Playlouder - Music is the Network

Rufus Wainwright is a very generous man. Not only did he record a string of shows duplicating the exact setlist of a Judy Garland concert, but he released a dvd of the entire London Palladium concert, and now he's gone and released a double cd of the entirety of the Carnegie Hall performance.

I make no bones about it - I love Rufus Wainwright. I've followed him since I first saw the video for April Fools on 120 Minutes and I've bought every album without fail as they came out. It's been a good investment, really - Rufus has yet to let me down, and he shows on these Judy performances that he's just as talented at performing others' songs as he is when he's singing his own. I got a taste of this when he chose Get Happy as his all-singing, all-dancing encore at Glastonbury last year, but there's so much more to the performance than just that fleeting, ultra-cheerful glance.

Most of us will recognise songs like That's Entertainment!, Swanee, San Francisco, or Puttin' On The Ritz, and you've got to be utterly culturally comatose to not know Somewhere Over The Rainbow, frankly. But some of the songs that stayed with me the most were ones I wasn't familar with before, like the excellent How Long Has This Been Going On, which he performed with his mother, Kate McGarrigle. His sister, Martha, also takes the stage to give an absolutely heartbreaking rendition of Stormy Weather, which frankly, almost threatens to upstage Rufus himself (which I doubt was the intended response)!

Even though the dvd and the cd cover much of the same ground, I can see why they've both been released, and it's not just to sop up double the fans' cash - the video really show what an amazing performer Rufus is when he gets up on stage with a full orchestra behind him (and Viktor and Rolf-designed suits on him), but with the wide range of portable technology on offer these days, the cd means you can take the audio with you without being hit by a bus because you're staring at a tiny video screen. 

Either way, this concert is an important landmark in Rufus Wainwright's (hopefully) long career, and I, for one, can't wait to see what he's going to do next.

(If you missed the link above, you can watch the video for his performance of Puttin' On The Ritz right here.)