Monday: Vila Isabel

5. Vila Isabel had a marvelous musical theme based on the life of the famous Brazilian composer Noel Rosa. But they suffered from a terrific problem that was NOT their fault - the sound system failed on the Avenida! I've never heard this happen before! The weird thing was, it wasn't a total failure (I think the parade would have delayed if there were a total sound failure, which would have been better for Vila]. It sounded like most of the microphones around the bateria, and on the sound truck, lost power or were unplugged or something. At any rate, all we could hear was a strangely throbbing, muted first surdo, and the singer. That was IT. No cavaquinho! No second surdo! No caixas! No bateria! It was very bizarre. The surdo also kept changing in volume, swelling suddenly and then nearly disappearing (I wonder if the apparently lone functional bateria microphone was being hurriedly moved around - eventually it started picking up one 2nd surdo too, and, very distantly, a lone weak caixa.) It sounded really horrible. Bear in mind that this is what most of the Vila paraders were hearing, and it was awful for them - they could barely tell if they were singing in time with the singer.
Anyway, the sound problem lasted 24 minutes before it was finally fixed. It was so frustrating, and was affecting the parade so badly, and was so clearly NOT Vila's fault, that it reportedly brought the president of the escola to tears. Vila actually managed to pull off a very nice parade anyway, and the second half of the parade regained energy once the problem was fixed. But the Vila directors are furious and are lodging a complaint with LIESA so that they won't be penalized for problems that were related to the poor sound. (I can't see how this couldn't have affected quite a lot of the judged parade components, including the porta-bandeira's dance, the commissao de frente's dance, the bateria, and the singing of the paraders.)