‘This is for Ukraine’: Twenty years on, American Idiot is as relevant as ever

“This is for Ukraine,” Armstrong declares before launching into Holiday, the Armageddon-tinged protest song that itself goes off like a bomb.

With Boulevard of Broken Dreams and Wake Me Up When September Ends, the band turns from punk brats to genuine rock stars and even after all these years the band finds ways to make them seem fresh and moving.

Let us pray that 20 years on the songs are just as exhilarating but a lot less chilling. Can I get another amen?

MUSIC
MARIZA
Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, March 3
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★

The lights go down, and Luis Guerreiro’s dazzling Portuguese guitar splinters the silence. Mariza first appears as a silhouette, only her platinum hair and sparkly gown catching the dim light. Then she unleashes the phenomenon that’s her contralto voice, a voice that may have darkened slightly in the 18 years since she was last in Sydney but that’s lost none of its ear-pinning power. This time, the Mozambique-born Portuguese singer, who has taken Lisbon’s fado music to new audiences around the world, was chattier than I recall, telling us how she began singing in her parents’ taverna when she was five and that her first album, recorded 26 years ago, was intended as a gift for her father, not a commercial release.

The world had other ideas.

Mariza immediately hits an intensity most singers aspire to reach at their concert’s pinnacle, and then she sustains it for song after song. Sometimes, it could seem as if all the sadness and despair in the world had been given voice or as if she were conjuring up the ghosts of all who have ever suffered. Meanwhile, her willowy arms and saucer eyes emphasised every note, compounding every emotion.

She could discard her microphone and still fill the Concert Hall with her voice, making one suspect that, despite the exemplary sound quality, she and her quintet were slightly over-amplified.

And what a band.

Besides Guerreiro (who was here 18 years ago), Carlos Phelipe Ferreira played equally dazzling acoustic guitar, and Gabriel Salles contributed sparse, apposite bass. Joao Frade’s accordion offered a contrasting, swirling sonic world to the guitars, with its unusually rich low notes particularly evident in the introduction to Meu Fado Meu, and drummer Mario Costa coloured and dramatised the music with a hybrid kit offering a wealth of sounds, which his virtuosity expanded further.

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But the band’s primary purpose was to launch Mariza’s spearing voice, to let her bare her heart on songs such as Beijo de Saudade (roughly Kiss of Longing), fado being Portugal’s blues or flamenco. Its slow tempos underline the desolation often present in the lyrics and in the singing of the likes of Mariza and her great predecessor, Amalia Rodrigues, to whom she again paid tribute.

When she has veered closer to pop music on her records, the songs can sometimes seem emotionally limp compared with those in the fado tradition or with those reflecting her Mozambican roots. Yet in concert there’s no sense of this because her commitment is unwavering and her presence compelling, while her band lends to every song the kind of authority that a great orchestra does to classical music.

Besides, she knows the importance of lightening the mood with her occasional party pieces, such as the enthusiastically received encore, Maria Joana. The spell was only broken – and repeatedly so – by those audience members who rudely and fatuously insisted on filming her.

MUSIC
Simone Young conducts Elgar and Vaughan Williams
Opera House Concert Hall, February 28
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★½

Moving from the front desk to the soloist’s position to play Elgar’s demanding Violin Concerto, Sydney Symphony concertmaster Andrew Haveron gave a commanding performance of majestic power, sinewy expression and rewarding musical richness. As might be expected, he interacted with the orchestra he usually leads with a refined ear, picking up the second phrase of the first movement’s main theme so as to continue the thought but gently darken the mood.

When Elgar’s expansive, striving textures called for it, he soared above the orchestral sound with heroic tone and impeccable intonation, heating up the coda of the weighty first movement to create a moment of stirring excitement. In the slow movement he and conductor Simone Young drew out the elegiac long line with tender sweetness, rising to searing intensity towards the end.

With an incisively carved flourish, Haveron brought the finale scintillatingly to life. For the cadenza, Elgar writes delicate tapping textures for accompanying strings to create a magical background of glistening presence while the soloist draws the music back to reflective melancholy for the reintroduction of the first movement’s opening idea.

In addition to its musical rewards, this performance was a reminder of Sydney’s good fortune in having a violinist of Haveron’s calibre leading its orchestra week by week.

The concert opened with a drily, skilfully orchestrated new work by Carl Vine, Dreams Undreamt, which propelled its way through eight minutes duration with energised syncopated rhythms, picking out irregular accents and transitioning to new tempi to ramp up the momentum, while raucous cow-bells barracked noisily at the back (which may be why the dreams remained undreamt).

This was part of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s 50 Fanfares project, though with eight symphonies under his belt, a composer of Vine’s experience might have merited a larger canvas in order to have the space to develop ideas more fully.

The final work was a rarity, at least in Sydney: Vaughan Williams’ Pastoral Symphony (Symphony No. 3). Although pervaded by subtly astringent modal harmony and gently billowing wistfulness, this 1922 work, is, as the composer noted, a response to the horrors of World War I.

Avoiding any hint of the Austro- German symphonic tradition, Vaughan Williams seems to block out his own experience as an ambulance driver by evoking the glories of the countryside he cherished around him in northern France even amid the devastation.

Young led the delicate shades of the opening (reminiscent of Debussy’s La Mer), and the piquant solo motives that emerge on violin, viola and woodwind with carefully shaded balance and translucent clarity. David Elton played the offstage natural trumpet solo of the second movement, reminiscent of a military bugler, with coloured and incisive yet softly haunting tone.

The third movement is a heavy-footed country dance followed by a swift, quiet coda that fleets away like something from Midsummer Night’s Dream. To frame the last movement, Vaughan Williams introduces an off-stage wordless soprano solo, which Lauren Fagan delivered from the high organ gallery in phrases of tumbling natural beauty, evoking some invisible deity heard across fields.