“The most beautiful sound in the world to me is that of an orchestra tuning itself to the oboe’s taut A,” writes Jia Tolentino on Monday (6/19) at The New Yorker. “The second most beautiful is Carly Rae Jepsen. For these two reasons, I flew to Canada for exactly twenty-eight hours over the weekend, to see Jepsen perform with the sixty-person Toronto Symphony Orchestra … for twenty-six hundred of the purest souls in pop fandom…. Jepsen … born in British Columbia … put on Saturday’s show as part of Canada 150, the yearlong celebration of the country’s sesquicentennial…. At Roy Thomson Hall, before the show, the crowd quivered. Strangers babbled at each other, smiling like maniacs. The orchestra began, suddenly, in a way that resembled star formation—dense clouds of melody floating in suspension and then, under piccolo flurries and timpani rolls, fusing into one…. The orchestra was heartbreaking, restrained by the simplicity of the songwriting and yet inherently hyperbolic. The violins took up the moments where, normally, on her albums, you’d hear Jepsen ad-libbing with interjections. Instead of a ‘Hey!’ their bows would strike, like an epiphany, a burst of sweetness outside the realm of words.”
Posted June 21, 2017
