Thebarton Theatre. Adelaide Festival. 29 Feb 2016
Last time we saw Sufjan Stevens it was his 2011 Age of Adz tour. Inspired by the paintings of the schizophrenic visionary Royal Robertson, the concert featured massive back projections of Robertson’s ecstatic, vibrantly coloured imaginings while Stevens and a ten piece band produced a symphonic event, festooned with samples, loops and intrepid orchestrations.
For his 2016 tour Sufjan Stevens is in lyric mode. With just four band members this time, he is showcasing last year’s album, Carrie and Lowell, his most personal album to date and, in the minds of many, his best. Stevens is a mercurial talent and like say, Prince or Beck, he can, chameleon-like, effortlessly inhabit a variety of contemporary forms from pop to prog to acoustic ballad, psychedelia and post-folk. The constants in Stevens’ music are his sweet keening vocal, his open-tuned guitar and banjo, and his incorporation of synths, piano, horns and angelic harmonies.
On stage at the Thebarton Theatre, Stevens and his associates open with Redford, an instrumental composition from Michigan. The band creates a weave of sounds – guitar, piano, trombone, percussion. It is a soothing, but inviting overture, setting the mood for what is to follow.
And what follows are the first trickling guitar notes of Death With Dignity, opening track to Carrie and Lowell. “Spirit of my silence I can hear you / But I’m afraid to be near you” Stevens sings in his soft, burred, mesmerising way- “And I don’t know where to begin.”
But begin he does, embarking on a set of songs, written after the death of his mother, Carrie in 2012. They are self-explorations, sometimes excoriating, sometimes plain bereft. These expressions of loss, anger, and bewilderment reflect the fact that he is trying to retrieve a mother he hardly knew, who left him when he was one year old.
Raised by his father and stepmother in an interfaith counterculture community in Michigan, Stevens rarely saw his mother who, living in Oregon with Lowell Brams, her second husband, suffered bipolar illness and bouts of drug dependence. When she was diagnosed with stomach cancer he visited her in hospital until her death. The songs describe his attempts to recover memories and unravel feelings, both repressed and lost to time.
I can think of few songwriters who cut as close to the emotional bone as Sufjan Stevens does in the Carrie and Lowell suite. Many singers draw on personal material – Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor in the 60s and 70s delved their own experiences, but the results were, more often than not, encrypted and at arm’s length. Blood on the Tracks is the closest Dylan example, Joni Mitchell’s Blue is her most directly revelatory work and Taylor said it all in one song – Fire and Rain. John Lennon’s Plastic Ono solo album is a primal cry from the heart, Loudon Wainwright is sardonically, almost compulsively, frank - and now, younger singers like Will Oldham and William Fitzsimmons are also Stevens’ fellow travellers.
The real comparisons with Sufjan’s Carrie and Lowell, though, are American confessional poets like Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, writing about family, anguish and self-harm. Lowell called his ground-breaking volume, Life Studies – vignettes of his parents, his marriage, his dreads and anxieties described in plain candour ; stark, courageous, sometimes wry - and, like all genuine confrontations with the troubled self : healing and celebratory in their rediscovery of purpose.
Death with Dignity is a remarkable song in that it describes grief as a child might experience it – paradoxically, as a mystery, an impossible finality. It is not self pitying, sentimental or mawkish: “I forgive you mother, I can hear you/And I long to be near you/ But every road leads to an end…Your apparition passes through me in the willows: Five red hens - you’ll never see us again.”
As the musicians conjure a modal web of guitar, piano and pedal steel, digital projections – a flickering slideshow of old family photos, glimpses of the baby Sufjan and his parents - appear in what seem like a series of cathedral windows or a huge illuminated picket fence. Light floods in to the hall, identifying us to the performers as well. This could have been portentous and self-regarding but Stevens judges it perfectly. He is a quiet mystic, modest in manner and able to heft emotional weight. These experiences are about him, but they are also about us, and he astutely reminds us so.
A cluster of songs follow- the regretful Should Have Known Better –“My black shroud… I should’ve wrote a letter/Explaining what I feel” – the vocals are on echo, processed, otherworldly, while Casey Foubert’s electric guitar churns in rhyme with Stephen Moore’s harmonium keyboard chords.
And there is Sufjan, in his signature wacky green trucker hat and a black t-shirt emblazoned with almost luminous silver cross-hatchings. The hall lights are up again. It is like a revival show but it’s not selling any afterlife except the rest of the one we already have.
All of Me Wants All of You – with its memories of Oregon landscapes: “Saw myself on Spencer’s Butte /landscape changed my point of view” - has the band really opening up with a more enveloping sound than the album version. Foubert unleashes a wash of pedal effects , James Mcalister’s percussion grows louder, along with piano and synths, and an extended, trippy, psychedelic jam unfolds, complete with purple haze lighting and the forlorn repetition of “All of me wants all of you”.
The exact sequence from the album is broken with a switch to The Only Thing, the most openly fraught song, it reveals Stevens’ crisis of faith and dread at what he has to contemplate. It is histrionic to say “Should I tear my eyes out now ?” but maybe it is the understatement of the vocal delivery which offsets a sense of excess.
In an age of bombastic self-regard and religious simple-mindedness, for any artist, describing the dark night of the soul is perilous, both personally and aesthetically. Sufjan Stevens, perhaps because he determinedly shies away from talking directly about questions of faith, is better able than most to explore the elusive subject of transcendence.
In this carefully managed set list the inclusion of The Owl and Tanager from All Delighted People is a switch but not a departure from the emotional narrative. The playful refrain between the two birds (a tanager is a generic for a songbird) and the shreds of childhood recollection in the song are beautifully managed with multiple harmonies from Stevens, Dawn Landes and Foubert with the band opening out in a swoon of synthesisers.
Four more key songs follow- Eugene, another mix of Oregon memory and deathbed reality –“What’s the point of singing songs/If they’ll never even hear you” And, the highpoint of the set, Fourth of July, with its plaintive opening piano notes (echoes of Elbow’s Puncture Repair and Fitzsimmons’ The Sparrow and the Crow) its irresistible melody and lambent lyrics – “It was night when you died, my firefly/What could I have said to raise you from the dead ?”
It is a tender song of comfort and harsh truth from mother to son – My little hawk, why do you cry? We’re all gonna die. “The final refrain repeated in ever widening circles as the sweet harmonies turn into a full crescendo with sprays of light and a gathering drumbeat. Again, a moment that could have toppled into bathos, becomes one of affirmation instead.
No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross again questions the central tenets of resurrection and, at last, the title song - Carrie and Lowell, is again accompanied by flickering Super 8 footage of his two families, including his stepfather Lowell. Accompanied on guitar and ukulele , the harmonies between Stevens and Dawn Landes, like much of the album, echo the very best of early Simon and Garfunkel. It is hovering on the edge of icky pop , but always carefully judged, the melody and lyric are triumphantly sublime.
Stevens and his splendid band complete the set with Vesuvius, a free form drumming blast from The Age of Adz, Futile Devices and one last word from Carrie and Lowell, Blue Bucket of Gold - referring to an Oregon story of miners who found gold but didn’t recognise it at the time - and then couldn’t find the site again.
The tune builds from simple piano chords to a full scale repeating finale – “Raise your right hand /tell me you want me in your life “ - with a long (perhaps over long) double spray of white laser light into the auditorium, drawing us towards two portals like a near death experience. It verges on interminable but, of course, like much else in the show its theatrics are intriguing and strangely comforting.
For the encore section, covering another six songs, the mood changes almost completely. The five musicians gather around a single microphone like an old-timey country music show. All play acoustic instruments – and Sufjan gets out his familiar banjo.
The selections are from Michigan and Seven Swans - and they sing Heirloom from All Delighted People. They have Emily Dickinson length titles – All The Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands, For the Widows in Paradise, For the Fatherless in Ypsilanti. Stevens adds The Dress looks Nice on You and perhaps as a kind of in-joke, Casimir Pulaski Day, referring to the local public holiday in Chicago commemorating a hero of the American Revolution. It falls on the first Monday in March which would have been the night of our concert – if it hadn’t been a Leap Year.
During the encores Stevens speaks to the audience for the first time, disarmingly telling self-deprecating anecdotes about his father’s belief in Edgar Cayce’s Past Lives and the reincarnation of family pets . He also says he’s been listening to Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life and muses ironically whether his show might be called songs in the key of death.
He needn’t have worried. This singular talent has, in a pop concert, tangled with large and elusive questions with intelligence, wit and an open heart. It is a risky venture and he succeeds. I call that a wonder. And these beautifully performed songs are Sufjan Stevens’ life studies.
Murray Bramwell
When: Closed
Where: Thebarton Theatre
Bookings: Closed
Presented by Australian String Quartet. Adelaide Town Hall. 29 Feb 2016.
Blue for new.
With matched Guadagnini instruments firmly in hand – part of the brand name of the Australian String Quartet – two gentlemen casually dressed in dark lounge suits and pale blue shirts and two ladies in bright blue dresses ascend the majestic icy-blue lit stage of the Adelaide Town Hall. The Australian String Quartet enters its fourth decade of music making and begins another incarnation with four new members.
To mark the occasion, the ASQ has chosen a program that includes a world première by Australian composer Matthew Hindson and a reimagined quartet by post-minimalist American composer John Adams. Both include and additional musician on percussion. These two contemporary pieces are bookended by more standard fare – a quartet by Beethoven, and one by (Robert) Schuman – but it’s a shame the Hindson was not programmed to bring the curtain down, because it was spectacularly inspirational and well worth the price of the admission ticket alone. As part of the Adelaide Festival of Arts, the packed audience witnessed the birth of what is destined to become a classic of the genre.
The bookends are both all about their fourth movements. Schumann’s Op.41 No.1 is a ‘safe’ composition and shows the composer plying his craft as he learns about what it means to compose for a string quartet. The first two movements lack dynamic color and texture, and the dialogue is sparse. The composer is feeling his way and finds safety in Haydn-esque classicism and restraint. The adagio third movement is more lyrical with the viola and cello building the momentum. It segues into the presto final movement which is brimming with spiky dynamics and diverse ethnically infused dance rhythms and melodies. The cello provides a drone like spine to the movement and has the final exhausted gasping word.
Beethoven’s string quartets are perhaps at the pinnacle of the genre and are always a great curtain raiser. A sure fired way for the ensemble to announce its credentials in case we were ever in doubt. Like the Schumann, the first movement of Beethoven’s Op.18 No.6 begins modestly, and the ASQ took the classy dotted rhythms in their stride. The luxurious slow adagio second movement strips away the density of the first and finishes gently with gentle pizzicato chords before giving way to the spirited scherzo third. But this all gives way to the no-holds barred of the adagio fourth movement, which the ASQ held in tight control and articulated beautifully (bravo Sharon Draper on cello). The audience loved it, and rightly so.
First violin Dale Barltrop introduced Hindson’s String Quartet No.4 (for string quartet and percussion) and made special note that it was composed especially for the new ASQ and was also a dedication to his beloved one year old daughter.
Born out of the promise of new beginnings, it is a liberating work and reminiscent of meditative Asian spirituality. It begins with crashing chords made all the more impressive by the inclusion of the vibraphone played passionately and expertly by guest percussionist Claire Edwardes (also dressed in blue… for new). The striking opening gives way to rising arpeggios and, as in the third movement of the Schumann, the cello and viola drive the piece forward. Astonishing ascending and falling repeating scale passages foreground the vibraphone and the occasional use of the mallet handles (rather than the heads) eventually quietened and put to bed the first movement. The second (and final) movement began with a languid melody that was passed gently between the instruments and evoked memories of the third movement of the Beethoven. Gradually there is a sense of awakening – perhaps a child stirring and beginnings its day under the loving and watchful eye of a parent. The scoring becomes inquisitive and the instruments enter into multiple dialogues searching out answers and ways to resolve the question they ask of each other, but not always successfully. Doubts linger but hope tentatively rises and eventually provides a calming influence and the piece gently closes.
Hindson’s composition is truly remarkable, but the same cannot be said for John Adams’ Alleged Dances. I should stress that Adams is one of my most admired composers but these short pieces just “don’t do it for me”, and didn’t for many of the audience. They were however entertaining and the inclusion of percussion on diverse household kitchen containers (everything but the kitchen sink!) again at the hands of Claire Edwardes provided an amusing accompaniment to the ASQ.
It was fitting that the Adams should be bookended and hence eclipsed by the Beethoven and Schumann, but it was a shame that its partner was the Hindson, which should have been the finale!
This was a fabulous start to the ASQ’s 2016 season. I can’t wait for the next instalment.
Kym Clayton
When: 1 March (Sydney), 2 March (Brisbane), 3 March (Melbourne), 6 March (Canberra), 14 March (Perth)
Where: Various venues
Bookings: asq.com.au
Presented by Ensemble Amplitude. BAPeA Gallery and Sculpture Garden. 28 Feb 2016.
Ensemble Amplitude is a relatively new outfit on the contemporary chamber classical music scene, comprising Dan Thorpe (Piano), Anna Coleman (Clarinet), Melanie Walters (Flutes) and Lester Wong (Violin).
This program very much focused on Thorpe. The first half was entirely solo piano, and all but one of the chamber pieces in the second half were dominated by piano. So, the pianist would want to be pretty good, and Thorpe was.
He sits easily at the piano and his concentration is manifestly intense. He clearly has a penchant for lightly textured compositions that are best served by finely balanced dynamics. He can also belt out a thumper as well, and his performance of Philip Glass’s iconic Mad Rush for solo piano, and his ensemble work in Srul Glick’s Klezmer’s Wedding were extremely well received by the audience; although he was probably a little too heavy on the sustain pedal throughout Mad Rush.
It was presumably no accident in programming that Thorpe concluded the first half of the concert with Mad Rush, for it comprises rapidly played and repeated rolling broken chords that were also a feature of his own compositions Considerate and Little Serenade that immediately preceded it.
The second half of the program kicked off with an interesting performance of the quirky Piece in the shape of a Square by Philip Glass. Originally scored for two flutes, Ensemble Amplitude presented it instead on flute and clarinet, which doesn’t seem to work as well. Using identical instruments allows the music to interact in a way that different instruments with different timbres cannot. The interest in the piece is how the instruments move in and out of phase with each other, and this is most evident and strangely beautiful with matching instruments.
The program also featured music of Missy Mazzoli, Anne Boyd, Jane Stanley, Houston Dunleavy and Nico Muhly. All composers featured in the program are living!
The concert was performed in the tranquility of the BAPëA gallery and Sculpture Garden in Brompton.
Kym Clayton
When: 28 Feb
Where: BAPeA Gallery and Sculpture Garden
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Festival Theatre. 13 Feb 2016
At the end of the Beethoven Violin Concerto I asked the young lad who was sitting alongside of me with his mother what he thought of the performance. He smiled widely and exclaimed that it was “fantastic”. At the end of the performance of Act 1 of Wagner’s Die Walküre, I hesitated to ask him again – Wagner is not everyone’s cup of tea, and this young lad’s preferred tipple was probably chocolate milk – but to my very great surprise he whispered that it was “beautiful”.
He of course was correct on both counts.
Beethoven’s Violin Concerto is one of the best known and most loved in the repertoire, and Canadian violinist James Ehnes gives a masterful reading. As one of the world’s leading violinists, Ehnes, as you would expect, has superb technique and polished musicality. With the expert collaboration of maestro Nicholas Carter, Ehnes gently balances the dynamics and suitably privileges the final movement to allow the playfulness and majesty to fully play out.
Carter ensures the first two movements are not overplayed and even the very softest notes from Ehnes’ 1715 Stradivarius are clearly heard. Carter’s placement of the orchestra assists the acoustic balancing in the cavernous Festival theatre auditorium. The cadenzas are a highlight and demonstrate Ehnes’ flair and musical imagination. The performance is beautifully articulated; a feature of the Wagner as well. Ehnes is rapturously applauded by the huge audience, and he rewards them with a breathtaking encore of the third movement from Bach’s 1st Violin Sonata.
The Beethoven alone is worth the price of the admission ticket, but the Wagner is something else. The vast stage is full to overflowing with extra instruments: a full complement of brass, including Wagner tubas, and bass and contra instruments; two harps and two timpanists. Every section seems augmented. Wagner’s music is expansive if nothing else. And so begins sixty minutes of intense musical drama. The roles of Siegmund, Sieglinde and Hunding are sung by Simon O’Neill, Michelle DeYoung and Shane Lawrence. They are all world class soloists and they have the music at their mercy. O’Neill in particular is dominant. His precise articulation and sheer vocal power to be able to rise above the might of the orchestra and be clearly heard and understood is simply awesome. DeYoung is equally imposing and her formidable mezzo voice handles, with comparative ease, the difficult tessitura presented by the role. O’Neill and DeYoung are both fine actors, and the absence of scenery and properties in what is a concert performance is of no consequence. Carter again commands the forces of the orchestra with great care and demonstrates a deep understanding of the orchestra as an additional character.
This is Carter’s first concert with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra as its new Principal Conductor, and he has clearly established a rapport and understanding with the players.
A fine performance all round.
Kym Clayton
When: Closed
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: Closed
Her Majesty’s Theatre. 3 Feb 2016
Some things really are worth the wait. And Adelaide has waited a very long time for a first visit from the incomparable Gillian Welch and her brilliant musical partner David Rawlings. It has been eleven years since they last toured Australia and then it was Eastern States only. This time they drove to South Australia from Perth - 28 hours by car, they proudly report, but- with some regret - not a single kangaroo sighted.
The crowd in Her Majesty’s is buzzing with anticipation and is not disappointed. “Greetings y’all”, beams Ms Welch, wearing a silk and lace ankle length shift dress and cowboy boots. Her soft-spoken beau, David Rawlings is dressed in a suit and a cream Stetson – the full ten gallons, or is that 37.8 litres? The staging is simple but carefully considered. The lighting is soft and buttery, a small table stands behind the twin microphones, on it a little cabinet with drawers for capos, harmonica holders, plectrums and other miniature mysteries.
They open with Scarlet Town, one of the highlights of the now-not-so-recent 2011 release, The Harrow and the Harvest. It is all there, straight off the bat. The enticing guitar duetting – Welch’s steady rhythm counterpointed by Rawlings’s amazingly nimble, wonderfully expressive syncopated melody lines. It is a curious mix of madrigal lute, bluegrass mandolin and acoustic punk.
Then, in comes Gillian Welch’s ringing vocal – “When I went down to Scarlet Town/ ain’t never been there before/ you slept on a feather bed / I slept on the floor....The things I seen in Scarlet Town did mortify my soul/ Look at that deep well/Look at that dark grave/ringing that iron bell/ in Scarlet Town today. “
It is a traditional song revived to perfection by a New York born, LA-raised , Berkelee School of Music graduate who doesn’t have to be born in Appalachia to capture that amalgam of 17th century English ballad, Pentecostal gospel and Depression era good-time music that fuels American country music. Leading participants in the O Brother Where Art Thou? music soundtrack which became the Ryman Theatre stage show, Down From the Mountain, it is no exaggeration to say that Gillian Welch and David Rawlings have been key to a new wave of 21st century Americana. Alt.Country is now the new mainstream, drawing in talents such as Bonnie Prince Billy, The Handsome Family, Punch Brothers and Iron and Wine, as well as reviving and refocusing the careers of Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris and Lucinda Williams.
The opening cluster of songs in the first set includes both original compositions and re-arrangements of such familiar fare as Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor – Welch crooning plaintively with Rawlings’ wistful fingerpicking sweetly reminiscent of the legendary Mississippi John Hurt. Then it’s time for some Vitamin B, as Welch jokingly refers to her banjo, and begins that irresistibly ramshackle riff that opens into Rock of Ages. Disarmingly deprecating about their music, Gillian Welch introduces The Way it Will Be by saying – “The next one is a real downer, it starts out slowly and then fizzles out.” For the following song, The Way it Goes Rawlings adds – “this one is faster, but … sadder.” Needless to say both were performed to perfection, followed by the mournful sweet strains of Wayside/Back in Time and Annabelle.
They close the first half with the majestically slow Elvis Presley Blues, Welch in fine vocal and Rawlings as always reeling out note perfect solos, his small-bodied guitar held in near vertical position as he closes his eyes and slowly undulates with the unfurling melodies, riffs and rhythms- all in complete and effortless accord with Welch’s chiming voice and rock steady guitar. A rousing bluegrass version of Red Clay Halo ends the set on such a high that the interval seems essential just to gather our wits.
The duo come back even stronger after the break. Welch sings the semi-confessional ballad from Soul Journey, No One Knows My Name, and - a highpoint of an already vertiginous program – Hard Times, a Depression era sharecropper song about a farmer and his mule. It is a Welch-Rawlings composition, with strong traditional origins. And like the Woody Guthrie compositions and the Hollis Brown-era Bob Dylan works that precede it , the song powerfully evokes those elements of poverty, social injustice, and fortitude which made folk music also politically activist music – in the 1930s, the 1960s, and surely, again, in these times of the 1% wealthy and Occupy Wall Street.
The program reminds us how strong their repertoire is. With just five albums in twenty years (plus two more with the David Rawlings Machine) Gillian Welch, reminiscent of Americana pioneers, The Band, has distilled an exceptional set of songs. She sings Down Along the Dixie Line and then Six White Horses , complete with thigh and flank slapping rhythms –“it’s called hamboning” – and some wildly-admired bootstepping from Welch. Revelator, the crowning song from the crowning album, has the hackles shivering and Rawlings’ novocaine anthem Sweet Tooth is an open-tuned rumpus of ragtime and cakewalk. After the gothic murder ballad Caleb Meyer, Gillian Welch steps forward to ask a favour of the audience. It is her father’s 90th birthday and, on the road in Australia, she can’t be there. The audience sings Happy Birthday Kenny and is also invited to capture the moment for YouTube. Up it went, minutes after the show. Look at Miss Ohio and Everything is Free close the proceedings on what can only be called a perfect note.
Except there is more. A taste of Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit, in tribute to the late Paul Kantner. And a masterful version of Lefty Frizzell’s weepy, Long Black Veil. The sound quality has been flawless all evening (let no one say Her Majesty’s has dud acoustics) and David Rawlings has played his pin-sharp guitar direct to a microphone.
For the final song the duo come to the edge of the stage and perform entirely without amplification. It is a spell-binding finale; the audience quieter than the quietest mice, Gillian Welch’s tuneful melancholy vocal in telepathic harmony with Rawlings and his minimal guitar. At one point all we hear is her vocal and the merest tapping harmonics from the fretboard. Less has never been quite this more. No-one who was there will forget this concert. As I said, it was worth the wait.
Murray Bramwell
When: 3 Feb
Where: Her Majesty’s Theatre
Bookings: Closed