Cool Air
AIR in concert
In this day and age, pulling off surprises is hard.
So when my husband, for our 13th anniversary, said we are going to Sydney for a surprise and dress up, I was delighted.
Last Sunday, on a sparkling Autumn day, we drove in to Sydney, left our boys with my father and his partner and then got in an Uber. Before I knew it, we’re were down at the Opera House harbourside. I was guided to take a seat in the beaming sun at Opera Bar right in front of the harbour bridge and Opera House forecourt. We got a table, ordered cocktails and waited for surprise friends to arrive.
After a beautiful lunch with our friends, they all stood up in sync and gathered their things to go. I followed suit. We walked across the forecourt, butterflies building in my belly, and up into the Opera House with a stream of others. Where were we heading?
By this time I knew it would be some performance with music as our surprise friends are huge music goers. On the way up, I saw a poster of Brian Eno…was it him we were seeing? (I’ve fallen in love with Eno’s work over the last few months and feel that so many of his songs are a sound track to my mesh wall hangings).
Past the ticket usher and up more steps. Right into the heart of the Opera House. I look across at a table set up with merch…omg…Air!
The iconic French electronic duo.
The soundtrack to my twenties.
Every song on Moon Safari (Talkie Walkie, too), like friends keeping me soothed and uplifted on cold trains around Europe, in my rusty car driving around Melbourne, in all those share houses and flats…
The delight! What a guy to create this surprise. What lovely friends to keep it all on the downlow for 4 months (!).
The reproduction of sound was unbelievable. The light show along with it, the colours the exact hue of the songs. Every tune and riff I knew.
In a Guardian review of the show, Andrew Stafford writes:
Brian Eno famously wrote that ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting. Moon Safari may have become embedded in popular culture – to the point where every note feels pre-ordained – but its emotional spectrum is vast, with rich reserves of melancholy beneath the swelling Talisman and the widescreen cinema of Ce Matin-là.
The epitome of cool, Jean-Benoît Dunckel, a hand on each keyboard, relaxed, looking out into the vast concert hall. Nicolas Godin, on base, acoutic, keyboards , singing. And then virtuoso tour drummer and percussionist Louis Delorme, in the middle, belting out the foundation for all these incredible songs.
Stafford sums it up beautifully:
This weekend, as part of Vivid, it was Sydney’s turn. To see and hear Moon Safari recreated in the Sydney Opera House was a trip indeed, amplifying a sound as exquisitely sculpted and immediately identifiable as the building in which it was performed.
I’m so thankful for my husband, for my friends, for sparking Sydney, for art.
Till next week,
Rachel
