Live Review: Missy Higgins, Ben Abraham

Ben Abraham jokes between songs that audience members on their phones must be Googling him. He also colludes with us to give him a standing ovation when Missy Higgins invites him up for a duet later on. As it happens, his set is ovation-worthy; he's like a more soulful Josh Pyke.

With the MSO members in place, Missy Higgins skips onto the stage without fuss and tells us how excited she is to be performing her songs "with lots of strings and horns and stuff". The orchestra suits her emotive style, heightening the drama of Katie and Everyone's Waiting, and lending a cinematic quality to her covers of The Angels' No Secrets and The Drones' Shark Fin Blues.

She switches to regular band mode for a new song inspired by her recent obsession with post-apocalyptic literature. After tussling good-naturedly with her keyboard player over the key, she delivers with aplomb on this edgy, eerie ballad. She has more immediate success later with another new song, Song For Sammy, which she wrote while rocking her then-infant son to sleep. Its sentimental directness is well serviced by Higgins' ukulele fingerpicking.

Turns out Higgins was in the audience during Abraham's set, so she is onto our conspiracy. She tries to one-up him by pretending the standing ovation is her idea, but he's a step ahead of her, appearing at the back of the hall and striding down the centre aisle to wild applause. They spend a few moments complimenting each other's vocal runs before performing new song We Run So Fast, a nondescript acoustic ballad with Abraham supplying harmonies. If it's underwhelming, the next song, Higgins' up-tempo cover of Kylie's Confide In Me, perturbed by stabs of brass, strings and timpani, is anything but.

We start out thinking Warm Whispers, achingly restrained in its original form, probably lost something with the addition of an orchestra. But it builds to such a heart-shattering crescendo that eventually we're convinced. Higgins follows this up with "the saddest song I've ever written", Oh Canada; a song inspired by the death of Syrian refugee toddler Alan Kurdi - she's right, it's a tearjerker. Next, The Special Two is rendered sublime by the orchestra's slow build and some nifty interjections from the MSO harpist.

Higgins admits her songs aren't particularly danceable, but invites us to let it all hang out for her last few songs. We're a rather genteel audience, though, and only a handful abandon seats for the aisles during a slightly hammy rendition of Scar. "Thank you to the five people who danced," Higgins quips. "One of them was my husband." Still, she pushes on, closing the show on a high with her partied-up version of Perry Keyes' NYE and Steer, reborn as an epic with its own mini-overture from MSO.