Golan in Bloomfield, last night (Photo: Nir Amitai)
Eyal Golan filled Bloomfield Stadium with 30,<> fans last night for the second time in one weekend and proved once again that when it comes to size, he has no competitors in Israeli music. True, others performed at Hayarkon Park and Sammy Ofer in Haifa and sold many tickets to series of shows at Rishon LeZion Amphitheater, but these are usually one-time flashes. Golan is currently the only artist in Israel who can create two Bloomfield events each summer and fill them, which won't reduce his audience's appetite when it comes to invitations to weddings and other private events. Golan is the only one (except, perhaps, for Shlomo Artzi) that such large masses of audiences continue to follow him for many years in good and bad, no matter what is said about him and what is published about him in the media.
And as befits a high-volume stadium, it was a show of enormous magnitude, expensive, invested, eye-popping Las Vegas-style. Golan took to the stage accompanied by the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, his band of musicians with maximum ensemble, a bouzoukas ensemble that included a player specially flown in from Greece and the best local bouzoukas, a colorful dance troupe and a children's band that joined the anthem "Melody". The series of artistic surprises was completed by his children, Aline and Liam, who each sang a song and joined their father in performing "When Another," the song written after his divorce from their mother, Ilanit Levy, whose excited face appeared on the screen while her daughter sang. Behind Golan, huge screens about 100 meters wide were built, the largest ever seen in Israel, with longitudinal screens projecting his picture, at the foot of the stage flames were repeatedly lit by flamethrowers, smoke cannons emitted tall cloud pillars, fireworks exploded in the sky and confetti of three kinds filled the space.
Golan in Bloomfield, last night (Photo: Nir Amitai)
If Israeli music had a football team, there is no doubt that Golan would be its captain. The love for popular sports has been part of his public personality since the beginning of his career. It is therefore natural for him to bring to the stage the trophy won by his beloved team Beitar Jerusalem only recently. It is natural for him to update the audience during the performance on the results of the youth team's match against Brazil at the World Cup in Argentina, which took place simultaneously with the performance, and to sweep the fans into rhythmic chants of "God to Israel." He himself was regularly updated on the headset, while singing, and reported to the crowd whenever the team scored a goal, "like in songs and goals," he said. With great enthusiasm, he announced, right in the middle of a performance of the huge hit "Hallucinating You Molly", that the team had risen to a gap of 4:2, an erroneous result, apparently due to the fact that Ofir Haim's pupils missed two kicks from 11 meters. As a kind of compensation, Haim Revivo, a friend and father of Roy Revivo, a member of the national team's squad, took the stage to hug him.
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Golan in Bloomfield, last night (Photo: Nir Amitai)
No less than 55 songs (yes, I counted) were performed last night in Bloomfield, in a two-and-a-half-hour show. It's an enormous amount of songs – it's amazing, by the way, that he can remember how they are all sung, even if the lyrics appear for him on promoters – a minority of which were heard at full length. True, the Mediterranean genre has always been dominated by the string system, designed to cram several songs into one sweeping piece, rhythmic or quiet. However, Golan and his music director Yaakov Lemay expanded the trend in this show, creating short and short performances of most of the show's songs. Huge hits, such as "You Touched My Heart", "The Heart on the Table", "String Sound", "Come Today", "Playing My Life" and "Another Reality", which other artists would celebrate with extended performances to savor with the audience, received partial performances lasting between one and two minutes, i.e. tick a V and move on to the next song. Four-minute ballads were reduced to two and a half, many songs in the show lasted from one and a half minutes to one minute and three-quarters.
The goal of this song compression is to get as much material as possible and give the audience a taste in a limited time of as many songs they like, in order to prevent fans from leaving the show complaining about big hits that Golan did not perform. After all, the Golan has a hundred big hits, and in order to sing them all, he has to perform for ten hours. And all this would be true if he had truly sung his best last night, and not left out huge hits like "Whoever believes is not afraid," "When You're With Him," "Friday Afternoon," "Time Will Tell," "All Dreams" and "A Few Days."
The result of this compression of songs is that you can't see the forest because of the trees. Because a song chases a song after a song, in order to keep the thrill threshold high all the time, the pleasure of enjoying a great song from start to finish is missed. And Golan has excellent songs that deserve this honor. In this respect, some will say that this show is a bit of a multiple-catch.
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Golan in Bloomfield, last night (Photo: Nir Amitai)
But all this does not change the fact that technically, Eyal Golan is the best singer who has ever been here. The intensity, precision, range, curling, ability to produce tone from the throat, the ability to nail the hairs of the hands with the penetrating sound. This is a singer who records most of his songs on first take in the studio. The second take is usually for the peace of mind of the music producer, and usually at the end the first is used. A singer whose instruments are tuned by his throat.
As befits his status as an all-Israeli singer and part of the mainstream, Golan did not forget to mention near the beginning of the performance the three soldiers killed yesterday, dedicated a song to their memory and prayed for the safety of IDF soldiers and security forces. National singer to the end.
In recent years, Golan, despite the affair associated with his name, has managed to maintain his place in the spitz of local success. He shares this summit with names such as Omer Adam, Idan Reichel, Hanan Ben Ari and Shlomo Artzi. The pair of shows in Bloomfield this past weekend strengthen his strong position, and alongside the new and successful album "2023" keep him at the top of the Israeli ranks.
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