Nice guys can come first: Just ask this Guy

MUSIC
Guy Sebastian
TikTok Entertainment Centre, April 30
Reviewed by MILLIE MUROI
★★★★½

More than two decades after winning Australian Idol, Guy Sebastian admits he can’t spring from one song to the next as easily as he used to.

But even while dancing and belting in a snug red suit under warm lights, his voice and stage presence barely falters.

He’s at home on stage but self-aware, weaving humour throughout the show while imbuing songs including Stand With You and No Reason to Stay with his trademark fervour.

That passion, tenderness and openness is not only etched in his face and lyrics but in the depth and timbre of his voice.

After years of touring and 10 albums, Guy Sebastian is using this opportunity to play, bringing his audience along on a fun and intimate journey from hits such as Battle Scars to his favourite song on his new album – The Keys, written for his wife.

The chemistry he has with his back-up singers, some of whom are from the Mt Druitt choir, was also effortless. They harmonised beautifully for songs such as Set In Stone and Carmen Smith’s rap solo in groovy number Who’s That Girl was refreshing, adding dimension and energy.

Sebastian is clearly an enduring artist. His vocal control is hard to fault and he is not only technically impressive – executing difficult runs and hitting high notes – but also able to strike a chord emotionally.

Even when singing Happy Birthday for a fan, the timeless R&B quality of his voice shines.

Despite some slower segments, and perhaps entertaining a few too many excited fans along the way, Sebastian is still able to keep us engaged.

He is also confident enough to walk through the audience asking for requests, singing everything from Prince’s Purple Rain to George Michael’s Faith.

Sebastian’s son, Archie Sebastian, also made an appearance, singing Whitney Houston’s I Have Nothing to a standing ovation.

Ending with a medley of earworms including Don’t Worry Be Happy and Like It Like That, as well as an encore including Choir, Sebastian ended on a high.

He is one of those rare artists who doesn’t need impressive production or stunts to put on a shimmering show. Instead, he trades on charisma, an inimitable voice and the ability and an act perfectly tailored to the fans.

MUSIC
Symphonic Cinema: The Planets
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Sydney Opera House, May 1
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★½

The role of music in cinema is usually to intensify salient moments and establish a mood (a single chord can tell you whether a scene is going to be tender or terrifying).

Symphonic Cinema, founded by Lucas Van Woerkum, broadly reverses that process, by backfilling an existing symphonic work with images and a wordless narrative, synchronised to a live performance by digital technology.

Van Woerkum’s Loss, receiving its first performance from the SSO under Benjamin Northey, overlaid Holst’s orchestral suite, The Planets with breathtaking images of cliffs, birds and the sea, dance sequences from Arts Umbrella Vancouver, and a wordless narrative of loss and grief enacted by cinematic stars Emma Thompson and Greg Wise.

For some listeners (novelist EM Forster put himself in this category), music is always a background to other thoughts, and the beautiful scenery and Thompson’s and Wise’s sensitive performances may provide a sympathetic stimulus and enrichment to their own imaginings.

For others, great musical works spin their own compelling, uniquely musical narrative, and such images and stories are at best extraneous and at worst distracting. Although the images were beautiful and the story discerningly performed, I found the film and music sat awkwardly with one another, each evoking different types of emotionalism.

In the opening movement, Mars: the Bringer of War, dancers writhed in the earth, abstract shapes mutated and, at the climax, Thompson, nervous and uncertain, was joined in a procession by dancers hooded like an angel of death. In Venus, the Bringer of Peace, Thompson walked through an artist’s studio perched vertiginously on shoreline cliffs, conveying alienation from her own space.

Later movements became a little more explicit but spoilers are best avoided. Northey and the SSO projected the bellicose rhythms of Mars with weight and heft. The slower music had transparent clarity, nowhere was it unduly rushed. The closing texture of Neptune, the Mystic, sung by the women of Sydney Philharmonia Choirs from the northern galleries, receded ethereally into the infinite.

The concert also began by peering into the infinite with Charles Ives’s searching short piece, The Unanswered Question. Then came a grippingly energised performance by SSO percussionist Rebecca Lagos of Nigel Westlake’s percussion concerto When the Clock Strikes Me, reshaped from its original 2006 version.

Framed within clock-like ticking figurations, and combining a fast-slow-fast structure into a continuous movement, the work’s trajectory is reminiscent of one of those magical trips by a child into a dream world where things rapidly become wild and exaggerated, and the line between vivid reality and impossible fantasy blurs.

In Lagos’s immensely capable hands, it was not only a brilliant tour-de-force. With fluid ease of limb and wrist, minute precision, and innately musical rhythmic sense, she darted, Ariel-like, around an intimidating array of instruments, drawing listeners into Westlake’s hypnotic world of constantly mutating rhythmic organisms until the dream suddenly ended with a rushing final clap.