"The great thing about touring without a band," says Rufus Wainwright, seated on his piano stool in a glittery jacket and satin silver trousers like an art-house Liberace, "is that you don't have to pay anybody." This latest in the night's string of bon mots is greeted with appreciative laughter, but the advantages of this stripped-back venture outweigh mere financial savings.
Usually the most elaborate and maximalist of performers, fond of hiring orchestras and gospel choirs, Wainwright is touring a best of album, Vibrate, with no more than a grand piano and his wits. He pulls it off because his charged, exuberant songs stand up, even shorn of their rococo frills and trills and their baroque musical flourishes.
Wainwright's precocious talent has always been to present his raw, confessional material with gloriously melodramatic showiness. Rich with majestic melodies, soaring choruses and lyrical zingers, tonight's two new songs, Argentina and Friendship, sing the praises of his husband, Jörn Weisbrodt, and could be the work of a 21st-century Cole Porter.
Wainwright was clearly stung by Liza Minnelli's disdain for his Broadway recital of the songs of her mother, Judy Garland. Tonight his half-sister, Lucy Wainwright Roche, performs a gawky impersonation of Liza with a Z as he sings his barbed response, Me and Liza. The night's highlight, though, is a truly stunning, pitch-perfect a capella rendition of the towering Candles.
Wainwright is on a mission to raise money, via PledgeMusic, to record his first opera, Prima Donna, and for his encore rendition of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah he is joined by a 50-strong choir of people who have each paid £100 for the privilege. This valiant amateur-night spectacle stands at odds to the evening's main lesson: sometimes, even for Rufus Wainwright, less is more.
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