Rosalia, Somerset House, review: a global superstar in the making
On a stage set in the courtyard of a Georgian neoclassical building looming over the River Thames, a young flamenco singer arched her back, threw her right arm over her head in a gesture of exaggerated triumph. She then unleashed an extraordinary, melismatic flow of shifting notes that drew on Spanish and Middle Eastern history and brought it into the 21st Century pop charts. Rosalía Vila Tobella’s boundlessly confident, thrillingly staged and rapturously received London show was a chance for British fans to catch up with a global superstar in the making.
“I remember the first time I was in this city,” Rosalía told her beguiled audience. “I was 16, I came here to study English. You can hear it didn’t work.” Which was modest nonsense, of course. Her English is almost certainly way better than most Londoners’ Spanish, only exotically enhanced by heavily accented vowels and consonants. But crucially she sings in her native tongue and performs in a style rooted in her Catalan musical heritage.
The 25-year-old from Barcelona has studied flamenco since she was a child, achieving fame in Spain on TV and in musical theatre, dancing and singing in traditional styles. Her unlikely international breakthrough, though, has followed a creatively bold blend of handclapping percussive rhythms and Moorish-inflected melodies with modern dance production styles. Her break out album, El Mal Querer, colours flamenco’s narrative melodrama with R’n’B, hip hop and experimental digital inflections, creating a lean, stripped-back base of sparkling electronica.
Crucially, Rosalía has kept flamenco at the core, rather than allowing it to be subsumed as a cultural flavouring into generic pop tropes. She may have made a commercial impact with the sleekly choreographed big budget video for slinky hit Malamente but her sky-high melodies, heel-clicking moves and melodramatic swagger remain flamenco through and through.
Even when she blends her voice with vocoder and autotune effects, the tone retains ripe humanity, so melodious it sounds a million miles from the kind of mumbling nursery rhyme sing-song effect increasingly common in modern pop. Her closeness to her folk roots was demonstrated when she performed a traditional song “taught to me by my father” in a stripped back a capella style, her voice bursting with vivid passion.
This year, Korean bands have played to enraptured teens in Britain’s stadiums and arenas. If further evidence were needed of the globalisation of pop, here was a Spanish star holding a hip London audience utterly spellbound. As a single percussionist added a fast-moving rhythm, the crowd began stamping on the courtyard’s cobbles. By halfway through the concert, Rosalía was leading the audience in exultant chants of “Ole! Ole!” English has always been the lingua franca of pop but, faced with the challenge of music that simply needs no translation, is its grip beginning to loosen?
Rosalía’s costume of flamboyantly ruffled top and sleek skin-tight shorts essayed the same mix of traditional and modern you find in her music. Movement is key to her performance, and six white clad dancers surrounded her, demonstrating tightly drilled routines that at times froze to become dramatic tableaux vivants or slowed down with an exaggerated style verging on theatrical mime. By contrast, a single musician playing percussion, keyboards and triggering backing tracks looked rather isolated in the corner.
The star interacted so cleverly and apparently spontaneously with pre-recorded elements, I look forward to a time when Rosalía’s production budget can stretch to bringing an actual band on the road. In front of 1500 new admirers in London, she performed with an intensity that switched from near tears to infectious laughter, one moment apparently overwhelmed, the next imperiously in control. You don’t need subtitles to translate this kind of emotion. Rosalía is a welcome demonstration of the universality of music. I can’t see anything stopping her rise to the status of superestrella.
