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Madonna (Live) The Confession Tour

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Madonna: The Confessions Tour

The Confessions Tour is the second live album by American singer and songwriter Madonna. It was released on January 26, 2007 by Warner Bros. Records. Directed by Jonas Åkerlund, the album ch... Read all The Confessions Tour is the second live album by American singer and songwriter Madonna. It was released on January 26, 2007 by Warner Bros. Records. Directed by Jonas Åkerlund, the album chronicles Madonna's 2006 Confessions Tour. It was recorded at Wembley Arena during the Lond... Read all The Confessions Tour is the second live album by American singer and songwriter Madonna. It was released on January 26, 2007 by Warner Bros. Records. Directed by Jonas Åkerlund, the album chronicles Madonna's 2006 Confessions Tour. It was recorded at Wembley Arena during the London dates of the tour, and was released in both CD and DVD format. The DVD contains the ent... Read all

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• Connections Featured in Somewhere Over the Rainbow (2014)
• Soundtracks Future Lovers/I Feel Love "Future Lovers" written by Madonna and Mirwais Ahmadzaï "I Feel Love" written by Donna Summer , Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte Performed by Madonna

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Madonna: The Confessions Tour streaming: where to watch online?

You can buy "Madonna: The Confessions Tour" on Amazon Video, Apple TV as download or rent it on Amazon Video, Apple TV online.

Filmed in its entirety at London's Wembley Arena during her worldwide sold-out 25-city Confessions Tour (2006's top-grossing tour world-wide), this concert film features songs from throughout the queen's career but largely focuses on Confessions On A Dance Floor.

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The Confessions Tour (Live) [Audio/Video Deluxe Version]

January 26, 2007 16 Songs, 1 hour, 24 minutes ℗ 2006 Warner Bros. Records Inc. for the U.S. and WEA International Inc. for the world outside the U.S.

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Madonna: The Confessions Tour

Confessions on a Dance Floor (2005) was Madonna’s heralded return to club music. Not only did the album resuscitate her record sales, debuting at #1 on the Billboard 200 and topping charts worldwide, its singles (“Hung Up”, “Jump”, “Sorry”, and “Get Together”) were among the most infections club hits of Madonna’s 25-year career. Altogether, Confessions on a Dance Floor proved that Madonna, approaching 50 years-old, is a vital force in the ever-expansive landscape of popular music. Buy that album. Her latest release, however…

The Confessions Tour follows on the release of I’m Going to Tell You a Secret (2006), which was a documentary about Madonna’s “Re-Invention” tour. Like its predecessor, The Confessions Tour is a lavish CD/DVD package. Instead of a documentary, the DVD on this set presents a full-length concert directed by Jamie King from Madonna’s Wembley Arena date. The CD contains 13 highlights from the show. Aside from over-saturating the market with three Madonna releases in two years, there’s a fundamental problem with the release of The Confessions Tour .

Experiencing recorded dance music in a club and hearing it rendered live in concert on a CD constitutes two very different experiences. The 4/4 beat that stimulates the body to dance sounds less dense in such a massive space like Wembley. This works against the The Confessions Tour since most tracks have a fast beats-per-minute count. If the beat is a bone, so to speak, there isn’t a lot of muscle cushioning it. The aural clarity and seamlessness of the songs on Confessions on a Dance Floor are also butchered on The Confessions Tour by zealous audience reactions. Enjoying propulsive tracks like “Hung Up” and “I Love New York” is difficult because of interminable vamps that are dotted by annoying hoots and hollers. Just what is everyone yelling about at the 00:42 mark during “Sorry”?

Such curiosities are answered on the DVD of The Confessions Tour . Whereas the CD is a superfluous “value add”, the DVD is thrilling entertainment, particularly for Madonna fans. Since Madonna is among the few artists to successfully and consistently exploit the visual medium to her benefit, it should surprise no one that The Confessions Tour is a stellar visual experience. Each song is dramatized and choreographed to within an inch of its life; therein lies Madonna’s most indispensable and enduring talent — dancing. The limbs that gave birth to a million “Madonna Wannabe’s” are stronger and more sinewy than ever. On The Confessions Tour Madonna is joined by a dozen or so dancers who narrowly escape injury during remarkable acrobatic dance sequences. Even more amazing is that Madonna breathlessly keeps pace with every one of them.

The stage design of The Confessions Tour gives Madonna and her “children” a decadent playground to frolic about. The moment she enters the stage inside a gargantuan mirror ball, understatement ceases to exist. Most notorious among Madonna’s grandiose gestures is her entrance from the stage floor cuffed to a gigantic crucifix posed like Jesus Christ, replete with a crown of thorns. After singing “Live to Tell”, Madonna descends the cross and warbles “Forbidden Love”. Accompanying her are male dancers who stand side-by-side in two’s, intertwining their arms and hands in obvious defiance to the cross. It’s an effective tableau .

Following a static-fueled montage of vintage Madonna videos, a DJ announces, “All right boys and girls, it’s time to get your dance shoes on. You’re listening to K UNT. (Get it?) It’s all Madonna, all the time”. The familiar bass line of “Disco Inferno” by The Trammps explodes with a chorus-line’s worth of disco dancers and roller skaters. Madonna emerges in a three-piece white suite à la John Travolta and sings “Music” over the sampled track. It’s gloriously fun, feckless, and tacky.

Less so are Madonna’s cold rearrangements of “Like a Virgin” and “Lucky Star”. The soulless Eurodisco beat fails to match the charm of the originals. The melodies are basically sung over chord progressions that bear little resemblance to the original arrangements. “Lucky Star”, for example, is paired with the track to “Hung Up”, itself a sampling of ABBA’s “Gimmie! Gimmie! Gimmie! (A Man After Midnight)”. The match is not made in heaven, though Madonna’s skin-tight, ABBA-esque jump suit is an amusing intertextualization.

But even the most rabid anti-Madonna listener or cynical music lover would find elements of The Confessions Tour impressive, whether the jaw-dropping talent of Madonna’s B-boys and girls, the awe-inspiring diligence of her lighting and sound crew, her rock-chick pose on “I Love New York”, or the audacity of her massive “fuck you” to George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Osama Bin Laden, and Condoleezza Rice on “Sorry”.

The oversaturation of recent Madonna product is ultimately what precludes The Confessions Tour from being wholly satisfying to anyone but the die-hard Madonna fan. How many people actually care to hear Madonna lead the audience in a three-minute call-and-response contest to the “Time goes by so slowly” refrain from “Hung Up”? Clocking in just under four hours, Madonna might as well be referencing the The Confessions Tour package.

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Madonna’s final celebration tour concert takes over copabacana beach in rio — here’s how to watch in the u.s..

The massive show will only be broadcast locally in Brazil on Saturday, May 4, but there are a few ways for those in the U.S. to stream it online.

By Danielle Directo-Meston

Danielle Directo-Meston

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Madonna is showing her appreciation for fans with a free concert on Saturday, May 4, at the Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro — the final stop of her Celebration Tour.

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At a Glance: How to Watch Madonna’s Celebration Tour in Rio Online

• When Saturday, May 4 at 5:45 p.m. PT/8:45 p.m. ET (9:45 p.m. local Brazil time)
• Channel TV Globo (Brazil)
• Stream online DirecTV , Sling (add-on required)
• More ways to watch online Globoplay (available at Appstore for Android on Amazon , Apple App Store )

Madonna’s free Celebration concert in Rio will only be broadcast locally in Brazil, including on the Brazilian streaming video-on-demand service Globoplay. Fans outside Brazil can livestream the big event online on a cable streaming service that carries TV Globo or through a Virtual Private Network (VPN).

Below, keep reading for more details on how to watch Madonna’s Celebration show in Rio online in the U.S., including for free.

How to Watch Madonna’s Celebration Concert in Rio: Date, Time, Channel

Madonna’s final Celebration Tour stop will take place at Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro on Saturday, May 4. It will air on the Brazilian channel TV Globo at 9:45 p.m. local time in Rio.

Stream Madonna’s Celebration Show in Rio: How to Watch in the U.S.

If you want to watch Madonna’s Rio concert outside of Brazil, you can tune into TV Globo at 5:45 p.m. PT/8:45 p.m. ET in the U.S. You can stream TV Globo on any live TV streaming service that carries the Brazilian channel, including DirecTV and Sling .

Already have a Globoplay account? There’s a way to access your service from outside of Brazil.

Get more details on how to watch TV Globo and other Brazilian channels in the U.S. below.

DirecTV Stream

You can watch Madonna’s concert in Rio on DirecTV when you add Brazilian programming (including the TV Globo channel) to a satellite or internet-based plan. New subscribers can stream for free with DirecTV’s five-day trial. For satellite subscribers, you can add international programming to a Basic or Preferred Choice base package ($27.99 to $59.99 per month plus tax). The BrazilianDirect add-on is an extra $29.99 per month and includes TV Globo, or you can get the standalone TV Globo channel add-on for $19.99 per month. For DirecTV subscribers connecting via internet, add Brazilian programming for just $30 per month on top of your existing cable TV streaming package. Learn more here. And for a limited time, eligible subscribers can save up to $240; learn more here .

Watch Madonna’s Celebration concert in Rio on TV Globo with Sling , which offers a free three-day trial when you add select Brazilian TV Pack plans (reg. $13.99 and up per month) to your streaming package. New subscribers save half off their first month of Sling, so you can stream Madonna’s show in Brazil starting at only $20 for the Orange plan (reg. $40 per month) that includes CNN, HGTV, ID, A&E, ESPN, Disney Channel and other networks. Other packages include the Blue tier ($22.50 for the first month, reg. $45 monthly) and the combined Orange & Blue package (reg. $60 monthly) that includes exclusive news and entertainment channels such as ABC, NBC, Fox, E!, FS1, FX and others.

For those who already have Brazil’s Globoplay streaming video-on-demand service, you can use a virtual private network (VPN) to access your account in the U.S. Plans start at $12.95 per month or $8.32 monthly with annual billing; learn more here .

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Madonna’s Celebration Tour pulls record 1.6M fans into the groove at Rio’s Copacabana

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More than a million music fans gathered at Brazil’s iconic Copacabana beach to prove their love to Madonna over the weekend.

The “Get into the Groove” and “Vogue” pop diva concluded her career-spanning Celebration Tour with a bang over the weekend, treating fans in Rio de Janeiro to a free beach concert on Saturday. “This really happened,” the singer reminisced in an Instagram video shared Sunday.

The Instagram clip shows an aerial view of attendees assembling on the sandy Brazilian strip, which stretches more than 2 miles along the coast. While some fans danced on the beach, others hosted house parties in nearby beachfront apartments and hotels, the Associated Press reported.

Madonna’s Celebration tour is a messy victory lap that needs more razzle-dazzle

Madonna brought her career-spanning Celebration tour to the Kia Forum for a night of hits, memories and grievances.

March 5, 2024

“This place is magic,” the 65-year-old singing icon said during her show, which also featured appearances from Brazilian artists Anitta and Pabllo Vittar.

An estimated 1.6 million people gathered for Madonna’s Celebration Tour finale, Brazilian outlet G1 reported, citing Rio City Hall’s tourism agency. The event was also broadcast on Brazilian network TV Globo. Even before a million-plus fans descended on Copacabana over the weekend, Madonna announced in late March that her send-off would be her “biggest gig yet.”

“The show will be free of charge as a thank you to her fans for celebrating more than four decades of her music over the course of the epic global run of the tour,” her website said.

Saturday’s concert broke Madge’s personal attendance record — 130,000 fans at Paris’ Parc des Sceaux in 1987 — by more than tenfold. Madonna also bested the record previously held by the Rolling Stones’ 2006 Copacabana concert , which drew 1.5 million people.

‘No Madonna fan’ should expect a Madonna show to start on time. So says Team Madonna

Madonna’s legal team submits a dismissal request in a class-action case about her concert tardiness, contending that a two-hour delay didn’t injure ticketholders.

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” @Madonna makes history in Rio tonight marking the largest ever standalone concert for any artist, with over 1.6 million fans attending as she closes The Celebration Tour,” Live Nation announced on X (formerly Twitter) on Saturday.

Madonna’s Celebration Tour launched in October, months after she was hospitalized for a bacterial infection last June. The Grammy winner brought her headline-generating tour to Inglewood’s Kia Forum for several nights in March.

Times critic Mikael Wood wrote that the singer’s Celebration Tour “ was curiously short on joy. ”

“A pop concert is a theater of personality and craft, not one of plot or character development,” he added. “But a narrative this messy needed more razzle-dazzle.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Madonna Brings Massive Free Concert to Rio, Capping Celebration Tour

The pop superstar performed a final date on her global trek marking four decades of hits: a set on Copacabana Beach before the largest live crowd of her career.

By Flávia Milhorance and Julia Jacobs

Reporting from Rio de Janeiro and New York

When Madonna stepped out onto the mammoth stage constructed on Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach on Saturday night in a gleaming halo headpiece and black kimono, she was greeted by the largest live crowd of her four-decade career.

The free show, announced in late March, was a grand finale to the pop superstar’s latest world tour, which has delivered 80 performances since last October . Without ticket data, concert crowd sizes can be difficult to gauge; Riotur, the municipality’s tourism department, estimated that 1.6 million people flooded onto the 2.4-mile stretch of sand on Saturday that had been turned into a roughly $12 million playground surrounding the 8,700-square-foot stage.

It was the culmination of days of Madonna-mania in the city, where talk of the singer, 65, was inescapable. Her songs spilled out of stores and car stereos. Fans assembled outside her hotel and shouted her name. Updates about the concert, which was broadcast on the network Globo TV, dominated local media reports.

The spectacle in Rio was a milestone in Madonna’s career: the victory lap for her first stage retrospective, called the Celebration Tour , in which she chronicled her rise to stardom, performing hits like “Into the Groove,” “Like a Prayer” and “Ray of Light” with a cadre of dancers, four of her six children, and a wardrobe of elaborate costuming that recalled some of her most memorable looks.

“Here we are, the most beautiful place in the world,” Madonna announced early in the concert, indicating the ocean and the mountains around her. “This is magic.” Later, she expounded on her gratitude for her Brazilian fans. “You have always been there for me,” she said. “That flag: that green-and-yellow flag, I see it everywhere. I feel it in my heart.”

The two-plus-hour Rio show hewed closely to the Celebration show, with a few exceptions: Madonna added her 2000 track “Music” to the set list, rearranged as a samba with live drummers and a special guest, the Brazilian drag star Pabllo Vittar. “Live to Tell,” staged as a tribute to victims of AIDS , included photographs of the Brazilian musicians Cazuza and Renato Russo, and the actress Sandra Bréa. For “Vogue,” Madonna appeared in a sparkly dress in the colors of the Brazilian flag and was joined by the pop sensation Anitta , who helped “judge” the competitors strutting down the runway.

The show had lifelong Madonna fans — many of whom came dressed in homage to their heroine in cone bras and lace gloves — screaming and dancing along. Ernesto Magalhães, 42, adorned in the style of Madonna’s “Material Girl” era in a gown and boa while balancing on stilts, epitomized the exuberant spirit of the occasion: “I’ve been a Madonna fan since I was 8; I couldn’t miss this.” Surya Rossi, a 31-year-old illustrator, decided on a last-minute trip from Rio Claro, São Paulo, after coordinating with her cousin, and stayed with friends. “Madonna has been a tremendous influence on me, both as a feminist and an artist,” she said. “Her empowering history and approach inspire me.”

It was also something of a landmark moment for live concerts globally. At a time of astronomical ticket prices and rising production costs for major shows, a free concert attracting a crowd of this scale is exceedingly rare, especially in the United States. California’s Coachella festival, where a three-day general admission pass starts at about $500, draws up to 125,000 attendees a day. Musikfest, a mostly free music festival in Pennsylvania, welcomed about 1.3 million visitors over 11 days last year.

“To have a free show like that in recent years is relatively unheard-of,” Katelyn Yount, the director of festivals at AEG Presents, said of Madonna’s closing show. Hangout, an upcoming music festival on Alabama’s Gulf Coast that is among the annual events AEG produces, is capped each day at about 40,000 attendees, who pay more than $300 for a three-day pass.

If a performance of this magnitude was going to be held anywhere in 2024, it would probably be in Rio, where officials have experience with enormous crowds. In 2006, about 1.5 million people attended a free Rolling Stones concert at Copacabana Beach, Brazilian police and other authorities said at the time. An even larger crowd was said to have gathered for a Rod Stewart show there on New Year’s Eve in 1994.

The idea for the sprawling event was first planted two years ago, when Luiz Oscar Niemeyer, an executive with Bonus Track, a live entertainment company based in Rio de Janeiro, approached Madonna’s managers after hearing about plans for the tour. The Rolling Stones concert in 2006 helped convince him that something like this was possible, he said.

Negotiations stalled until last year, when a Madonna show in Mexico City was announced — ticketed dates for the Celebration Tour ended up wrapping with five nights there at the Palacio de los Deportes — and Niemeyer resumed his efforts to convince the pop star’s representatives and secure funding.

“It was an ambitious project for everyone, aiming to attract the largest audience of her career, and I thought this would help me persuade her,” Niemeyer said in an interview last week.

The concert’s corporate backers include the Brazilian bank Itaú and Heineken, and the government has made a significant investment as well.

Preparation for Madonna-palooza had consumed a segment of the city in recent days. A week ago, cargo planes carried about 270 tons of concert material to the city, including costumes and gym equipment. Eighteen sound and video towers were built across the beach, and last Wednesday, 4,000 workers prepared the stage in scorching heat.

Because this was the only Celebration concert in South America — Madonna last toured there in 2012 — fans congregated from all over the continent. In the days leading up to the event, a Madonna impersonator, Izelene Cristina, danced to “La Isla Bonita” at a bus station as she welcomed travelers. She would not be attending the concert because excitement over the superstar’s performance had led to a flood of bookings.

“Such is the life of an artist,” she said. “You work to move and entertain people.”

On Monday, Madonna and her touring team of about 200 arrived in Rio, heading directly to the French Riviera-inspired Copacabana Palace, the luxury hotel near where the stage was built. Later in the week, crowds gathered as close to the stage as possible, as the pop star crossed a specially built footbridge from the hotel to the stage to rehearse with some of her dancers.

Social media was flooded with clips of Madonna running through songs including the opener, “Nothing Really Matters.” “Are you happy? Are you ready?” she asked the assembled crowd at one point . The response: wild cheering. “OK, just checking,” she replied.

At a press briefing ahead of the concert, officials discussed the safety concerns that can accompany an audience of that size and unpredictable weather on the shore. Last year, the Brazilian D.J. Alok scheduled what had been billed as the “concert of the century” on Copacabana Beach, but a storm led part of the crowd to scatter, and concertgoers were faced with rampant pickpocketing , a problem at least some faced on Saturday night as well.

Marco Andrade, a spokesman for the Rio police, told reporters that the department planned to deploy 3,200 officers at the Madonna concert, compared with about 900 for Alok’s event. He said that facial recognition technology would be used at inspection areas, in addition to drones to monitor the crowd. In the end, the audience stretched into the ocean as well — a collection of boats anchored in the waters near the venue.

The atmosphere on the ground Saturday night was like a World Cup event, street carnival and New Year’s Eve celebration combined. Street vendors offered shirts, hats, cups and fans adorned with Madonna’s face and rainbow colors, and a plethora of barbecue, grilled cheese, empanadas and the Brazilian cocktail caipirinhas were available. To fight the heat, a firefighter atop a fire truck sprayed a jet of water on the crowd.

As the show ended with a remix of her 2009 track “Celebration,” Madonna addressed the audience for a final time: “Thank you, Rio,” adding “obrigada,” the equivalent in Portuguese. She smiled and let go of a Brazilian flag, flipped a white veil over her head and descended beneath the stage.

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the Bonus Track executive who approached Madonna’s team about the Brazil show. He is Luiz Oscar Niemeyer, not Luiz Guilherme Niemeyer.

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Julia Jacobs is an arts and culture reporter who often covers legal issues for The Times. More about Julia Jacobs

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Madonna’s biggest-ever concert transforms Rio’s Copacabana beach into a massive dance floor

RIO DE JANEIRO — Madonna put on a free concert on Copacabana beach Saturday night, turning Rio de Janeiro’s vast stretch of sand into an enormous dance floor teeming with a multitude of her fans.

It was the last show of The Celebration Tour, her first retrospective,  which kicked off in October in London .

The “Queen of Pop” began the show with her 1998 hit “Nothing Really Matters.” Huge cheers rose from the buzzing, tightly packed crowd, pressed up against the barriers. Others held house parties in brightly lighted apartments and hotels overlooking the beachfront. Helicopters and drones flew overhead, and motorboats and sailboats anchored off the beach filled the bay.

“Here we are in the most beautiful place in the world,” Madonna, 65, told the crowd. Pointing out the ocean view, the mountains and the Christ the Redeemer statue overlooking the city, she added: “This place is magic.”

Madonna performed her classic hits, including “Like A Virgin” and “Hung Up.” For the introduction to “Like A Prayer,” her head was completely covered in a black cape, a rosary gripped in her hands.

The star paid an emotional tribute to “all the bright lights” lost to AIDS as she sang “Live to Tell,” with black and white photos of people who died from the illness flashing behind her.

Later, she was joined on stage by Brazilian artists Anitta and Pabllo Vittar.

Rio spent the last few days readying itself for the performance.

An estimated 1.6 million people attended the show, G1 reported, citing Rio City Hall’s tourism agency. That is more than 10 times Madonna’s record attendance of 130,000 at Paris’ Parc des Sceaux in 1987. Madonna’s official website hyped the show as the biggest ever in her four-decade career.

In recent days, the buzz was palpable. Fans milled outside the stately, beachfront  Copacabana Palace hotel , where Madonna is staying, hoping to catch a glimpse of the pop star. During the sound check on the stage set up in front of the hotel, they danced on the sand.

By midday Saturday, fans crowded in front of the hotel. A white-bearded man carried a sign saying, “Welcome Madonna you are the best I love you.”

Flags with “Madonna” printed against a background of Copacabana’s iconic black and white waved sidewalk pattern hung from balconies. The area was packed with street vendors and concert attendees kitted out in themed T-shirts, sweating under a baking sun.

“Since Madonna arrived here, I’ve been coming every day with this outfit to welcome my idol, my diva, my pop queen,” said Rosemary de Oliveira Bohrer, 69, who sported a gold-colored cone bra and a black cap.

“It’s going to be an unforgettable show here in Copacabana,” said Oliveira Bohrer, a retired civil servant who lives in the area.

Eighteen sound towers were spread along the beach to ensure that all attendees can hear the hits. Her two-hour show started at 10:37 p.m. local time, nearly 50 minutes behind schedule.

City Hall produced a report in April estimating that the concert would inject 293 million reals ($57 million) into the local economy. Hotel capacity was expected to reach 98% in Copacabana, according to Rio’s hotel association. Fans hailing from across Brazil and even Argentina and France sought out Airbnbs for the weekend, the platform said in a statement. Rio’s international airport had forecast an extra 170 flights during May 1-6, from 27 destinations, City Hall said in a statement.

“It’s a unique opportunity to see Madonna, who knows if she’ll ever come back,” said Alessandro Augusto, 53, who flew in from Brazil’s Ceara state — approximately 1,555 miles from Rio.

“Welcome Queen!” read Heineken ads plastered around the city, the lettering above an image of an upturned bottle cap resembling a crown.

Heineken wasn’t the only company seeking to profit from the excitement. Bars and restaurants prepared “Like a Virgin” cocktails. A shop in the downtown neighborhood famed for selling Carnival attire completely reinvented itself, stocking its shelves with Madonna-themed costumes, fans, fanny packs and even underwear.

Organization of the mega-event was similar to New Year’s Eve, when millions of people gather on Copacabana for its fireworks display, local authorities said. That annual event often produces widespread thefts and muggings, and there was some concern such problems might occur at Madonna’s show.

Rio state’s security plan included the presence of 3,200 military personnel and 1,500 civilian police officers on stand by. In the lead-up to the concert, Brazil’s navy inspected vessels that wished to position themselves offshore to follow the show.

A number of huge concerts have taken place on Copacabana beach before, including a 1994 New Year’s Eve show by Rod Stewart that drew more than 4 million fans and was  the biggest free rock concert in history , according to Guinness World Records. Many of those spectators also came to see Rio’s fireworks show, though, so a more fitting comparison might be to the Rolling Stones in 2006, which saw 1.2 million people crowd onto the sand, according to Rio’s military police, the newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo reported at the time.

Ana Beatriz Soares, a fan who was at Copacabana on Saturday, said Madonna has made her mark across the decades.

“Madonna had to run so that today’s pop artists could walk. That’s why she’s important, because she serves as an inspiration for today’s pop divas,” Soares said.

“And that’s 40 years ago. Not 40 days, 40 months. It’s 40 years,” she said.

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Free Madonna concert draws crowd of 1.6m to Brazil’s Copacabana beach

Area around Rio de Janeiro beach filled for several blocks as singer closes her Celebration world tour

With the world-famous statue towering over it from Corcovado mountain, Rio de Janeiro is well used to Christ the Redeemer. For one night only this weekend, it also had Madonna.

More than a million people thronged Copacabana beach on Saturday night, turning its vast stretch of sand into a massive dancefloor for a free concert by the pop star as she completed her world tour.

“Here we are in the most beautiful place in the world,” Madonna , 65, told the tightly packed crowd. Pointing out the ocean view and the mountains, she added: “This place is magic.”

In the run-up to the concert, the city had been buzzing, with fans lined up outside the stately Copacabana Palace hotel in the hope of catching a glimpse of the star. The city’s airport fielded an estimated 170 extra flights as fans poured in from around the world.

City officials estimated that 1.6 million people turned up for the concert, some watching from brightly lit apartments or hotels overlooking the beach, while others looked on from motorboats and sailboats anchored nearby.

As drones and helicopters flew overhead, the singer offered up a dazzling show, playing classics ranging from Like a Virgin to Like a Prayer, and cycling through dozens of sets and costume changes.

Flanked by giant screens, she began the show with her 1998 hit Nothing Really Matters, eliciting a huge cheer from the crowd.

“Oi, Rio!” she called out in Portuguese. The response was swift, carried by more than a million voices: “Oi, Queen Madonna!”

The singer also paid an emotional tribute to “all the bright lights” lost to Aids as she sang Live to Tell, against a backdrop of black-and-white photos featuring people who died from the illness.

The Brazilian pop artists Anitta and Pabllo Vittar, as well as younger musicians from samba schools, also took part in the show.

The show, which Madonna’s official website described as the biggest ever in her 40-year career, marked the final stop on her Celebration tour. Giant screens and 18 sound towers had been spread out along the beach to ensure the crowds could enjoy the event.

Fans, many of whom lined up hours or even days before the concert to get a good view, hailed Madonna’s performance. “I have never seen such a powerful show,” one told the BBC . “It’s unimaginable, very much out of the ordinary,” she added.

“Madonna is spectacular,” said another. “There’s no concert better than Madonna’s.”

City officials, on high alert after a young Brazilian fan died at a Taylor Swift concert last year as a result of heat exhaustion, ordered firefighters to cool down fans by spraying water before the concert. Free drinking water was also handed out as temperatures hovered at about 27C (81F) during the late-night show.

More than 3,000 police officers were deployed around the concert area, where the Rolling Stones and Rod Stewart have also drawn million-strong crowds.

Across Rio, anticipation had been building all week. “Welcome, Queen!” read Heineken ads plastered around the city, while bars and restaurants served up “Like a Virgin” cocktails. Across the Copacabana neighbourhood, the singer’s image was emblazoned on billboards, souvenirs and T-shirts.

As hotel bookings in Copacabana climbed to an estimated 98% of capacity, Rio state’s security readied plans that included the presence of 3,200 military personnel and 1,500 civilian police officers on standby, while the country’s navy carried out inspections of any vessel looking to follow the concert offshore. City officials estimated that the concert would inject as much as 293m reais (£46m) into the local economy.

With contributions from Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse

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Madonna attracts 1.6 million to free concert at Brazil's Copacabana beach

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Reporting by Leonardo Benessato, Renato Spyrro, Rodrigo Viga Gaier, Sebastian Rocandio and Sergio Queiroz in Rio de Janeiro; Additional reporting by Andre Romani in Sao Paulo; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and William Mallard

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