St. Vincent came through Symphony Hall for a performance with the Boston Pops that served as a highly anticipated and powerful presentation of her upcoming release, Live With Orchestra.
The enigmatic artist born Annie Clark has built a career out of reinventing herself album after album, both visually and sonically, channeling David Bowie and making every stage of her career unique from what came before and what will come next. 2024’s All Born Screaming saw the auteur leave her powerful lead guitar chops on the back burner for an experience that explored a more spastic approach, dipping into electronica. 2021’s Daddy’s Home took things in a gritty, 70’s-era Times Square direction, and 2017’s Masseduction, arguably her finest release, went full risque- complete with bright Latex costumes, wild guitar leads, and songs that explored the full spectrum of human sexuality. The soon-to-be-released Live With Orchestra is a recording of her full 2025 performance at Royal Albert Hall alongside Maestro Jules Buckley and his Orchestra. In support of the endeavor, Clark and Buckley are taking the performance on the road from coast to coast.
Her performance at Symphony Hall was just the second stop of the tour, following only Pittsburgh, and given the strict structure inherent in orchestral compositions, there’s little wiggle room for flexibility, and both dates showcased setlists nearly identical to the upcoming live album. The performance started off with a newly arranged “We Put A Pearl In The Ground,” off her 2007 debut, Marry Me, which quickly brought things into the present with “Hell Is Near,” off All Born Screaming.
Out of the gate, Clark was stoic and rather motionless, holding her audience’s focus with a statuesque composure that demonstrated her charisma, but things didn’t really pick up until a few songs later, during “Violent Times,” when she strapped on one of her artist-signature Music Man electric guitars. For all the acclaim, Clark is celebrated as a singer, performer, and fashion icon, her lead guitar playing is grossly underrated. She wields an iconic, vibrato-heavy tone that is instantly recognizable as her own, playing within the notes and putting enough stress on the instrument to justify having a guitar tech hand her a new one after every song.
The guitar wasn’t mixed nearly loud enough, and while there may have been an interest in shining the light more brightly on the orchestral arrangements, the same can’t be said for her vocals. Throughout the night, her singing was either too loud or was lost in the mix, and given Symphony Hall’s status as one of the most acoustically pristine performance spaces in the world, this couldn’t be explained away by acoustics. In light of the fact that fans can hear the full performance from home on the live album, this is something her front-of-house team is going to have to hammer out as the tour progresses, so future audiences can experience every bit of that magic that you just can’t get through headphones.
The highlight of the night may have been a performance of “Digital Witness” off her 2014 self-titled release. She playfully engaged with the audience, used the entire stage, and featured the horn section that made the performance. The studio version of the tune has a brass section on it she’s never been able to authentically replicate in a live setting, which made this song the perfect selection for the format.
Other highlights included both “Los Ageless” and “New York,” both off Masseduction and the latter seeing Clark go deep into the audience and directly interact with at least a half dozen fans and an encore of “Slow Disco” is always a theatrical selection, but in this case, given the studio recordings incorporation of a string section, it was another example of a fan-favorite she was finally able to bring into a live setting the way Clark had always envisioned it.
While some of these songs delivered on the recording’s promise of a full accompaniment of Strings or Horns, the setlist as a whole leaned heavily towards the slower, more mellow end of her catalog, and the upbeat engagement displayed on “Digital Witness” really made the exclusion of more hard-hitting material seem like a missed opportunity. “Masseduction” is always a banger in the live setting, and given that she plays the song in Glam Tuning, it’s just one of many examples of more enthusiastic songs that could have lent themselves to orchestral accompaniment just as effectively.
The crowd was a mix of St. Vincent fans and Boston Symphony Orchestra regulars, and while plenty of folks in the latter section had their first encounter with Clark at Symphony Hall, it’s a safe bet that the majority of long-time fans in attendance weren’t at their first show. Seeing Clark perform such an extensive collaboration in a venue as regal as Symphony Hall was an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for longtime fans, but for longtime fans seeing her for their first time, you’d likely want to catch her again in order to really get the Full St. Vincent Concert Experience. That said, for completist fans who know what they’re signing up for, these shows are without question not to be missed.
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