A bit of Bad Bunny might just be what we all need right now

MUSIC
Bad Bunny
Engie Stadium, February 28
Reviewed by MILLIE MUROI
★★★½

Bad Bunny already has the stadium captured with his stoic stare before even singing a note.

That presence — unapologetic, focused and arresting — and the way he breaks into a smile before launching into his discography effortlessly draws us in.

It’s a marathon performance ranging from songs such as La Romana from his first album to hits from his newest release, including …DTMF and BAILE INoLVIDABLE. The addictive reggaeton beats and salsa rhythms keep everyone on their feet.

There are a handful of moments that drag, including a long segment in which he high-fives and shakes hands with fans — much to the delight of those chosen but a bit self-indulgent for those watching on.

But there’s enough variety to keep us hooked: Bad Bunny moves from the main stage to a small house-like structure at the back of the stadium for songs including Neverita and Monaco — and back again. And he doesn’t shy away from showcasing the wide talents of his troupe. From lively choreography to cuatro and drum solos, there’s character, novelty and a triumphant celebration of cultural diversity.

And Bad Bunny himself brings the energy, making the stadium feel like a giant house party – albeit one with thousand of guests.

His baritone vocals are easy on the ears, the rapping is cleanly executed, and there’s deeper emotion present in downbeat songs such as LA CANCION.

The production is packed with fireworks, flames, smoke and strobe lights (some overused) along with a handful of funky videos that break up the set list. Following the theme of the tour, which is named “Debi Tirar Mas Fotos” (I Should Have Taken More Photos), each concert-goer is given a lanyard with a camera cutout programmed to flash in various patterns.

While non-Spanish speakers may not understand everything Bad Bunny says or sings, the high-energy hip hop, rap and reggaeton hits and the passion with which he performs go beyond language and cultural barriers: something a lot of us need right now.

Light and easy does it

MUSIC
Josh Groban
TikTok Entertainment Centre, February 28
Reviewed by MICHAEL RUFFLES
★★★½

Sydney had options this weekend, and Josh Groban knew it. The biggest star among those brave or foolish enough to straddle the pop-classical chasm in recent decades, the crooner listed Grace Jones, Bad Bunny and the Mardi Gras as shows he wanted to see.

“And you chose me,” he sounds incredulous. “It’s not what I would have done.”

Me neither, honestly, but since the Significant Other demanded it, I schlepped along to the TikTok Entertainment Centre and attempted to suspend my scepticism for 100 minutes. And, mostly, Groban managed to stop the world and make us melt.

From the opening mellifluous note of You Are Loved (Don’t Give Up) to the final whisper at the end of the encore, we were in the company of a great voice singing fine songs. Along the way was enough variety among the booming balladry to keep it interesting, and the right amount of chit-chat and self-deprecating humour to lighten the mood.

The tour is called Gems, and a flawless cover of the Willy Wonka wonder Pure Imagination sets the tone early. Smooth, polished and with no rough edges, it was a pleasant gateway for an evening where the biggest risk was that the easy listening would be too easy and we’d be settled too deep in our seats.

Groban charmed with originals, notably February Song and Alla luce del sole but also including a song first written as a 12-year-old.

The show really started to soar with his interpretations of pop classics. Robbie Williams’ Angels was heavenly, the Godfather theme Brucia la terra suitably intense, and Peter Gabriel’s The Book of Love just dripping with romance.

In the kind of show where even the drummer is wearing a three-piece suit, it made sense to have a guest appearance from soprano Amy Manford for two songs from Phantom of the Opera, a solo and a duet of All I Ask of You.

The show peaks where you expect, with You Raise Me Up, a cover Groban made his own, before returning to the piano for Bridge Over Troubled Water.

More photos might have been taken of Benito and the number of Josh Groban songs making the cut for Mardi Gras DJ set lists would have been close to zero, but it ticked all the boxes. And the Significant Other walked out very happy.

Josh Groban plays the Sidney Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne on Sunday, before tour dates in Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth.

You won’t hear a better performance from here to eternity

MUSIC
Simone Young conducts Mahler’s Song of the Earth
Sydney Symphony Orchestra, February 25
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★★

Mahler’s Song of the Earth begins with wild craggy upward striving phrases from the tenor, and ends with the mezzo-soprano subsiding in gentle steps of transcendent acceptance – ewig… ewig… (eternal … eternal …)

I’m not sure you’ll hear this better sung this side of eternity.

In the opening Drinking Song of the Sorrow of the Earth, tenor Simon O’Neill mixed his splendid Wagnerian heldentenor sound with colours of self-doubt, while conductor Simone Young measured out the surging rhythms and raucous blaring from the SSO horns and woodwinds as though controlling a petulant steed.

It became a song where lusty vigour glimpses its own delusion but presses on regardless, as though Wagner’s Siegfried had lived to middle age, taken to drink, and started to wonder what it was all about.

In absolute contrast, mezzo Alexandra Ionis sang the descending lines of the second song, The Lonely Man in Autumn, with a tone of velvety sorrow and quiet radiance while the strings threaded a line of murmuring quavers in the background like the measurement of deep time.

The songs continued to alternate between futile vigour and glowing stasis until the final one, The Farewell, in which Ionis, singing with immaculate control and enveloping warmth, and the SSO woodwind, playing with finely shaped restraint (Shefali Pryor, Emma Sholl, Olli Leppaniemi and Todd Gibson-Cornish), conjured luminously spare textures in a line to infinity.

Mahler’s initial inspiration for the work was a set of poems by Hans Bethge paraphrasing Chinese texts on the fragile transience of life, and a similar thought seems to have informed the inclusion of Qigang Chen’s piano concerto, Er Huang, in the first half. The title refers to a melodic type found in traditional Beijing opera devoted to lyrical reflection.

After a Rhythmic Acknowledgement of Country by Adam Manning to formally kick off the SSO’s 2026 season, Jean-Yves Thibaudet began the Debussy-esque opening solo of this work with a tone of subtly nuanced gentleness and depth, progressing to brightly highlighted rapid figuration as the melody moves around the orchestra.

The mood is of nostalgia for something lost, and the refinement and high craft of the orchestration give the sentimental mood a convincingly authentic tone and steer it away from predictability and cliche.

In a complete change of mood, by way of generous encore, Thibaudet, Young and the SSO gave a superbly spiky, deftly accented performance of Gershwin’s Variations for piano and orchestra on “I got rhythm”.

Thibaudet got it in abundance.

Laidback Bernard maybe a little too chilled out

MUSIC
BERNARD FANNING
State Theatre, February 25. Also March 19-20.
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★★★

From the endorphins-roar of Vulture Street to the rootsy acoustic folk of Tea & Sympathy: it was a mellow solo turn for Powderfinger’s frontman back in 2006, after the Queensland barons of Aussie rock took a year’s breather. Bernard Fanning was in his mid-30s then, and the FM radio stations and the CD stores and the iPod Classics were used to playing (Baby I’ve Got You) On My Mind on repeat.

Bruised if not bitter from grief and heartbreak, exhausted from touring, Fanning started his lone venture down a country music road and then took a walk with the blues to sing his first record true. It didn’t take long for Songbird and Wish You Well to start doing the rounds on the airwaves, too.

Now cresting his 50s, Fanning began the two-decade lap of his debut album in Sydney, with 10 more cities to follow, with a circle back to the State Theatre in March. Ball Park Music’s Sam Cromack is one of the openers and – with that resonant voice and gift for storytelling – gets you thinking he needs a solo album himself.

Our crowd, placid but for one rogue agitator who got booted out, were here for their man Fanning, though. He and his guitar appeared with the most impressive entrance the State Theatre, that gorgeous old dame, can muster: backlit in white light, a silhouette in resplendent shafts.

With a band that’s almost identical to the first noughties tour, Fanning goes on to serve Tea & Sympathy over 17 tracks – most from the original album, with a dash of disc two from last year’s 20th-anniversary edition (Steady Job; Believe). The set list is handsomely sculpted through moods and textures, from the rousing Not Finished Just Yet to the tender, stripped-back Watch Over Me or the fiddle-accompanied Wash Me Clean. It’s a warm, relaxed and well-delivered blend.

Sometimes too relaxed, even for Fanning. During Songbird he broke etiquette to usher dancers to the front to jimmy up the energy – only to send us back when he realised how annoyed that was making the happily seated.

No matter. The steady grace suffusing Tea & Sympathy makes nostalgia come easy. As he told that evicted malcontent (who yelled “get on with the show!” when Fanning flashed an anti-Trump message): “It’s OK to be sentimental in times like these … to take comfort in art.”

The Unbearable Sadness of Being

MUSIC
Martin Hayes
Chatswood Concourse Concert Hall, February 25
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★½

Martin Hayes excels at enunciating the exquisite sadness of being. Like the trumpet-playing of Miles Davis or the voices of Billie Holiday and Jose Carreras, it’s ever present in the great Irish violinist’s sound and phrasing.

Beyond the airs and laments in which you expect it, he even imbues the jigs and reels – pieces conceived for dancing – with an ineffable wistfulness. It’s as if, for Hayes, the human experience, for all its joy and certainly all its humour, is shrouded in grief and longing.

On previous visits Hayes had the late US guitarist Dennis Cahill with him, firstly as a duo and then as two-fifths of The Gloaming, who gave one of the finest concerts I’ve ever heard, to which their albums give ample testament.

Since then, Hayes formed another band that expands the perimeters of Irish traditional music, The Common Ground Ensemble, and he tours Australia this time with that band’s guitarist, Kyle Sanna.

Just as Miles sought endlessly to recontextualise his trumpet, Hayes does his fiddle, so Sanna is by no means a like-for-like replacement for Cahill. No one could be. Where Cahill’s acoustic guitar drove the up-tempo pieces to the point of explosive excitement, Sanna used a broader palette of harmony and texture on a semi-acoustic guitar, always understanding how little has to be done to frame Hayes’ mastery.

Once he played the simplest ostinato, out of which the violin line gradually took shape as if appearing from a mist. Later, when they came back for two heartily demanded encores, Sanna added some pedal effects to create a liquid pool in which the fiddle’s notes rippled.

A wonder of this idiom is that it brushes away the centuries, making time evaporate as a linear phenomenon. The ancient tunes, as interpreted by Hayes and Sanna, can still scorch the souls of the living, while new ones by Peadar O’Riada (on whose Trathan an Taoide the notes fell like leaves slowly pirouetting in the air) ensure the tradition never stultifies.

Highlights abounded. O’Carolan’s Farewell to Music had Hayes at his most visceral, beginning over a drone effect from Sanna, with the violin building from its usual diaphanousness to a coarser, almost braying sound, and then gradually fading again, with Sanna just cross-hatching the shadows of Hayes’ notes.

On so many pieces, including The Road to Cashel and O’Rourke’s Reel, Hayes’ rhythmic sensibility was stunningly sophisticated, as he draped the tune against the time so it felt impossibly light, yet had myriad little syncopated stings in the phrasing.

And always, as soon as a tune developed the slightest element of drive, his right leg rose and his right foot pumped quarter notes on the stage, earthing the beauty – and probably wearing out his right shoe rather faster than his left.

Good – but not great – Charlotte

MUSIC
Good Charlotte
Qudos Bank Arena, February 25
Reviewed by ROD YATES
★★★

Pop-punk bands don’t die, they just add more pyrotechnics to their live show.

Perhaps it’s a way to compensate for the fact that, 30 years in, Good Charlotte aren’t quite as fiery onstage as they once were.

Luckily, they have a catalogue of pop-punk songs that not only helped define the scene in the early 2000s, but is enjoying a second life as a soundtrack for a generation hellbent on reliving the glory days of their youth.

On that front, the band oblige with a set bursting with hits, from the joyous finale of The Anthem to the new-wave-tinged Keep Your Hands off My Girl and the outsider call-to-arms of debut single Little Things.

To the band’s credit they don’t lean solely on nostalgia, airing material from throughout their chameleonic career, including their eighth album, 2025’s highly enjoyable Motel Du Cap.

The new songs are greeted politely, which is probably the best a band at this stage of their career can hope for.

Album highlight Rejects is as catchy as anything in the Good Charlotte canon.

Pairing Bodies and Mean with a flat Actual Pain from the Generation Rx record, however, creates a mid-set lull from which the show takes a few songs to recover.

It’s hard to pick any glaring issues in the band’s performance, and vocalist Joel Madden and his guitar-playing twin brother Benji strike a welcome note of sincerity when acknowledging that Australia was the first country to embrace them.

And yet, something feels flat.

In its best moments, such as the raucous Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous and I Don’t Wanna Be in Love (Dance Floor Anthem), band and audience come together in a joyous, combustible wave of energy that, though born from nostalgia, feels very much alive and in the now.

Too often, though, the show feels like it’s cruising to its conclusion, the group making their way through the songs in a workmanlike fashion that is, ultimately, fine.

It makes for a show that is respectable rather than spectacular, solid rather than soaring.

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