Bon Iver, Anohni: soaring on folk less ethereal at Vivid Live

The brief of stark, ethereal folk has been broadened, strengthened, rearranged and staged in a manner entirely new.

Bon Iver main man Justin Vernon performs solo at the Opera House as part of Vivid Live. Picture: Daniel Boud

Bon Iver main man Justin Vernon inspires a rare passion in fans, perhaps because of the emotional reach within his songs but most certainly because of the manner in which they are delivered.

For this quartet of Vivid Live performances the brief of stark, ethereal folk has been broadened, strengthened, rearranged and staged in a manner entirely new and thoroughly rewarding.

Vernon’s penetrating falsetto is still at the forefront, cutting straight to the heart on songs such as Roslyn, WA, Beach Baby and Blood Bank.

What’s different here is the ­instrumentation and the set-up. For the most part Vernon positions himself in the centre of a ramshackle circle of musicians — eight in all — the ensemble ­performing in the round, ­almost, with the back of the ­concert hall opened up to an ­audience.

With inventive lighting feeding off a kind of lampshade made up of thousands of strands of ­fabric hanging in a circle above them, Bon Iver’s music, largely from the albums For Emma, Forever Ago and Bon Iver, Bon Iver, is given an unusual, often mesmerising tint. It begins provocatively, with Vernon alone on stage, the song Woods taking on a new form through a series of loops in which the vocals swoop and ­intertwine to reach a thrilling climax. ­

The cast includes English vocal trio the Staves. Their contribution of exquisite harmonies is central to some of the re-imaginings of Bon Iver songs, including the achingly beautiful Holocene and the final encore, For Emma, for which the entire band gather around one microphone.

There are a couple of standouts, strangely neither of which are Bon Iver compositions.

The first is a lengthy piano duet featuring Vernon and pianist Sean Carey on an intense cover of Bonnie Raitt’s I Can’t Make You Love Me, the pair trading piano flourishes and vocals that whip up into a storm of rhythm and ­emotion. The Staves’s tune Steady is a celebration of harmony and melody.

The first of several standing ovations comes after another ­moment of solo Vernon. His classic Skinny Love, delivered with just that sweetly demanding voice and a rather bruised-looking acoustic guitar, brings the crowd to its knees before they get to their feet.

No such adoration could be levelled at Anohni, who performed her new album Hopelessness, the first since dropping her previous moniker of Antony and the Johnsons.

The music has changed also, from chamber pop to a more gloomy electronica. Flanked by producers Oneohtrix Point Never and Christopher Elms, ­Anohni, veiled and in silhouette for most of the perfor­mance, let her distinctive voice do the work while a series of images of women mouthing the words leapt from the screen behind her.

It was art, of a kind; deliberately devoid of engagement, other than with an unsubtle scream about the state of the world on songs such as Drone Bomb Me, 4 Degrees and Violent Men.

Vivid Live. Bon Iver, Sydney Opera House Concert Hall. May 27. Anohni, Sydney Opera House Joan Sutherland Theatre. May 28.