09.27.2010 23:00 Clock
The deeper meaning
Leonard Cohen at the TUI Arena in Hannover
Something man needs to keep warm: Leonard Cohen has occurred on Monday evening at the TUI Arena in Hannover.
Leonard Cohen on Monday evening at the TUI Arena.
© Martin Steiner
The external circumstances - perfect. Outside, the weather is just perfect to listen inside to Leonard Cohen. From the CD or most of the old LP including built fireplace crackles, with soft cushions on the sofa, with drip candle, rain against the window, red wine by the glass and all the other clichés of the younger Melancholiegeschichte.
Now what if the old man with the basement voice appears in person in the city? Does the big cuddle happen in the collective? It is enough to warm. Around 5,500 people have risen up through the November weather in the TUI Arena, a multipurpose hall with cool architecture, under the floor boards is typically the permanent ice of the matches of the Hannover Scorpions. The stage background is decorated with a warm illuminated curtain as comfortable as it is here just the residual heat to generate this evening music and poetry. The primary responsibility for the latter appear shortly after 20 clock, he has a suit and a hat pulled low over his face, an outfit that seems to have been invented just for him. He is the prototype of the mysterious stranger in every shadow film of the fifties.
For the first time heard his incredible voice, the secrecy and security holds, wisdom and dignity, and now the audience is enveloped several hours as a Flauschdecke. "Dance Me to the End of Love" is a 25 year old piece that comes in his pleading lines like a love song, therefore, but the Holocaust is, by musicians who were forced into the Nazi death camps to play, while their fellow prisoners murdered were. But this evening is not to be dominated by dark lyrics, it is so leisurely and atmospheric festival that will celebrate the 76-year-old since last week with people. Much he does not talk with the audience, but he says: ". I do not know when we come here again over, but I promise you we will give you this day all we have"
Leonard Cohen at the TUI Arena
[Click on ink above for more pictures. Gallery - 10 pictures]
He is singing again and again to his knees, and he bows to almost humiliating for the applause, he is grateful for the gratitude that resonates in the cheers of his audience. Then he raises his voice again to raise with this bass hum is not a good word indeed. He seems to have become even deeper when Cohen does so, he has 80 of the first man who can talk over great distances with elephants. With "Bird on a Wire," "Is not no Cure for Love", the joyful applause after the first notes of "Chelsea Hotel No. welcomed. 2 "or even the newer" Born in Chains "he wanders through his over 40-year career as a musician, tells his bittersweet stories that celebrate often more evocative than singing his poetry, sentences, carved for fans since the seventies in stone: With the lines "There's a crack in everything, that's how the light get's in," he heralds "Anthem", then it is also in the hall after an hour and a half break and the light comes on. Not because the end is. But pause.
Cohen has a big and great band. Unexcited types who know their craft and relaxed in the airy and wonderful, but always show peppered with clever details arranged songs in extensive solos allowed. Above all, the Spanish guitarist Javier Mas. It delivers on various guitars elegantly flowing melodies. Dino Soldo on the saxophone weaves buttery soft runs in the songs. And the two singers, the sisters Hattie and Charley Webb, the band's sound completely bring to float. But fear not: The man with the hat on the microphone thing then grounded again.
That the 5500 people in the room on the nostalgia cloud dahinschwelgen, he can not however prevent it steps up its after the interval even further: to "Suzanne" and "So Long Marianne", the Canadian Newcomer 1967, one of the most influential and stylish most influential representatives of the young singer / songwriter scene has made, probably everyone in the room an image, an experience, a mood, or any other memory in the mind. This "I'm Your Man," "Tower of Song," "The Partisan" and the often interpreted Waltz "Hallelujah". And then, after so many stories for so many small illuminations in the dark corners of life, and after a few encores long celebration, It could not be far away from the midnight hour back in the Hanoverian reality. November weather is outside. But that's okay.
[Uwe Janssen]