“Welcome to my living room,” Natalia Lafourcade says at one point from the stage of Carnegie Hall. With that greeting, 20 songs from her repertoire, and some famous friends, Lafourcade throws an intimate party in the hallowed New York City auditorium, obviously touched and a bit amazed that she is the sold-out featured artist of the night.
Though Lafourcade has had an international pop star career and many hits since she was a teenager, the last ten years have seen her in a particularly rich and noncommercial phase of her career. Lafourcade has won the most Latin Grammys for a female artist, among other accolades. The results of her long career were beautifully represented in October 2022 amid the gold and velvet lushness of Carnegie.
After a wordless piano introduction, Natalia Lafourcade gently eases into the night on the heartbeat bass of “De Todas Las Flores”, the title of her last studio album. The song is a great way to start the show. It builds in strength, but even as it builds in intensity, its swing remains gentle, like a bossa nova classic.
The easygoing sunniness of “El Lugar Correcto (The Right Place)” again wraps Lafourcade’s lovely voice with an understated accompaniment of piano, electric guitar, and a chorus. “Sorry if I cried, cried, cried while dancing / I had old pains to deal with from that past / Then I returned to that necessary silence / To hear the heart speak the truth / And the right place is now.”
With “Caminar Bonito (Walk Beautifully)”, Lafourcade adds to the canon of slow, romantic boleros. She raises the show’s energy level with the hip-shimmying samba rhythms of “Mi Manera de Querer (My Way of Loving)” and “Canta La Arena (Song of the Beach)”.
Natalia Lafourcade’s first guest is David Byrne, who reads some translated lyrics to “Muerte (Death)”, thanking death for waking us up to the joys of life. Here, as on the album version, the music reaches an ecstatic, chaotic crescendo, literally and figuratively celebrating life. In the actual concert (which I attended), Lafourcade does a courtly flowing dance across the stage in a voluminous black dress along with Byrne. “I give thanks to death / For teaching me to live / For inviting me to go out / To decipher my luck well / Taking my hand firmly / Filling it with life.”
After the celebratory song, a lone clarinet freefalls into the cumulus-cloud embrace of the big band bolero “Cien Años (100 Years)”. Lafourcade jumps into the bouncy folkloric cumbia of “Lo Que Construimos” from the expansive sounds of an old mambo ballroom.
Jorge Drexler comes to the stage for “Ya No Vivo Por Vivar”, a duet Natalia Lafourcade does on her record Un Canto Por Mexico, Volume One. Here, the hyper-romantic song made popular originally by the singer-songwriter Juan Gabriel is made into that rare animal, the playful and sexy love track. The amiable Drexler brings out the lightheartedness, and both singers come close to laughing as their intricate and fleeting words tumble over each other like the famous Brazilian superstars Tom Jobim and Elis Regina on “Aguas de Março”.
That leads to the delicate “Alma Mia (My Soul)” from the second of her two sublime Musas albums, where she played with the acoustic guitar duo Los Macorinos. Here, this song about finding a soulmate is a quiet bolero, filled out with additional instrumentation but retaining the sense of wonder and joy. “If I found a soul like mine / How many secret things would I tell him? / A soul that, when looking at me, without saying anything / He told me everything with his eyes / A soul that intoxicates with soft breath / That when kissing me he felt what I feel.”
Then comes one of the emotional highlights of the concert: 94-year-old Omara Portuondo enters to sit alongside Lafourcade in grand rattan chairs. The regal but delicate nonagenarian singer shows she has lost nothing of her charisma and ability to deliver the emotion and beauty of a great tune. The duo sing “Tu Me Acumbraste (You Got Me Accustomed)” an old song of lost love. Despite the sad lyrics, the luminescent singers seem to buoy each other as they enjoy the narrator’s incisive remembrances. The song is the definition of the Portuguese word sodade, which is an appreciation of a beautiful sadness, a nostalgia that brings both a smile and a tear.
After Portuondo put a smile on everyone’s face, she left the stage, leaving Natalia Lafourcade to tackle her hit “Hasta La Raíz” with its traditional rhythm strummed on an acoustic guitar and built up layer by layer of instrumentation.
Then the ensemble launches into another huapanga song, an extended version of the anthem to her home state, “Mi Tierra Veracruzana”. Like on other versions of the music, the lively rhythm from Veracruz starts with a solo charanga, a ukele-like string instrument. Percussion comes in, and instruments keep building on the ode to the culture and natural beauty of Veracruz. This version allows the instrumentalists to do a series of solos and two dancers with wooden shoes to clack out the folkloric rhythms.
While live albums are often thought of as wild and wooly explorations of an artist’s catalog – long on raw energy but with less polish than a recording studio. However, Natalia Lafourcade’s album is an immaculate recording that one can quickly grasp. The Carnegie Hall audience is reverently quiet and enthusiastic, with applause at the end of each song. Listeners should love this chance to luxuriate in Natalia Lafourcade’s beloved songs and spend an intimate evening with this gracious spirit.