When the most absolute authenticity of love to music and the fight against adversities is dressed in elegant black, identity bears the name of Raphael, an artist whose return to the stage after six months of non -dear remoteness has sounded to a song to life.
And it is that Raphael, after a primary brain lymphoma was diagnosed at the end of last year, has stomped a stage and, for more inri (blessed), interpret nothing more and nothing less than 30 songs, as many as the times that the public has stood up to applaud him.
The Roman Theater of Mérida has seen its 2,000 years of age tremble when the Jienense, with only 82, has taken the stage to display his own history, that which has raised him to be, to continue being the one who places him every night as an eternal icon of music.
And it is that Raphael has returned and that is enough for tonight to have been his great night and the caveas of the Emeritense theater – in which there was no more soul – they have witnessed it together with an audience delivered, grateful, expectant and even a cristle.
Almost five minutes of applause when a concert has not yet begun say much about their recipient, and if there are another ten at the end, as has happened, the artist's name chisel in stone, especially when they arrive at an important time.
Possibly they could have been many more, but it has been Raphael himself who has ordered the concert; With those of the end he has not been able to send … the public of the Stone & Music Festival of Mérida has prevented it.
With an overwhelming voice, the artist has started his expected concert with 'La Noche', a song that is 58 years old that has given him his characteristic requirements of impetus, those vibrates that make the melody and voice move like a tide in the viewer's ears.
And in them he has stayed all night, like who decorates the balcony of his throat with feelings, and those that he has accompanied with his steps and his “challenging 'gestures always. They are not as energetic as those of before, the truth, but each of them is a page of the history of music.
In some songs, the most intimate of his repertoire, such as 'If you were not you', 'Master' and 'I will be born again', Raphael has sung sitting. Ten musicians – a outstanding piano – have wrapped him in this return in which the artist has sailed through his extensive ocean of works in which they have blown enough winds of vinyl.
'I am still that', 'I close my eyes', my great night', 'Sometimes letters arrive' and 'Let's talk about love', among others, they have allowed the public to get on that ship of yesteryear whose candles are almost intact.
Witnesses and present of this return – since the distance – have been some gods and goddesses of 'La Chanson', that French musical drink that has always accompanied the artist and those who pay tribute in his last work “yesterday … yet.”
His most intimate wink has been for Édith Piaf when playing 'Padam Padam', 'La Vie en Rose', 'Ja Ne Regrete Rien' E 'Hymn a l'Mor
With that same ship of life and music the Atlantic has crossed to stand the public with 'Nobody knows my suffer', from the Argentines Ángel Cabral and Enrique Diezo, and 'Thanks to life', of the Chilean Violeta Parra.
When it seemed that he put an end to two classics, 'being in love' and 'Amaame', Raphael's smile, present at all night, has been attached even more to give five icons: 'In living flesh', 'What no one knows', 'I am that', 'scandal' and 'as I love you'.
“In singing it flies, with its wings: harmony and eternity,” Rubén Darío wrote to describe – without meeting Raphael – what it means to sing with an open heart by those who sew with his voice the loom of the music.
