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Written in fRoots issue 329/330, 2010
 

DVD

MARINA ROSSELL
Gran Teatre Del Liceu De Barcelona (DVD)
World Village WV 498039 (2010)

Marina Rossell is an esteemed Catalan singer and songwriter, with a long performing and recording career that began in the mid-1970s and who is still in fine voice. The centrepiece of this DVD is the one and a half hours of her concert at the big, ornate Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona in 2008. Twenty-six songs, accompanied by her quartet plus for some numbers guests: a big group of traditional percussion players, two players of the tenora (the long keyed shawm of Catalunya’s sardana-playing coblas), a youth choir and Basque trikitixa star Kepa.
      It’s a good idea, though, to watch first the included half-hour TV documentary in which she travels around Catalunya exploring the stories and writers of the Catalan sardanas and other songs that were popular in the early 20th century, before Franco, some now nearly forgotten, others still in the popular consciousness, which with elegance and passion she’s bringing into the post-Franco present day, in their original form or sometimes adapting the lyrics. We get a sense of her charm, an illumination of the songs she sings, and so an entrée into what’s going on at the concert and some understanding of why the theatre is packed. (The audio comes in 5.1 surround, so the suitably equipped listener’s sofa can, I suppose, be virtually relocated to join that standing-ovation Gran Teatre audience.)
      www.worldvillage.com


© 2010 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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