Joan Manuel Serrat: the last great day

If we stop to think, there are few things in life that we do knowing that this, precisely that, is the last time we do them.

Life does not usually leave us many conscious goodbyes, things happen that one day stop happening and that's it.

For that we must thank Joan Manuel Serrat (Barcelona, ​​78 years old), for having offered his audience an official farewell.

"I proclaim my dismissal of my own free will," he said at the beginning of the night.

Yes, he will compose, sing and even appear on some stage as a guest, but Serrat will never again be Serrat in concert.

It was the last time, in a packed Palau Sant Jordi, with all the audience seated, there he also said goodbye to that boy who decades ago felt the vertigo of singing in front of someone other than friends and family for the first time.

On Friday night, after six decades of stages,

everyone was his family in goodbye.

In his hometown.

They even moved to the chairs.

More information

Joan Manuel Serrat's party never ends

Because Serrat leaves the stage for real, he is not a bullfighter with a detachable ponytail.

Knowing how to retire is a success and the one who was

note that his time has come.

Rather than go down, drawing only on the admiration and empathy of an audience that would forgive him everything for what he owes.

Leaving and leaving a night for history, those nights in which a crowd, more than 15,000 people in their last concert, countless in the other 71 of the tour, seem like a single person because they feel the same, each one with their memories.

Yes, Serrat has chosen the moment, close to his eighth decade of life (he turns 79 next Tuesday), after basting together the musical chronicle of the changes that his neighborhood, his city, his country and the entire world have undergone during this time.

That is why the atmosphere was a mixture of sorrow and joy, of feelings lived inwards, like the plant that takes water from the earth without anyone seeing it.

And applause and ovations outward,

like when the flower opens and shows itself shamelessly.

A patient and warm enthusiasm, typical of an already mature public, the one that knows precisely what Serrat means with songs like

, in charge of opening a goodbye to which Serrat himself wanted to lower the octane with jokes that wanted to combat sorrows.

Memories cannot anchor life, coating it in sadness, they are steps of memory.

Also old age.

An emotional Joan Manuel Serrat, at his farewell concert, the third consecutive one he has given in Barcelona.Albert Garcia

The artist has said goodbye to the stage on a tour of 40 concerts, with the latter held at the Palau Sant Jordi.

albert garcia

Serrat says goodbye after 50 years of career and the embodiment of a generation.Albert Garcia

The first leap in his career was given with the 'extended play' 'Ara que tinc vint anys', at the end of 1966. It was number one in sales.Albert Garcia

Throughout his career, Serrat has alternated albums in Catalan and Spanish.Albert Garcia

The artist says goodbye with a repertoire of more than twenty songs with which he rebuilds his musical legacy.Albert Garcia

His songs will remain as part of the sentimental education of several generations in Spain and Latin America.Albert Garcia

Serrat has offered three concerts to say goodbye in Barcelona.Albert Garcia

When he finishes his last concert in Barcelona, ​​his songbook will be eternal.Albert Garcia

Since he was at home, the repertoire varied with respect to other concerts, and the Catalan gained weight in the songbook through gems like

or the youthful

who shared the spotlight at the start of the recital with that

in which Spanish also sounds, something very typical of someone who already mixes roots in his own first name.

Serrat was moved and his voice, with traces of decades of life and profession, trembled when speaking, as it did when singing, thus giving him the authority of a grandfather who tells his gaping grandchildren things that they still don't know will remember for life.

That grandfather he sang in

.

And although Serrat's “grandchildren” were also grandparents in their lives on Friday night, and they know first-hand some of the things he sang for them, they were still creatures rejuvenated by Serrat's songbook.

Actually, the entire public was at the same time grandmother, mother and grandson, including President Pedro Sánchez (50 years old) and Ada Colau (48), two representatives of the large group of politicians present at the concert.

And all this was so because Serrat has explained the world with words so plain that it seems, a big mistake, that anyone could write them: the intricacies of plainness.

Costumbrismo can only be dust on an object, but Serrat's costumbrismo is the object itself, it is life made into a song with words threaded by a street, neighborhood sensibility, neither corny nor baroque, simple and deep.

And we already know that songs are the last thing our brain erases when it flies into the clouds of oblivion.

Thus, Serrat's last night on stage, he in a brown patterned jacket, black street shirt and pants, the parquet upholstered on the back in red, with a screen on which hearts coexisted, black and white photos, a fretted Mona Lisa, carousels, comic strips, graffiti, skies, Hopper's loneliness, Picasso's incandescent gaze or the streets of Barcelona, ​​it was a night of memories without Serrat allowing melancholy to wrinkle such a smooth evening, trying to steer the ship towards the fun that he promised in his first addresses.

He was helped by a gang of accomplices headed by Josep Mas

and Ricard Miralles, complete with David Palau, Úrsula Amargós, Vicente Climent, Raimón Ferrer and José Miguel Pérez Sagaste, a group with double bass and viola, with saxes and clarinet, keyboards and piano, caressed drums and some arrangements that sometimes masked the song. until his first words placed the audience, which then applauded.

And in a good bunch of Serrat pieces with his guitar, not necessarily musically, yes to fix that image of the kid who started when refrigerators were cabinets with an ice bar.

I did not suspect then that it would eat the world even in metaverse times.

I fell

, the audience sang, swayed and it was clear that looking tenderly is easier than writing about love as Serrat has done, in the same way that the environmentalism of soflama withered in comparison with

or

, where the Palau once again realized the ugliness of times that have filled the sea with corpses and plastic, as he recalled presenting them on a winter night with almost spring temperatures.

But for once, the ugly stayed at the door in what was an emotional parenthesis that could almost be measured on the

The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, at the beginning of the concert, accompanied by his wife, Begoña Gómez, and the Foreign Minister, José Manuel Albares.Albert Garcia

The repertoire exceeded twenty songs, with slight differences between the three Barcelona concerts (including

for example).

In the background, details of little importance given the oceanic nature of the show, a generous walk through a career longer than the dictatorship that kept him in exile for a while in Mexico.

Each one must have missed some composition, but in the same way that counting stars in the sky leads to missing some, a repertoire tailored to each assistant would still have us there, with a Serrat without lumbars of such reverence to thank each and every one of the applause, much more nourished than in his concert on Tuesday.

Like those ovations that

unleashed , more than a hymn, which it is, a love song;

that emotion that overwhelmed him presenting and singing

under the ominous presence of a prison window that did not detract from Miguel Hernández's beauty when he wrote a poem for his wife and son, both hungry while he was dying in prison.

Or that feeling of chill typical of

a delicate and human portrait of loneliness in the feminine singular.

But on the other hand, joy, essential in good farewells, was served by

, which was, of course, a

sung by the public and prelude to the exciting

, when everyone was Serrat singing it.

He, much fuller than in his first farewell concert in Barcelona, ​​jokingly said that he had failed the public by not crying, an impossible thing while playing

as almost closure of his live career.

Because later, alone on stage, on a stool that he barely used during the night, he thanked his family, friends like Salvador Escamilla, Quico Sabater and Joan Ollé and the music for everything they had given him.

He began to interpret

until he had to change it because, he said, it didn't work.

He changed it and now a seminal song from 1965 closed his career and a concert that was much more than a concert, because last night Sant Jordi celebrated the passage of time and the things that make us remember what in our lives has remained attached to yesterday.

And he did it with an unusual mixture of joy, containment, tears, evocations, awareness of old age and the pride of his audience for being part of something as intangible and solid as having followed Serrat in his concerts, on his records, in his melodies. in his letters.

He has managed to get rid of singing, name of his tour, live and now he will only do it for his intimates.

For the others, the beginning of an abstinence remains that will have no end, but thanks to how Serrat said goodbye to him, he had a principle to cling to.

A new era begins.

Excellent news when gray hair is combed.

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