Live Review: Lee Ranaldo, Mike Patton

As it generally does every Sydney Festival, the Recital Hall played host to two of the most important people in contemporary music, arguably at opposite ends of the musical spectrum (and attracting the same in audience membership), for a night of soundscape, composition, spoken word and conducting.
Lee Ranaldo, who is best known for his guitar work in the virtually unknown Sonic Youth, showed his deft touch also with other forms of sound. On the night he had the opportunity to share his own individual experience following Hurricane Sandy, the once-in-a-century storm that brought the city that never sleeps to a standstill late in 2012. Ranaldo's take on the natural disaster was what gave birth to the composition played on the night, and accompanied by the very marvellous Ensemble Offspring, a Sydney-based group of virtuoso performers, it made for a very thought-provoking experience, rich in texture and surprisingly leaning more toward the beatific side of mother nature rather than the destructive and indiscriminate force she can be. Interspersed throughout the piece were more contemporary moments featuring Ranaldo on vocals, accompanied by acoustic guitar and his signature Jazzmaster, and Conductor Roland Peelman, plus the surrounds of the sonically sound Recital Hall (with brilliant sound engineers to boot), the performance was exceptional and one of the best gigs the Sydney Fest has hosted.
Returning to Oz following his Mondo Cane performances here last year, Mr Mike Patton accompanied The Song Company, a six-piece a capella group, and again shared the stage with Ensemble Offspring and Peelman, presenting their interpretation of Luciano Verio's composition Laborintus II, an operatic piece composed in the mid-1960s to celebrate the 700th anniversary of Dante's birth. The complexity of the piece itself was at times difficult to keep up with, and much like the movies Memento or The Usual Suspects, its something one could easily return to in order to appreciate it in its full glory. To list all the things Mike Patton has done creatively in his time on earth would take up too much of the word count for this review, but on the night he lent his spoken word skills to both the accompanying mini-orchestra and the composition, which was predominantly in Italiano. Spontaneous and unpredictable, it was another exceptional performance, both emotionally engrossing (despite any understanding of the Italian language) and visually stunning; he again showed us the importance of the pursuit of music in its many forms.