The Canadian singer-songwriter has packed his bags for three thematic evenings at the Cité de la Musique. We attended the concerts on Monday and Tuesday. Moments of great beauty.
Intense, ardent, with a touch of stress and a good dose of self-deprecation… Monday October 9 at the Philharmonie de Paris, on the stage of the Cité de la Musique, Rufus Wainwright offered two hours ten minutes of joy, d emotion and humor to the audience. He gave the first concert in an ambitious trilogy aiming to span some thirty years of career. Tuesday October 10, the concert lasted about a quarter of an hour longer than the day before… The Rufus-Retro-Wainwright-Spectivenon-chronological, is made up of three thematic evenings: Songs of youth and addiction (October 9), Songs of love and desire (October 10) and finally Songs of disdain and resistance (October 11). Or three distinct programs to (re)discover a repertoire with arrangements different from those of the studio versions with sophisticated orchestrations.
Closer to the essence of the songs
Minimalist arrangements, therefore, to savor the songs in the flavor and power of purity. And just three men on stage: Rufus Wainwright, gray beard, shoulder-length hair and black jumpsuit, his guitarist Zak Hobbs and his pianist Jacob Mann. With a fourth protagonist, Gioele Amaro, present through the superb video illustrations projected behind the stage. And finally, guests for a dotted dialogue throughout the concert, “a last minute idea”, explains the Canadian singer to the audience. On Monday, director and journalist Thierry Klifa, seated at the far right of the stage, asked Wainwright a few questions. Tuesday, it was the turn of actress Alkistis Poulopoulou, friend of the singer, the opportunity to hear sometimes funny, sometimes moving secrets. For the tireless Canadian, this mini-festival constitutes a digression as impressive as it is original in the middle of his American tour.
Rufus Wainwright, sometimes standing at the front of the stage, sometimes at the piano installed in the center, sometimes equipped with an acoustic guitar, performs, every evening, a good twenty songs, some of which were not played on scene for years. At his side, Jacob Mann, switching from keyboards to piano, and Zak Hobbs on electric guitar. At the back, suspended above the musicians, a large rectangular screen on which the videos accompanying the songs are projected.
A singing tour like in a music room
Rufus Wainwright, who speaks mainly in French, displays a disarming simplicity and naturalness. Monday evening, he makes a mistake on the piano and has to try more than once to finish the first song of the concert, Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk. “I’m very nervous, so please be kind,” he said to the audience who encouraged him with applause. “You know, I tend to end my concerts with this song…” A little later, he approaches another title on the guitar with a little apprehension, confident that the chords are still fresh in his head… Wainwright thus performs his Parisian singing tour with naturalness and warmth, as if he had invited everyone to a music room by the fire, slipping in anecdotes and memories here and there, talking about his coming out, his husband “present in the room”his daughter, his musical family, and even his dog Siegfried…
To accentuate the intimate side, the artist performs several songs in piano-voice. On Tuesdays, he sings a cappella Candles, a title he wrote in homage to his late mother. This moment constitutes one of the highlights of the two evenings, as is the moving memory that Rufus Wainwright evokes just before singing. He remembers that after his mother’s death, he entered different churches in Montreal with the hope of lighting a candle. But two of them were out of stock, and the third only had electric candles, so the young artist threw in the towel. Later, during a stay in Paris, he had the idea of entering Notre-Dame and he found the candles that he had missed so much in Quebec. “Maybe that’s what my mother wanted, a cathedral!” he joked to brush away the emotion with which he remembered this loss.
A hypnotizing voice
Rufus Wainwright’s Parisian singing tour is a succession of small miracles where we savor or rediscover the poetry of his texts, the beauty of his melodies sometimes crossed by dissonances and disturbing harmonies, and above all his voice deep, powerful, strikingly expressive. Certain songs hypnotize us, reinforced by video projections where Greek statues parade, a Thinker of Rodin on the waves, a flooded cathedral where a meteorite flutters slowly approaching us, a man with a beard covered in white powder… Among the most magnificent visual illustrations, we will remember these haunting sequences, sometimes distorted, sometimes adorned with computer-generated images, Hollywood kisses where we recognize Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, James Dean, Fred Astaire and so many others…
The singing tour finally includes a few covers: Chelsea Hotel by Leonard Cohen, sung both evenings, then Across the Universe by the Beatles, sung on Tuesday. And songs in French: There Mound complainta 1955 title co-signed by Jean Renoir, which Wainwright had taken for the film’s soundtrack red Milloffered both evenings, and a song formerly performed by Arletty, Heart of Parisian, offered to the public on Tuesday. We inevitably wonder what he is preparing for the last evening, this Wednesday…
His “Dream Requiem” world premiere in Paris in 2024
During his previous visit to Paris, on March 30, 2022 at the Grand Rex, Rufus Wainwright achieved the feat of bringing Catherine Deneuve on stage to sing, which she had never done before. Together, they performed Havana smoking god by Serge Gainsbourg, a duet title that she had previously recorded with the French artist.
A regular on French stages, Rufus Wainwright will return on June 14, 2024 in Paris for a world premiere at the Radio France auditorium. The eclectic musician is currently composing a requiem – a musical form that fascinates him – entitled Dream Requiem, to a text by Lord Byron. On stage, the piece will be created by the Philharmonic Orchestra, the Maîtrise and the Radio France Choir under the respective direction of Mikko Franck, Marie-Noëlle Maerten Guillemette Daboval, with soprano Anna Prohaska.
Furthermore, on Tuesday evening, during his casual dialogue with Alkistis Poulopoulou, Rufus Wainwright furtively mentioned a theatrical project supposed to remain confidential for the moment… The 50-year-old artist has definitely not finished surprising us.