Issues with the precision of the dancing aside, what’s not to like? Party boats only intruded upon our enjoyment twice and the weather was kind. It’s the perfect answer to the question of where to take a visitor to Sydney.

Psychedelic Frenzy
Ensemble Offspring
The Neilson, March 23
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★

Italian composer Fausto Romitelli died tragically from cancer in 2004, at age 41, giving him just 10 years longer than Schubert to make his musical mark. He did so, though that’s where the resemblance to Schubert ends.

His music combines dense, anarchic textures that draw on the complexity of European avant garde styles of the mid-20th and the hallucinatory wildness of rock music from what is sometimes called the “psychedelic era”. The result is not so much a thrash into oblivion as an exploration of psychological states in which strong ideas burst into the mind and then fragment and dissolve as though destroyed by their own violent energy.

This process leaves behind a sense of iridescence as though a new awareness has been born. Sydney had a chance to experience his approach in 2015 when Sydney Chamber Opera and Ensemble Offspring presented his opera An Index of Metals and Offspring returned to his work in this concert with his palendromically- titled ensemble piece Amok Koma (drawing its title from an album by German punk band Abwarts).

Amok Koma, for a heterogenous group of nine wind, string, keyboard and percussion players, starts with grand rhetorical chordal gestures that quickly begin to slide and smear before coming to rest on a pause. The idea is repeated, becoming more extreme and frenetic.

When things quieten at the end, only hushed filaments of sound remain (made ghostly with quiet whistles and blown wine bottles) like pale sunlight through a smoking ruin. The concert began with a very short, extremely hyperactive work, beijing, by Austrian composer Bernhard Gander for two saxophones.

Kate Moore’s Joyful Melodies for Marimba (Claire Edwardes) comprised undulating arpeggios in minimalist style with occasional connections and disjunctions of voice-leading.

Wang Lu’s Cloud Intimacy mixed distorted references to languorously sensual Romantic gestures of love (including quotations from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde) with shrieking clarinets and frenetic typing, texting and musical representations of the right-swiping gestures with which modern love is dismissed.

Hannah Peel’s Neon, in three parts, started with brittle rhythmic patterns on the piano while the other players added brushed chords like an image caught fleetingly as one sweeps past. The second part combined plucked string notes and clicking atmospherics on a digital track with long flute notes and an improvisatory clarinet part to create a shimmering surface that evades depth.

The last part used sustained sounds receding into the distance, bringing to mind, in modern form, Robert Frost’s line, ‘I have looked down the saddest alleyways’, from the poem I have been one acquainted with the night.

ROCK
Wilco
Sydney Opera House, March 21
Reviewed by BERNARD ZUEL
★★★★½

Greatness is overrated and certainly overused. We elevate in emotion and remember in a glow and sometimes, years on, we realise, yeah, maybe it wasn’t quite that special.

So there’s a caveat to be placed on reviews like this that declare Wilco are one of the great bands and that this was one of the great (not perfect, but very close) shows. But dammit with the caveat, so much about this night thrilled to the core.

For long-time travellers there was a setlist that traversed their decades-long career as if it were a box of no-orange-ones family favourites. They dipped into their 1995 debut A.M. with the breezy ’60s 12-string guitar jangle and punchy drums of Box Full of Letters – which crowned the first hour – as comfortably as they approached last year’s trotting-paced Evicted, which has just enough of a hint of Raspberry Beret to cast sunlight on to its grey sky story.

They fired up songs from the slightly better-known second album Being There, via the silver satin-tinged parenthetical double hit of Outtasite (Outta Mind) and I Got You (at the End of the Century) – which closed the night with a Who-like blend of midland rock fuelled by power pop – with the same ease they brought to the waltz shuffle and earned wisdom of 2022’s I Am My Mother.

For aficionados of the subtleties of rhythm there was John Stirratt (whose electric bass on Handshake Drugs was so warm and woody it sounded as if he were playing an upright) and Glenn Kotche (whose drums could hint and suggest through Cruel Country or invoke the clamour of collapsing new buildings in Via Chicago) to play forward and back like some musical Isaac Heeney.

Even if the opening seven-song bracket of laid-back country shapes, which began with the forlorn trans-urbanite Hell Is Chrome, was one or two songs too long, for lovers of the broadest range of Americana, Wilco can add to those the Randy Newman-ish Hummingbird, the folk charmer California Stars, the wistful bright rock of Heavy Metal Drummer, and the blend of resonator guitar, sound effects, decoupling breakdown and anxiety that squeezes into I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.

And for those for whom the possibilities of guitar remain open, there was the small thing of wonder that was the doubled solo in Side With the Seeds (Nels Cline and Pat Sansone entwined), the dovetailed climax of Bird Without a Tail/Base of My Skull (Cline and Sansone duelling into acceptance), and the closing-out triple-guitar feedback (Cline, Sansone and Jeff Tweedy in a siren call, not a revolt) of Handshake Drugs. All of which still bow down to Impossible Germany, where the liquid guitars pour honey as a prelude to Cline’s tour-de-force solo that in 10 minutes covered New Orleans and Oklahoma, New York and west Texas, Los Angeles and Macon.

I haven’t even mentioned Tweedy’s vocals, which were simultaneously relaxed, aching, cutting and vibrant, especially in the dedication dressed as a caress of Jesus, Etc. Or the pleasure coursing through The Late Greats that prepared the way for the shot of energy in the dark pointedness of A Shot in the Arm. Let alone the sense of lightness that moved two hours on stage into next to nothing.

Great, great band. Great, great show.

POP
Jessica Mauboy
Enmore Theatre, March 23
Reviewed by MICHAEL RUFFLES
★★★½

New album, new tour, new record label, same relentlessly enthusiastic Jessica Mauboy.

The effervescent R&B pop diva made her Enmore Theatre debut on Saturday in front of an adoring crowd, delivering belter after belter with the occasional ballad thrown in for good measure.

Starting with the made-for-the-wedding-reception title track Yours Forever set the mood: optimistic, bright and polished pop from a seasoned and talented singer. The gospel-tinged Give You Love, last year a gold-certified single with Jason Derulo, was similarly uplifting.

Even the one about the neglectful ex-boyfriend (The Loneliest I Ever Was) and the one about heartbreak and missed opportunities (Little Too Late) end up being anthemic and empowering.

Mauboy sparkles so much you could be forgiven for thinking she was still trying to win Australian Idol after all these years. (Being runner-up doesn’t seem to have harmed her chart-topping career.)

About eight songs in, my dance partner confessed she felt like she was in church. Mauboy might even have prompted an “amen” in response to the barnstorming Can I Get a Moment? if she had asked.

But it’s less a holy experience than a wholesome one, less Jesus Christ Superstar and more Carly Rae Jepsen.

The show’s main flaw, if it could be called that, is that Mauboy’s show is too smooth, too slick, too perfect. The songs seem too cookie-cutter for such a great singer. She’s all diamond and no rough.

A middle run of ballads and some wanders down memory lane and reality-TV show competitions from the Voice judge helped vary the momentum. She describes her latest work as her “most honest and most vulnerable” and it provides emotional highlights with the regretful Sorry and the stripped-back, grief-stricken Goodbye.

Mauboy also played it safe with the greatest-hits selection. Post-Idol chart-toppers Running Back and Burn were delivered with aplomb, the hedonistic Pop a Bottle (Fill Me Up) unbridled in its joy. For those firmly in the church of Mauboy, it was a rapture. For the rest of us, it was a bright, uplifting night.

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