Opera House, Sydney, Feb. 4 + 5 + 6, 2014

[narrowdaylight]

http://www.noise11.com/news/diana-krall ... s-20131202

Diana Krall To Perform With Australian Orchestras

Diana Krall will return to Australia to perform with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and the Perth Symphony Orchestra in February.
The three-time Grammy winner and eight-time Juno winner has released 10 studio albums and sold more than 15 million records.
Diana will have a 42-piece orchestra when she performs in Sydney and Melbourne lead by her long-time conductor Alan Broadbent.

Diana Krall Australian tour dates are:

February 4 and 5, Sydney, Opera House
February 11, Melbourne, Hamer Hall
February 15 and 16, Margaret River, Leeuwin Estate

[narrowdaylight]

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/mus ... 2yluc.html

Jazz artist Diana Krall brings out her showbiz side

Jazz artist Diana Krall adds a touch of vaudeville to her shows.

Paul Keating used to talk about flicking the switch to vaudeville to keep the public and the press entertained. Who knew Canadian pianist and vocalist Diana Krall was listening and taking things quite literally?

Krall, a multiple Grammy winner for albums that blend fine playing and a slow-dissolving voice of cream and butter, is a rarity in being a disciplined jazz artist who sells in pop artist numbers (about 15 million albums at last count).

She is also a devotee of both brilliant bassist Ray Brown and 1950s crooner Rosemary Clooney.

She is a classicist willing to stretch herself into contemporary songwriting and is the wife of Elvis Costello and mother of their twin sons.

To those descriptions you can also add a very serious woman, and a shy one at that, who, as we saw on her earliest tours to Australia, would sometimes be a little awkward in trying for an audience connection between songs and a touch prickly with the media.

Her coming tour of Australia, with her band augmented again by symphony orchestras, might suggest more seriousness. But reviews of her most recent concerts in the US, performing versions of lesser-known songs from between the wars, have highlighted her growing development as a broader, old-style showbiz entertainer.

''I worked really hard and it took me about a year to put together a show that's really a theatre production with a movie screen [and] upright piano. There's a lot more conversation,'' Krall says from her New York home. ''It was recreating in my imagination a vaudeville show because my aunt was in vaudeville in the '20s in New York and I've always loved Radio Days, the Woody Allen film.''

While it is unlikely we will hear too many of those songs on this orchestral tour - though as she says, ''I'm a lot better choosing spontaneously'', so a mid-show solo bracket might be the surprise packet - its legacy should be obvious in the new Krall.

''I guess the more comfortable with myself I am and talk to the audience, the more I feel like we are experiencing something together,'' she says.

This turn may be a surprise, it seems the comedic Krall has been in there all along. When she talks about influences now, it is not just Frank Sinatra or Harry Connick jnr who she puts alongside the jazz giants.

''I credit Eddie Izzard as important an influence on me as any jazz musician,'' Krall says, while also admitting to having watched Ruth Cracknell religiously in Mother And Son.

''I've always loved comedy,'' she says. ''I grew up with the Marx Brothers, watching Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, every early comic. I just found Eddie Izzard the most intelligent and he makes you think. I saw the Billy Crystal show 700 Sundays recently and there was that same feeling of making you laugh and making you feel, knowing when to bring you in to go, 'I am not f---ing kidding here'. That's what the deal is: someone who can pull the audience in quiet and make you go [she gasps] like that. I didn't say that I can do that, but that's something you can strive for, giving an audience a reason to take that breath collectively.''

Maybe flicking the switch to vaudeville is not so surprising when you hear Krall talk about what her life is like now, not that long after turning 49.

''I'm having the most fun I've had in my life,'' she says. ''Having a really relaxed, really fun time. And it's a nice place to be. I was talking to my son today about what our job is as parents and he said your job is to make us laugh, mummy.''

Diana Krall plays with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House on February 4 and 5.

Tickets will go on sale at 9am on Friday, December 6.

[narrowdaylight]

Tickets: http://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/whatson ... krall.aspx

[narrowdaylight]

The official website has added a thirth Sydney date: Februari 6, 2014: http://www.dianakrall.com/tour.aspx

[narrowdaylight]

http://music.ninemsn.com.au/blog.aspx?b ... ments=true

'It's wonderful': Diana Krall charms Sydney Opera House audience

Jazz artist Diana Krall sauntered onstage at the Sydney Opera House last night, hiding her face behind her hair, waving awkwardly and struggling to disguise a visible case of the nerves.

But the Concert Hall was lulled when the Grammy winning artist let her voice and the keys of her Steinway piano do the talking ... through jazz.

Pure escapism at its finest, there's something mystical about Diana's contralto vocals and her ability to transform any classic jazz or blues tune without sounding like an ordinary cover band.

After all, two Grammys, eight Juno awards and nine gold albums is not something awarded to your ordinary Sunday sesh jazz quartet down at the local bowlo.

It's the simple things in Diana's performance that set her apart from your average Joe. The improvisation, the voice and the passion, it's all there, but with Diana Krall, there's an off-the-Richter-scale level of charisma that can't be learned. The woman just has it!

Her endearing disjointed banter in-between songs had the audience in hysterics as she told elaborate stories of life with hubby Elvis Costello and their two seven-year-old sons, Dexter Henry Lorcan and Frank Harlan James.

Every now and then she would get side-tracked mid-story with, "well that's all I have to say about that" or "that story has nothing to do with this next song", but the audience thrived on her awkward charm.

Crooning nods to old favourites such as Nat King Cole, Neil Young, Dusty Springfield and Ray Charles, it's no wonder this Canadian singer has sold almost 15 million albums worldwide. Far out!

With this in mind, it's a strange combination to mix the randomness of jazz with the complexities of a symphony orchestra, but within the atmosphere of the epic Opera House, it's hard to deny the spectacle of Diana Krall.

[narrowdaylight]

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/mu ... 818849707#

Diana Krall a talent with great songs but sum is less than the parts


Diana Krall with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Conductor Alan Broadbent.
Sydney Opera House. February 4.

THE term "easy listening" divides music lovers. To some it is a safety net, a guarantee that one needn't worry about anything unsavoury spoiling one's enjoyment. To others it is like being stuck in an elevator with Kenny G.

Canadian star Diana Krall is a great talent. She has sold 15 million albums and since the mid-1990s has helped bring the work of great 20th-century songwriters and composers back into the pop mainstream. She's a gifted piano player, too, and her voice can soar and seduce when she's pushed.

This wasn't a pushy performance, however.

Krall complained of jet lag at one point, which might go some way to explain why, armed with a bunch of great songs, a hot trio of bass, drums and guitar and an army of horns, strings, and woodwinds, the temperature in the Sydney Opera House concert hall rose rarely above lukewarm.

There were moments of sparkle. Krall likes to mix it up with her interpretations, calling on contemporary writers such as Tom Waits and Neil Young as well as Cole Porter, Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields. Porter's classic Cheek to Cheek closed the show with plenty of vim and vigour, particularly in the brush chops of drummer Karriem Riggins, with Krall animated on piano.

So too she put soul into a beautifully sparse medley of Young's A Man Needs a Maid and Heart of Gold from his album Harvest and Waits's brisk rumble Jockey Full of Bourbon.

Nor could one question the performance of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra under Alan Broadbent's baton. They added suitable melodrama to Antonio Carlos Jobim's Quiet Nights, the title song of Krall's 2012 album. Beyond that, one would have to question whether their presence added much more than gravitas to the occasion, however.

Indeed, the larger ensemble playing on Love Letters Straight From Your Heart, Pick Yourself Up and, for the encore, Burt Bacharach's The Look of Love, served only to give the material an unrewarding schmaltzy sheen.

Krall has graced the same stage before, just with a trio, and displayed more energy and more exciting dynamics than emerged on Monday night. She is capable of such greatness, but we got only a glimpse of it here.

[narrowdaylight]

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/mus ... 320vs.html

Diana Krall review: Opening up becomes her

Shy songstress reveals rawness, wit and vivacity.

Reviewer rating: 4 stars out of 5

About nine years ago – well into her phenomenally successful career – Diana Krall began to come out of her shell. Now the need for that shell is almost gone. Having gradually grown chattier and more at ease with the frightening reality of an audience over the years, this time she dared to let us glimpse the engaging humour behind the shyness; dared to let us in on fragments of her private life with husband Elvis Costello, their twin sons, her father and late mother.

This would usually be irrelevant in reviewing a jazz concert, but with Krall it seems that the more relaxed she becomes with the peripherals of performing, the more she is inclined to excavate deeper into a song. Although she will probably never be a singer to shred hearts Billie Holiday-style, she has developed a way of using understatement poignantly, like a writer who, by leaving something unsaid, maximises communication with the reader. This was particularly evident on Let It Rain.

She told us she has recently toured with Neil Young, and, with just her piano for accompaniment, segued from A Man Needs a Maid into Heart of Gold, letting a rawness come as close to the surface as I have heard her do. At the polar-opposite end of her repertoire she and her band turned Cheek to Cheek into a rapid-fire rhythmic game of great wit and vivacity.

Old hands Anthony Wilson (guitar) and Karriem Riggins (drums) were joined by bassist Paul Keller. A supple band, they were also versatile enough to tackle Tom Waits or Antonio Carlos Jobim, Peggy Lee or Burt Bacharach. For half the songs the strings and winds of the Sydney Symphony under Alan Broadbent added a lushness that suited Krall's distinctive half-sexy, half-detached approach, and worked especially well on Love Letters. Finally a tribute to the sound engineers: never have band and orchestra been mixed so seamlessly in the Concert Hall.

[narrowdaylight]

http://music.ninemsn.com.au/blog.aspx?b ... ments=true

'It's wonderful': Diana Krall charms Sydney Opera House audience

Jazz artist Diana Krall sauntered onstage at the Sydney Opera House last night, hiding her face behind her hair, waving awkwardly and struggling to disguise a visible case of the nerves.

But the Concert Hall was lulled when the Grammy winning artist let her voice and the keys of her Steinway piano do the talking ... through jazz.

Pure escapism at its finest, there's something mystical about Diana's contralto vocals and her ability to transform any classic jazz or blues tune without sounding like an ordinary cover band.

After all, two Grammys, eight Juno awards and nine gold albums is not something awarded to your ordinary Sunday sesh jazz quartet down at the local bowlo.

It's the simple things in Diana's performance that set her apart from your average Joe. The improvisation, the voice and the passion, it's all there, but with Diana Krall, there's an off-the-Richter-scale level of charisma that can't be learned. The woman just has it!

Her endearing disjointed banter in-between songs had the audience in hysterics as she told elaborate stories of life with hubby Elvis Costello and their two seven-year-old sons, Dexter Henry Lorcan and Frank Harlan James.

Every now and then she would get side-tracked mid-story with, "well that's all I have to say about that" or "that story has nothing to do with this next song", but the audience thrived on her awkward charm.

Crooning nods to old favourites such as Nat King Cole, Neil Young, Dusty Springfield and Ray Charles, it's no wonder this Canadian singer has sold almost 15 million albums worldwide. Far out!

With this in mind, it's a strange combination to mix the randomness of jazz with the complexities of a symphony orchestra, but within the atmosphere of the epic Opera House, it's hard to deny the spectacle of Diana Krall.

[narrowdaylight]

S Wonderful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtUwBHHCmy4