the audience to ,“… to a spell of pleasure”. Corinne entered the stage like a wizard, wrapped in cloak resembling Merlin’s one, rocked by her band’s music ready to bewitch.

words: Marcos Leal (edited and freely translated by Raquel Pinheiro); photos: Marcos Leal

At each rest, Corinne spoke of the inspiration behind each song of her latest record, composed after a visit to the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicado, a 1923 bank building turned arts and archive center for the people of South Side.

An exhibition with strong afro-american and racial segregation in the United States, curated by Theaster Gates, lead Corinne to a number of objects that would be the driving force behind Black Rainbows. Given the diversity of influences and Corinne’ need to properly live express the feelings brought by the inspirational objects the record proved to be very dynamic in concert.

© Mondo Bizarre Magazine/Marcos Leal

Some may had been surprised by such versatility from the singer when New York Transic Queen (an old beauty pageant) was performed in a more rock way, steaming from a photo of former model Audrey Smaltz, that took Corinne to compose a more rebellious and feminist song.

The evening highlight was Put it Down, introduzido by the story of a party at Stony Island Arts Bank in celebration of dj Frankie Knuckles. Corinne tells that at the entrance there was a big jar where people would drop a piece of paper with whatever worried or tormented them.

At a point, fire was thrown inside the jar and everyone danced as a community like what had been written in those pieces of paperhsd stop having so much weight upon people. And that was how,, in Put it Down, the audience was contaminated by the music dancing and smiling along Corinne in the middle of room, a few hugs and emotional words shinning in their faces.

Music really has an incredible power and Corinne and her fantastic musicians turned the night into a celebration and freedom of the worries that torment our days making us forget the outer world for a little bit.

© Mondo Bizarre Magazine/Marcos Leal