LOS ANGELES, CA- There is something uniquely rewarding about seeing an artist you love perform with an orchestra. You already know the songs. You know where the guitar should enter, where the chorus should crest, where a familiar melody should turn. But put those same songs in the hands of dozens of musicians, surrounded by strings, brass, woodwinds, percussion and harp, and suddenly all of those expectations become possibilities.
At their best, orchestral performances are not simply bigger versions of familiar songs. They expose the architecture underneath them. A string section can amplify a tension that once belonged to a guitar. A burst of brass can transform a refrain into something monumental. A harp or flute can completely change the emotional complexion of a passage you thought you knew by heart. There is something genuinely majestic about hearing music you love reconstructed on that scale.
And if there is an artist whose catalog seems almost purpose-built for that kind of experimentation, it is St. Vincent.
On August 2, Annie Clark returned to the Hollywood Bowl for a special KCRW Festival performance alongside the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, conducted by Jules Buckley. The evening offered an opportunity not merely to hear St. Vincent’s songs performed live, but to hear them reconsidered. Clark’s music… and performances… has always thrived on contrasts: precision against chaos, vulnerability against artifice. With an orchestra behind her, those contrasts suddenly had an enormous new vocabulary.
Before St. Vincent took the stage, however, Anoushka Shankar provided a reminder that expanding a musical vocabulary need not mean making music louder or grander.
There is something almost mystical about the sitar. Its sound seems to carry history within it, ancient and majestic even when surrounded by thoroughly modern jazz, rock and contemporary sensibilities. In Shankar’s hands, those worlds never seemed to be competing with one another. They simply coexisted.
Opening with “Hiraeth,” Shankar framed her relatively short performance as a journey. “New Dawn” followed before “We Burn So Brightly,” a vibrant, urgent composition that Shankar described in terms of the power of change. Particularly striking was the relationship between the sitar and clarinet. They are instruments one might not instinctively pair together, yet their timbres complemented each other beautifully, the clarinet’s woody warmth moving around the sharper resonance of Shankar’s strings.
The set moved through “Amrita” before concluding with “Daybreak,” the final part of the trilogy from which much of the evening’s material was drawn. The music was joyful and rhythmically restless, with shifting time signatures that kept the composition moving beneath Shankar’s playing.
It was during those final passages that Shankar herself became as captivating as the music. Playing with her eyes closed, she would occasionally arrive at a note or phrase that seemed to delight even her. A huge smile would suddenly appear across her face, eyes still shut, an involuntary expression of joy from a musician completely absorbed in what she was creating.
That joy was contagious.
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Then came St. Vincent.
The Hollywood Bowl Orchestra began the main performance with the atmospheric “We Put a Pearl in the Ground,” flowing into “Hell Is Near,” before Clark made her entrance. Rather than arriving with some grand rock-star gesture befitting the surroundings, Annie Clark skipped onto the Hollywood Bowl stage.
It was cute as hell.
From there, however, she immediately began using the scale of the production to her advantage. Standing in her characteristic sculptural poses in a form fitting black dress and sharply red heels as the orchestra swirled behind her, Clark sometimes appeared less like the leader of a rock band than a figure planted at the center of some enormous art installation.
“Reckless” followed, but “Violent Times” provided one of the first demonstrations of just how much an orchestra could alter the dimensions of St. Vincent’s music. The horn introduction was tremendous, while sudden string glissandos gave the arrangement a startling sense of movement. The original recording already possesses a high level of drama but give it an orchestral touch it evolved into some wonderfully warped James Bond theme.
The orchestra shined, but perhaps more importantly, so did Clark’s voice. Against that expansive acoustic backdrop, her vocals had room to soar above the arrangements.
Later in the evening, Clark made a point during the evening of acknowledging the enormous amount of work that went into making these transformations possible. In particular, she recognized Rachel Eckroth, her longtime keyboardist and a key arranger behind the orchestral project. It was deserved recognition. The collaboration that eventually produced these arrangements had been developing for years: Clark has said the idea grew from her work with Eckroth and Eckroth’s friendship with Buckley. That context mattered because what we were hearing at the Bowl clearly wasn’t a case of simply putting strings behind a collection of rock songs.
For “Black Rainbow,” Clark strapped on her iconic red guitar, and its role within the orchestra was fascinating. She did not simply use it to compete with the musicians behind her. The instrument became another voice in the arrangement, its lines accentuating upward movements and cutting through the mass of acoustic sound at carefully chosen moments.
Clark switched to a white guitar for “Marrow,” where the orchestration again revealed unexpected colors, including the harp emerging prominently from the arrangement. By “The Bed,” she had put the guitar aside altogether. Strings and flutes brought an entirely different dynamism to the composition, demonstrating one of the pleasures of the evening: these arrangements were not content simply to place orchestral accompaniment underneath St. Vincent songs. The orchestra could become the song.
Eventually, I stopped keeping track of where one composition ended and another began.
That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
“Smoking Section,” “Now, Now,” “Live in the Dream” and “The Nowhere Inn” unfolded as part of an increasingly fluid musical progression, with Clark moving between guitars, vocals and theatrical gestures while Buckley and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra continually changed the environment around her.
At one point, because a friend of mine in the audience texted me to do so, I caught myself admiring what I can only describe as the Robert Palmer-girl vibes of one of Clark’s guitar techs.
It was that kind of evening.
Then Clark addressed the crowd.
“OK, Los Angeles… let’s get a little loose.”
“Digital Witness” was the signal that the latter portion of the performance was about to become considerably less restrained. “Los Ageless” naturally followed, St. Vincent’s wonderfully acidic ode to the city sounding particularly appropriate beneath the shell of the Hollywood Bowl.
And then came “New York.”
For all the sophistication of the orchestral arrangements, Clark never seemed interested in allowing the evening to become overly formal. During the extended ending, she abandoned the stage and wandered into the audience, gleefully disrupting whatever dignity an orchestra-backed performance is supposed to possess. She poured a bucket of popcorn over herself. She commandeered someone’s drink and managed to spill it over herself. She grabbed an audience member’s phone and wandered around with it.
It was ridiculous.
It was also very St. Vincent.
That willingness to move between elegance and absurdity is part of what has always made Clark such a compelling performer. One moment she can stand motionless beneath dramatic orchestration like some avant-garde femme fatale; the next she is covered in popcorn in the middle of the Hollywood Bowl.
By the time “Paris Is Burning” arrived, orchestra and artist seemed to have reached their most wonderfully unhinged synthesis. The composition already possesses a dark carnival quality, but the orchestra exaggerated those elements until the song felt positively delirious. With the arrangement spinning around Clark, it felt like being trapped on a psychotic merry-go-round, equal parts glamorous, sinister and exhilarating.
The evening ultimately returned for a two-song encore of “Candy Darling” and “Slow Disco,” bringing a performance built around maximal possibilities toward a more emotional conclusion.
What stayed with me about experiencing those arrangements in person was not simply the novelty of hearing St. Vincent accompanied by an orchestra. It was how naturally her music accepted the transformation. There are artists whose songs are so dependent on a particular recording, arrangement or sonic identity that altering them risks diminishing what made them special. St. Vincent’s music seems to invite the opposite. Beneath all the distortion, synthesizers, angular guitars and meticulously constructed production are compositions sturdy enough to be pulled apart and rebuilt.
That is ultimately the magic of seeing an artist you love perform with an orchestra. You arrive hoping to hear your favorite songs.
If everything goes right, you leave feeling as though you have heard them again for the first time.
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St. Vincent Reimagines Her Music With the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra
