St. Vincent's work has been grounded in a desire to push boundaries from the very beginning. Annie Clark's songs, which combine sculptural vocals, powerful guitar lines, and surreal wit with a deeply personal perspective, create a kind of pop music that mirrors the artist and her listeners alike. While David Bowie and Kate Bush are certainly influences, she has also spoken openly about the impact the orchestrations of early Disney films had on her: "All of that is your first taste of magic," she said on the This Song podcast in 2019.<\/p>\n
Related: St. Vincent: "My most awkward celebrity encounter? I'm sweating right now telling you about it.".<\/p>\n
Last year, she debuted at the BBC Proms with a program featuring orchestral reworkings of her repertoire. The Jules Buckley Orchestra and a rock band performed new arrangements of classic hits like the playfully eccentric "Digital Witness," as well as compositions from her latest album, 2024's "All Born Screaming." The experiment was so successful that it spawned a live album, Live in London!, and now a touring show in which Clarke, conductor Buckley, and a touring band (keyboardist Rachel Eckroth, guitarist Robert Ellis, bassist Alle Futterer, and drummer John Hadfield) perform with local orchestras.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, Clark and her team took to Boston Symphony Hall to join forces with the Boston Pops, the incredibly diverse division of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Clark graduated from Berklee College of Music, located a short walk from the hall, in the early 2000s, and at the beginning of her performance, she deadpanned, "This is the first time Euripides has seen us play," referring to one of the 16 replicas of the statues adorning the hall's walls.<\/p>\n
The Athenian playwright and others in attendance were treated to sweeping renditions of Clarke's work, beginning with a trilogy of songs from All Born Screaming, including the feverishly dreamlike "Hell Is Near" and the existentially troubling "Violent Time." The latter gained new depth thanks to a new arrangement: the pulsating electro beat of the recorded version gave way to a more abrasive rhythm that framed the orchestral chaos and underscored the underlying pain: "I must have dreamed \/ I fell in a well \/ Waking up, waking up in hell," Clarke growled as the strings and brass went wild.<\/p>\n
Clarke's guitar playing was also on display throughout the show, with a stage manager demonstrating various instruments from her arsenal at opportune moments. "Marrow," a spirited track from her 2009 album "Actor," gained added urgency thanks to her insistent guitar work. In "Now, Now," from her 2007 debut album "Marry Me," her delicate arpeggios contrasted with ghostly string harmonics, lending a lightness to the tongue-in-cheek verses, and its melodic finale\u2014"You don't mean it, apologize," repeated often enough to transform the words into an imperious command\u2014was even more powerful.<\/p>\n
The show's central number was the composition Smoking Section, which closes the 2017 album Masseduction. .<\/em> Here, it was transformed into a suite, with an opening section where the rapid sounds of brass and keyboard instruments created a sense of the churning of an anxious mind, a fitting lyrical prelude to the song, in which the heroine struggles to survive a depressive state, yearning for a hopeful future. The final refrain, "This is not the end," was made even more poignant by the orchestra, as if enveloping the listener in solace.<\/p>\n From there, Clarke's demeanor lightened, though the musicianship remained sky-high, and by the time the setlist reached 2014's frantic, selfie-era-indictment "Digital Witness," she was dancing around the stage, offering the mic to various musicians so they could add their signature Valley Girl drawls. During the powerful "New York," she appeared in the crowd, wearing a hat handed to her by an excited front-row member, and offered hugs and high fives, and during the encore's opening "Candy Darling," she plopped down on the stage floor, dancing girlishly and crooning her 2021 ode to the "queen of southern Queens." She steeled herself for the closing track, "Slow Disco," a ballad called "Masseduction," which features strings on the recording. The orchestral arrangement was larger in scope, but not by much, capping an evening that showed how Clarke's art-pop has always been closely intertwined with high art.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the very beginning, St. Vincent's work has been rooted in a desire to push the boundaries of what's possible. Annie Clark's songs, which combine sculptural vocals, powerful guitar parts, and\u2026<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14681,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-muzyka","hvn-theme-has-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/imgist.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/imgist.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/imgist.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imgist.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imgist.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/imgist.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14680\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imgist.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/imgist.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imgist.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imgist.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}