Rufus Wainwright
saves the best until last

Iain Shedden
The Australian, 18 October 2010

Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, 14 October 2010

ALREADY in Australia we have seen Rufus Wainwright in a number of guises.

Performing with a band, by himself, with members of his family and with a musical ensemble of Ben Hur proportions in the tribute to Leonard Cohen, Came So Far For Beauty, at the Sydney Festival in 2005.

It's hardly surprising, then, that this latest visit by the acclaimed Canadian-American songwriter should expand further his musical and performance agenda.

To use a footballing analogy, this time it's a game of two halves, one in which victory is confirmed just minutes before the final whistle.

The opening half of Wainwright's solo show is dedicated entirely to the performance, in sequence, of his latest album, All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu, a collection of songs and sonnets that rarely pokes its head above misery, albeit in an occasionally beautiful and intense manner.

Performed as a song cycle and with the audience instructed not to clap in between, Wainwright creates a mood of foreboding from the moment he enters the stage dressed as a Shakespearian Dark Lady, all in black with a long train dragging behind him as he takes his place at the piano.

What follows is an at times mesmerising display of vocal dexterity and pianistic prowess, sometimes in tandem, as Wainwright attacks as much as performs pieces such as The Dream and Zebulon, the latter making reference to his mother, singer Kate McGarrigle, who was dying from cancer while her son penned the songs for his album.

For all the dazzling piano runs and soaring vocal melodrama - and allowing for the added dramatic tension of silence between songs - All Days Are Nights as a whole performance piece is too one-dimensional to fully engage for its duration.

After a short break Wainwright returns transformed, switching attire from tragic heroine to Rupert Bear and delivering an equally colourful set culled from the best of his considerable pop canon.

Between highlights, such as the title track of his second album Poses and its opening song Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk, Wainwright opens up, chatting between songs, offering welcome involvement to the now eager Opera House crowd.

He compliments Jeff Buckley before playing the Cohen song they both covered, Hallelujah. This rendition, however, is a little too rushed to engage the song's considerable emotional depth.

Wainwright saves the best until the encore, with a wonderfully impassioned reading of Going to a Town, from his last pop album Release the Stars. Here his seductive, mournful vocal soars over sympathetic rather than torrential piano to great effect.

The clincher, however, is Walking Song, a Kate and Anna McGarrigle song from the 1970s written by his mother about his father, Loudon Wainwright III. It's an inspired diversion into the Wainwright-McGarrigle family's folk roots and a fitting finale to a show in which the singer's mother is never far away.