Polina Gagarina burst into tears in front of the audience

How it looked

Without unnecessary flirting with modesty. A two-level stage, a podium, a second stage, three air lifts, five screens mainly for close-ups and a video wall for more complex tasks. Almost all the vertical parts of the large and small stages were also turned into screens, which sometimes gave what was happening a three-dimensional effect and even the illusion of weightlessness. In the midst of this hi-tech are four musicians, a dozen dancers and the singer herself.

If they wanted to make the beginning of the show pompous, then the idea was embodied on a grand scale. In front of the white curtain, another screen was lowered and a video intro was shown on it with frames in which Polina, as a child, begins to sing and gradually turns into a popular singer. “Star Factory”, “Eurovision”, enthusiastic fans, tears in the eyes of the artist … The buzz in the hall is growing, the first verse “Forever” Polina performs behind the curtain, in the chorus it falls, and the audience sees the pop diva in a lush silver outfit against the backdrop of fake abundance.

The show quickly picks up, if not a hurricane, then more than a dynamic pace. Four albums, each of which had rather loud hits, as a whole, make it possible to compile a very boring set list, where sentiment, polished pop and dance beats keep the audience in a constant tone. In addition, the resources of the directors looked like bottomless pockets of magicians. In the first third of the concert, it seemed as if the further course of events was more or less clear, when new surprises suddenly appeared.

The song “Inhale” is suitable material for a dance number, but when it turns out that the floor of the main stage is equipped with moving surfaces and the ballet participants begin to move not quite according to the laws of physics, the very combination of music and dance breaks away from stereotypes a little.

“Disarmed” will be performed on a small stage, and four huge fabric canvases are added to all screens, on which projections of the singer are placed in full growth. In this entourage, the reasons to complain about the fact that in the sports arenas the artist is somewhere out there and of a tiny size have clearly diminished. Bracelets with remote-activated flashlights (volunteers give them to each spectator) are not a new trick, to put it mildly, but it still works flawlessly both for Polina and for the ColdPlay stadium tour.

The use of child labor is a controversial undertaking, but few people are left indifferent. At the last show, Polina brought her now fifteen-year-old son onto the stage, and now it’s the turn of her six-year-old daughter. Mia is still too young a person to be entrusted with a separate number, but in the “Lullaby”, performed by her mother, a sweet girl in a white dress, of course, fit perfectly. At first, mother and daughter were sitting on the stairs, just like Alla and Christina on “Song-83”, and then they moved to a small stage, into the very sea of ​​​​lights. In general, naive and cute, as in all cases when children are on stage.

The punchy false ending from “Drama No More” and “Show Over” could have been the ending, but the screen went down again. Under the footage of the backstage chronicle and concert cutting, the singer thanked the audience and expressed the hope that she made someone happier that evening. Then Polina again appears on the small stage, where, against the backdrop of demonic-red illumination, she performs Tsoev’s “Cuckoo”. Further, with a children’s choir, – the final “Heaven in the Eyes”. The audience was at odds with the feeling that they had seen and heard even a little more than enough. And absolutely all fourteen thousand spectators were once again surprised how much strength and voice can be in such a fragile girl. They say that Polina performed with a leg injury, which did not prevent her from almost flying between floors and stages in frightening high heels.

pros

The inevitable pauses for changing costumes and the singer’s desire to talk influenced the volume of the set list, making it not the longest, but the audience was not deprived of emotions in terms of emotions. Moreover, different emotions were offered. From touching, albeit a bit banal stories about a dream that the singer has been striving for since childhood, to some blockbuster episodes. When a real SUV plays the role of the physical part of the installation with a giant interchange on the screen, and the singer herself rises above the stage, blazing terribly in Ramstein, even the unimpressive inhabitants of the VIP compartment had a chance to be impressed.

Musically, Polina is probably what the singer Valeria was in the nineties, that is, a fashionable little thing that brings pop music made with fantasy to the masses. Nowadays, it is, of course, much more difficult to be fashionable, but Polina still succeeds a lot.

Minuses

During the action, the singer turned into a real disco diva several times, but the audience did not arrange a wild rave. The reason is very banal. The people are simply hindered by phones, combined with the desire to capture everything around and themselves loved ones. But if such attachment to gadgets is treated by other people outside of concert halls, then it is better, of course, for artists to deal with songs.

The desire to perform “Cuckoo” at the concert is quite understandable. Almost a folk song, for which, moreover, I almost had to fight in court. The long-term conflict between Polina Gagarina and Olga Kormukhina was overgrown with a mass of details and sometimes even presented almost as a battle for the proper disposal of Tsoi’s legacy.

Olga Kormukhina recorded a cover of “Cuckoo” in 2011, and four years later Polina Gagarina released her version as a soundtrack to the film “Sevastopol”. The arrangements and vocal techniques turned out to be surprisingly similar, and Kormukhina sued. Full-blown litigation became possible when copyright law was amended with arrangements and the process turned into a battle of experts.

As a result, senior state experts and laureates of various awards found eleven matches in two arrangements, which probably concluded in favor of the fact that Gagarina’s version, later than the release date, was not very original. But the court listened to Igor Krutoy, who left the “Cuckoo” from Gagarina the status of an independent work. Probably, in this situation there is a reason to complain about the battle not so much notes as influences, nevertheless, the court denied Kormukhina’s claim, and Gagarina can still dispose of her cover at her own discretion.

However, the court decision is not subject to musical logic, and there is not very much of the latter in Polina’s intention to sing “Cuckoo” at the concert. Filming a big sovereign film project, which was “Sevastopol”, the producers of the film, of course, also counted on the younger audience familiar to cinemas. Perhaps that is why Gagarina was engaged to perform Tsoi’s song, although it has long been known that fanatical adherence to the interests of marketing does not always coincide with common sense.

At the concert, Polina and “Cuckoo” in her performance are deprived of the film context, and it immediately becomes clear: this song does not suit the singer at all, it sounds extremely strange during the show with content that does not correspond to Tsoi’s lines at all, in general, it plays the role of a tail from another mare. In our music industry, the question “why?” in its intensity, it often corresponds to the traditional Russian “who is to blame?” and “what to do?”. And while all this without clear answers. Well, except that people like it.

Party Phrase

“I’m going to cry now, but I can’t, I still have to sing for two hours,” Polina said already at the beginning of the show under the first wave of applause. There were tears in the end. But without losing control of the situation.