Shereen Ali - Trinidad Guardian
There were many high points in last Saturday’s Champs in Steel Plus concert, staged by Pan Trinbago Inc at the Queen’s Park Savannah, Port-of-Spain.
Among them was the masterful performance by the young Helon Francis, who is a music student at UTT and who had earlier won the Young King Calypso Monarch on January 25 after he impressed the audience with his rendition of The Real Bandits.
He sang Real Bandits on Saturday night, and it was both lyrically strong and performed with class and a graceful, effortless confidence on the stage. He commanded the stage intellectually, musically and creatively in a way the soca “party” artists simply did not. And he wrote the song himself. This might be this generation’s answer to David Rudder.
The pan performances were exhilarating, energetic, and entertaining, but in some cases, the heightened volume and frequency of furious crescendos and various musical party tricks intended to raise excitement levels for a Panorama audience outweighed the musicality and art of the compositions, at least to this listener..
...A three-hour concert would have made for a better, tighter, more dramatic show. Perhaps we need to hire professional, experienced show managers instead of leaving this critical element to staff in Pan Trinbago or the NCC.
Replies
To sit in a show for five hours and fifteen minutes is punishment,when you consider the age group of the patrons