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Rating: Diamanda Galas, if you hear her even just once, you will not forget. A voice that expresses all the depths of the human soul, and again, a voice that screams the torments of hell on earth, and again, a voice capable of spanning four octaves with equal power, clarity, and darkness together. ""Diamanda Galas"", someone said, " is not for everyone", so difficult, intense, and indigestible are many of her works (the splendid "Vena Cava" above all, yet on the edge of unlistenability). "but everyone should listen to her".
Diamanda Galas is a true artist, not just a singer, she is a contradictory and complex artist, who, like all great artists, knows how to shake the deepest part of a person's soul. After canceling the summer date in Bologna, with a fond thought to the Italian audience, Diamanda returned to Italy for two theater dates, where she presented her show "Guilty guilty guilty", songs and ballads of love and murder. Ballads of death. This is the utmost pop that Diamanda grants you. The theater is packed, the lights go out, and the stage is colored blood red (and what other color, otherwise?), and Diamanda enters, dressed for the evening, long black hair, like a diva from bygone times. She sits inside the grand piano and begins to sing "I am empty/without you babe..." it is a catacombal, absolute blues, the voice is deep, then it rises to shrill highs that pierce the ears. But after all, could the blues be less than this? In short, when singing about heartache, it cannot be done lightly, and Diamanda knows how to express within herself all the world's suffering, and in a manner that terrifies. The songs follow one another, and I don't even know the titles, because the blues, I mean the real one, the one that has something Luciferian, mocking, one that contemplates while laughing at human distress, who wrote it? Everyone or no one. The intensity of Diamanda Galas's interpretation is extraordinary, some say it is as if she were Callas back from hell, but for me, she is Medea, she is the womb of the earth, she is something unique. And her voice is a monster that devours her throat, it is a marvel and a curse. She leaves everyone stunned.
The concert ends with a song by Edith Piaf, played with the malice and melancholy that her original interpreter would certainly have appreciated, and then the lady exits, waving. The audience begins to clap and shout her name, and then she, comes out and gathers the flowers thrown to her on stage, bows, and leaves. But the warmth of the audience is so great that she gifts us two more songs. The lights come back on, some people get up and leave, but the diehards remain shouting her name for ten long minutes. She is not a singer, she is a diva, and she must be desired. Then she comes out, bows, sits down, and starts the song from the beginning "I am empty/without you babe"... a boy in the audience, while she sings, shouts "we love you". And Diamanda, changes the last verse, and whispers ""I love you too". What a moment. What an artist. What a woman.
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