Rosalía kicked off this Monday night in Lyon the world tour of Lux with an ambitious, theatrical and at times dazzling show, which confirmed the magnitude of the turn undertaken with their latest album. Taking such a sophisticated and maximalist album live, a work built on endless contrasts, instruments, languages, references and drives, seemed laborious. The Catalan singer solved the test with authority in a first date that had something of a luxury general rehearsal for an already very solid and armed montage, although still with some visible seams. Rosalía will perform in Spain from the end of March to mid-April, with four concerts in Madrid in the middle of Holy Week and then another four in Barcelona, before continuing to tour Europe, the US and Latin America.
Rosalía had promised a concert very different from that of Motomamicapable of combining “experimentation, rigor and joy”. That was, broadly speaking, what could be seen at the LDLC Arena in the French city, a multipurpose auditorium attached to the Olympique de Lyon stadium. Lux It arrived on stage converted into a classically inspired pop ceremony, which looks at opera, ballet and the world of art while still being a great spectacle for the masses. Also to religion, although not in the form of the great emphatic liturgy that one might expect. Rosalía administered these signs with more lightness than expected: there were saints, conventual white and symbols of devotion, but without drowning the concert in solemnity.
The singer appeared on stage coming out of a box, turned into a motionless dancer, on a stage arranged in a semicircle and illuminated with light bulbs, as if it were an Italian theater. In the background, the decoration was the back of a painting, as if Rosalía were showing the back room of creation. The singer came out wearing a white chiffon dress and pink bra with a retro feel, as if it were a playful nod to Madonna’s famous bustier, but then she starred in multiple metamorphoses throughout the night: blessed and saint, cabaret dancer, artist’s muse, raver hallucinated, Lucifer’s apprentice and, in the end, a celestial creature with angel wings.
Lyon, a city unaccustomed to being kilometer zero for tours of this scale, functioned as a test bed. The chosen room, of intermediate size and capacity for 13,500 people, allowed volumes and transitions to be measured before the jump to larger venues: the next stop will be Paris, where Rosalía will perform on Wednesday and Friday in front of almost double the audience. The concert had the tension typical of a first night, with some very minor technical imbalances that did not tarnish the whole. Rosalía moved comfortably in that format, more collected than a stadium. He was able to get closer to the public, wander among the attendees and take advantage of a set designed to erase distances.
One of the great discoveries of the assembly was the moat, arranged in the shape of a Latin cross. At the intersection of its axes there were around thirty musicians in the format of a chamber orchestra, with strings, winds and percussions giving thickness to the device without turning it into a symphonic mass. The image reinforced the iconography of Luxbut it also had a pragmatic mission: to facilitate the singer’s circulation and create a more intimate relationship between Rosalía, the scene, the musicians and the public, with whom she interacted non-stop, always in a casual manner.
The repertoire was one of the unknowns of the night. The concert, which lasted just under two hours, clearly focused on Luxalthough he left room for nods to the previous repertoire. The first part of the concert served to present the new album with Sex, violence and tires, Relic o Divinize, interspersing a brief syncopated version of Thank YouDido’s anthem that conquered the charts in the late ’90s. Porcelainwith Rosalía standing on pointe and surrounded by the dancers of (LA)HORDE, the French collective responsible for the main choreography of the show, was one of the most powerful images of that initial block. Then it came My Christ cries diamondswith Rosalía in her most folkloric version.
After a first greeting to the audience in strong French, the concert changed temperature. Rosalía got rid of the white to enter the darkness. Dressed in black, with feather horns and the air of a creature from hell, she attacked Berghain, the letter of introduction Lux, in one of the most forceful sequences of the night that ended in a riotous electronic party, as already announced by his tremendous performance just a few days ago at the Brit Awards. From there, he built a bridge towards Motomami con Just in case, fame, The Versace combi y early in the morning. At that moment it became clear that Lux It was not going to delete the previous disk, but rather merge with it. The evil willon the other hand, was conspicuous by its absence: unexpectedly, given the direction the night was taking, Rosalía did not perform any of the songs from her second album.
The third act began with a flamenco cajon solo while the French audience clapped at the wrong time. They followed him The redeemerrescued from its debut Los Angeles; an unexpected version of Can’t Take My Eyes Off You; Sauvignon blancon the piano with Llorenç Barceló, and a sensational The jugular. The most successful moment of this section was The pearla big fan favorite and perhaps the best choreographic number of the night, with Rosalía undressing until she becomes a Venus de Milo. Just before, the singer had entered a confessional with one of her dancers to evoke one of those “pearls” that the song mentions—narcissistic and unpresentable types—in a comic segment destined to become a fixed ritual of the tour.
The final stretch returned the assembly to direct contact with the public. In God is a stalkerRosalía advanced among the attendees in a kind of secular procession, microphone in hand, collecting reliquaries and signing autographs. Then they came The rumba of forgiveness y Cuuuutealready with an air of denouement, before the last section recovered part of the most recognizable punch of his repertoire with last night (his 2020 duet with Bad Bunny), sponge cake y Desperate. The closure, with Magnoliasreduced the party drive to leave a more suspended final image.
The concert confirmed that this tour will propose something more than a simple relay of imagery. Rosalía has found a way to reconcile the ambition of large format with an unexpected feeling of closeness. Opera with reggaeton, the refined with the mischievous, the total artist with the girl next door. The first night did not clear up all the unknowns, but it did clear up the main one: Lux works on stage. And not as a mere literal translation of the album, but as the articulation of his character in a broader framework, capable of absorbing almost all of his previous incarnations. On the tour of Luxthe different Rosalies no longer follow one another: they finally begin to coexist.