Live Review: Paul Kelly

Paul Kelly

Paul Kelly has embarked on some interesting collaborations, but none more so or with such pleasing results as the song cycle, Conversations With Ghosts, which sees him co-composing with James Ledger, setting poems and some original lyrics to music played by an ensemble from Melbourne's Australian National Academy of Music.

The concert, as part of the Brisbane Festival, delighted the audience with its juxtaposition of Kelly's pure, true vocals and strumming guitar with the contemporary classical strains of the ANAM musos and Ledger's evocative keyboard samples. Featured was virtuoso recorder player Genevieve Lacey.

The musicians took to the dark, smoky stage (designed by bluebottle) with little fanfare and began their first plaintive and haunting piece as Kelly emerged from the shadows to penetrate the dissonant mood with that very familiar voice. Australia's own musical poet laureate of sorts went on to interpret the words of poets as diverse as W.B. Yeats, Judith Wright, Les Murray and Kenneth Slessor.

Kelly remarked that the experience of co-composing with Ledger was valuable but scary, with him learning about 'wonderful dissonance'… while Ledger was reacquainted with the chords C, F and G. To the listener, the musical dominance seemed more Ledger's, with a contemporary discordance that struck the right balance by not being too adventurous for the uninitiated and maintaining a suitably eerie mood.

Kelly introduced Emily Dickinson's One Need Not Be A Chamber To Be Haunted, which featured a beautiful interplay of recorder, strings, keyboard samples and speech-like vocals. Sailing To Byzantium by Yeats was another treat, with its circular harp pattern, trance-like piano and sonorous double bass. Then came a rousing rendition of Slessor's Five Bells, capturing the sadness of the poem written in honour of Slessor's friend who jumped off a Sydney ferry. Kelly's guitar and the resonant, discordant ensemble built to an explosive crescendo as Kelly struck the lamenting-sounding bells of the title. The audience roared its appreciation of this dynamic creation.

Once In A Lifetime, Snow by Les Murray featured Genevieve Lacey's plaintively wailing recorder punctuated by bursts of flutter tonguing that invoked a singing bird. Finally, there was a stellar performance of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Ring Out Wild Bells (from In Memoriam), starting with Ledger's evocative ocean sounds and engaging the whole ensemble of brass, woodwind, strings, piano, harp and bells in a sonorous cocktail that left the audience demanding more.

The encore eased them down with Kelly's I'm Not Afraid Of The Dark Anymore with the musicians vocally harmonising then moving into a somewhat off-kilter-sounding instrumental passage, rounding off the song cycle that “meditates on time, mortality, friendship and love”.