True to his word, Rufus Wainwright basked in contradictions at his recent Park West show, indulging in both his self-affirmed romantic and masochistic sides with a roller coaster ride of emotional highs and lows, delivered with a lyrical bombast more akin to Greek tragedy than the plain old pop song.
And as easily as he wore his heart on his sleeve, so too did he shrug it off at each song’s end with an uproarious burst of humor to start the process all over again.
Such obvious bits of eccentricity are natural for the son of folk legends Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, but Saturday’s performance was singularly Rufus Wainwright’s, and the man’s talent spoke far beyond what any musical inheritance could.
In a year marked by the high production values of hip-hop and bubble-gum pop, Wainwright’s self-titled debut was 1998’s critical surprise, a full collection of songs echoing the elements of an entire century’s worth of popular music. Embedded in the classical songwriting tradition of George Gershwin but speaking directly at the more cynical and diverse world of the present, Wainwright is something of a pop revivalist and a new voice in his own right, celebrating his music as both art form and a simple expression of joy.
Perhaps what’s most shocking about Wainwright is how such a young artist — who dropped out of music school twice and never took well to formal training — so successfully evokes the spirit of America’s great songwriters: the aforementioned Gershwin, Cole Porter, Brian Wilson. Indeed, one finds in the 24-year-old the same kind of prodigious spark which Wilson, directing studio musicians twice his age, had on the Beach Boys’ legendary “Pet Sounds.”
Such high praise stems first and foremost from his voice, an instrument of incredible range and the mouthpiece for his vivid wordplay. There’s a certain operatic quality to his pronunciation and his lyrics, in the way he ends “In My Arms” in a solemn but earnest “Still I pray to God/ this song will end happily,” in the way his lilting falsetto seemed breathless on “Barcelona,” as a bowed bass and a drum kick embellished a yearning for solace and contemplation.
Wainwright prefers not to rock so much as to move his audience through song, and his band — especially drummer Kevin Hupp — provided the atmospheric foundation from which Wainwright’s piano and acoustic guitar numbers could flourish in their multiple personas. What the conventional band setup lost without the record’s orchestration, Wainwright and his chums made up for with grandiose and essentially orchestral tempo changes: “The Greek Song” started in the spirit of tango but drifted away as a marchlike waltz; “Imaginary Love” playfully switched between baroque and Tin Pan Alley piano lines with carefree glee.
Wainwright’s voice conveys a rich yet solemn quality, but his topics of song cavorted irreverently through Viking mythology, Mozart and the “forbidden love of cowboys” with a sense of flirtation and humor that belied his dark melodies.
Keeping up with the multifaceted and exuberant Wainwright, who laughed at his own mistakes and beckoned the crowd to enjoy the cunning simplicity of jangly pop numbers “California” and “April Fools,” proved to be a task in its own right. But when the last rollicking notes of “Foolish Love” rang true and Wainwright hoisted his white flag to his romantic dispositions, his giddy smile and thumbs up was all the audience needed to know about what was before them: a transcendent performance, a transcendent performer.
