Updating her material, singer Sosa still glows

By James Reed, Globe Correspondent, 9/30/2003

Mercedes Sosa
With Marta Gomez
At: Berklee Performance Center, Sunday

Draped with a peach-colored wrap, Argentine singer Mercedes Sosa offered Sunday night's crowd at the Berklee Performance Center some vibrant glimpses of why she used to be called ``la Mecha Sosa'' (``the Sosa Wick''). Her voice can ignite even the most understated of songs.

Like her US counterpart and friend Joan Baez, Sosa has moved slightly away from overtly political material in recent years. That's not to say she has moved on; in concert she still reads aloud the solemn poems of Chilean Violeta Parra before segueing into Parra's ``Gracias a la Vida.'' That song - a signature piece for Sosa and for Latin America's New Song movement - became an anthem in the 1970s for anyone with a cause or just a reverence for life. With her expressive delivery and bare-bones guitar accompaniment, Sosa proved again on Sunday she is its definitive interpreter.

Sosa still sings her classics, but she has wisely adopted more songs by contemporary performers such as Argentine Fito Paez, whose ``Un Vestido y un Amor'' she sang with lovelorn remorse.

Much has been made of Sosa possessing ``the voice of the Americas,'' and at 68, it is a remarkable instrument. In her youth her voice could be bombastic; now it is nuanced, with more vibrato and with phrasing that suggests a survivor of the strife she has chronicled. While still forceful, her voice's intensity now feels charged more by romance, less by politics.

At times, the jazzed-up arrangements failed her, as when an added electronic melody on ``Como la Cigarra'' sank the song's emotional lyrics about exile into synthesized goo. But her ripened phrasing was the linchpin of the Ariel Ramirez/Felix Luna classic ``Alfonsina y el Mar.'' When Sosa stretched out the final words in a long sigh, it was as though she had become Alfonsina, the song's doomed heroine.

Marta Gomez, a popular young singer formerly of Boston, opened with a 30-minute set of smart, occasionally playful Latin jazz. She seemed appropriately nervous to be on the bill. ``I'm opening the concert for my idol, '' she told the audience.