American musician Beck performs the first of his two concerts with 76 members of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra at Roy Thomson Hall on Friday.Jag Gundu/Supplied
Two turntables and a microphone – and a symphony. In case you were wondering where Beck David Hansen is at these days.
The Gen X icon and musical shape-shifter gave the second of his two concerts with 76 members of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra at Roy Thomson Hall on Saturday. It was a lovely collaboration and a worthwhile calculation: More was less, in the best possible way.
“We brought some backup tonight,” Beck said, by way of introducing the TSO. The orchestra wore its typical black; Beck’s suit, accompanied by an open-necked white shirt, was dark, too. Turning to the back of the auditorium, he addressed the fans in the choir loft, telling them he’d be sure to fix the hair on the back of his head. The 55-year-old Californian wears his blond in a perm these days, like a post-pixie-cut Mia Farrow.
Beck’s own band (drums, keyboards and electric bass) was squeezed to the extreme left of the stage. The title attraction mostly strummed a tobacco sunburst acoustic guitar, with the occasional appearance of a nifty-looking but harmless electric model.
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The highlight came early in the form of Lonesome Tears, off his brooding boo-hoo masterpiece from 2002, Sea Change: “How could this love, ever changing, never change the way I feel?”
His voice was passionless, the strings doing the heavy lifting on a piece that rose epically. Outside of an opera house, I don’t know if I’ve ever heard sorrow presented so triumphantly. Roll over Verdi, then, tell Puccini the news.
Though Beck began his career as a lo-fi, Loser-singing, bong-hitting, hip-hopping slacker, his early sonic imperfections, a reaction to the aural slickness of the 1980s, were the mark of a talented conceptualist.
He comes by his musical gifts naturally: His father is David Campbell, the Toronto-born composer-arranger whose credits include work with Beyoncé, Rush and the Rolling Stones and films such as Brokeback Mountain. He arranged the strings and conducted the orchestra for his son’s Sea Change and the 2014 companion album Morning Phase, and wrote the charts for Beck’s symphonic tours of this year and last.
Though the setlist drew heavily on those two melancholic albums, the live presentations weren’t carbon copies of the original recordings. When Beck strapped on his Silvertone electric for Paper Tiger, the funky riffs of the studio version were distinctly underplayed.
Counterintuitively, the heft of a symphony gave the music a streamlined aesthetic. The songs, without the noise, heat and drama of a rock ‘n’ roll performance, were clarified. At times Beck stood with hands in pockets watching the orchestra work, a crooner-composer admiring his own chords and clefs.
While Beck no doubt pays a pretty penny for the local orchestras he hires – including Orchestre Métropolitain in Montreal – the notes hit by Jason Falkner on his Fender Mustang bass stood out clearly.
As on all the tour dates, the orchestra was led by Edwin Outwater, who lent a certain physicality to the occasion. The current music director of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music held the same position with some acclaim from 2007 to 2017 with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony.
The arrangements often had a groovy cinematic flair. An appreciative audience took in Beck’s version of Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime (from the Michel Gondry film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and his own Ramona (from Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, filmed in Toronto).
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Beck introduced his bossa nova number Tropicalia as something to “lighten the mood,” which it did compared with a pair of Scott Walker covers.
Heavy mood or not, the songwriter did not appear to be emotionally reconnecting to the bittersweetness of Sea Change and Morning Phase. When Beck brought his Sea Change tour to Toronto’s Massey Hall in 2002, his heartbreak was on display. Twenty-three years later, not so much.
For the concert’s encore set, the TSO was dismissed. “Now we can relax,” he said.
The a cappella One Foot in the Grave was a call-and-response salute to the folk-blues of the Sonny Terry variety, complete with harmonica. The convincing falsetto soul of 1999’s Debra was an example of Beck’s ability to make the most of whatever style might be in vogue.
He sang in the middle of dozens of chairs vacated by the violinists and the rest. It felt like an after-hours wind-down; had Beck worn a bow tie, it would have been loosened at that point.
The finale was Loser, the 1994 anthem for those feeling out of step. “In the time of chimpanzees, I was a monkey,” he sang. Let the others ape. Beck is an original.
