Bewilderment and daring at the Live Music Market

VicThe management of the Mercat de Música Viva de Vic had fueled the mystery by announcing a special opening show: Non concerto, whose stage director, Lucia del Greco, had not wanted to reveal any details. Only the purpose had emerged, to raise questions about what live music is or should be, and the musical material, the album Una lunghissima ombra (2025) by the Italian musician Andrea Laszlo De Simone. The result lived up to expectations, because with elegance and respect for the music it shot at the waterline of live music: the pact according to which the audience admits that what sounds is the result of the action of people playing an instrument. Daring and bewilderment at the same time in a magnificent staging.

"I am very eager to discover what the show proposes," said the Minister of Culture, Sònia Hernández Almodóvar, in one of the speeches prior to the concert at L'Atlàntida. The first thing to be revealed were the silhouettes of some musicians backlit and the shadows of others behind a screen. In Non concerto, a name that does not hide the omen, Del Greco evoked both the idealism of the myth of the cave and the illusionism of shadow theater. The idea is the music, the most important thing, and it sounded wonderful, doing justice to the author's chamber pop: harmonic depth, melancholic melodic beauty, as only the Italians know how to do, electronic textures, string and brass arrangements... On stage there were sixteen musicians without autonomy of movement, because they were distributed on different platforms that some operators moved from time to time, even making them disappear. The musicians as puppets at the service of a higher entity: the concert! The music captivated, expanded the emotional power, and that's enough, isn't it? But looking at the stage, Del Greco's proposal kept offering more or less subtle clues that made one think that it was all playback, including canned applause. Paradoxically, when the singer, who looked a lot like Andrea Laszlo De Simone, made it evident that he was not singing live, the doubt appeared: what if the game was precisely this, to make a deception evident, to make people believe that the others were indeed playing live? And once the idol breaks the pact, bewilderment arrives: why continue watching that which presented itself as false? Well, because it was fascinating.

Non concerto also brings together scenic, visual, and choreographic solutions characteristic of concerts that Del Greco arranges, fleeing from parody. It prefers a delicate irony and, therefore, is more plausible. In this concert simulation, the only thing missing is direct communication with the audience: no "good evening, Vic", nor "you are the best audience of the tour". But there is a stage box with a transparent curtain, smoke, lights treated like curtains of water, dance gestures, glances between the musicians... The success, the trick, is that every resource makes sense and many stage directors would pay to use them with such intelligence. The music also helps: good idea, not choosing experimental music for this experiment that ends with the song Non è reale and a white smoke like an angelic cloud invading the stage and also spilling over into the stalls. From the idealism of the initial cave to the heaven of emotions. Because Non concerto moves you... even though the music is not live. And at the same time, it seems like a determined defense of live music.