Rufus Wainwright Leaves the Paramount in Tears

• On Thursday, September 9, Rufus Wainwright joins the Portland Symphony for an evening that includes excerpts from his opera Prima Donna, works by Berlioz, and song selections from his own albums.

"A heart of stone never goes anywhere," concludes Rufus Wainwright, in black, in feathers, in a 15-foot train. On a giant screen behind him, an airbrushed black eye slowly opens and closes and cries, reappearing in various sizes.

He repeats the line, alive to both the self-criticism and self-preservation in it. He explores the idea elsewhere, singing, "the earth just spins in place / throwing things away."

He's playing his album All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu right through, from "Who Are You, New York?" to "Zebulon," and aside from a few scattered, apparently irrepressible whoops at his entrance, the Paramount Theatre audience is obliging him in not clapping until the song cycle is through.

It's a Rufus Wainwright album with a mourning veil--familiar themes transposed to the register of loss--but it's also an artistic elevation. Written during his mother Kate McGarrigle's final illness, the music is rarely at rest. The piano's bass end is often emphasized, but the music flows out in charged, turbulent torrents of notes. Occasional high notes drop on top like petals, and are carried away.

It's art because it's not really for you, or me. The Shakespeare sonnets, the thorn-hooked "What Would I Do With a Rose?," the intimacy of "Martha," the sheer work of pitching your musical voice to these heights, and lows--it's a rush to say something before the loved one leaves. Well, a "rush" of sorts. Wainwright actually retards his already taffy-like vocal delivery that much more, in a superhuman effort to make more time appear. Yet, a chord repeats like the chime of a clock.

Though it's just him and his piano up there (sister Martha, who opened, joins him for a few songs), the stage becomes crowded with his family in the second part. It's the end of the tour, and he's feeling a little jaunty, initially, with the end in sight. Someone shouts, "We love you!" and he responds with a showman's "A-thank-yew."

When years ago he first came to Seattle, he says, he didn't understand the appeal of the Space Needle: It wasn't that tall and looked a bit like an airport. Now, with all that's grown up around it, it's become more precious to him, something from the Rococo era stuck into the midst of modernity.

Martha comes out to sing two French songs with him; she finished her own set with "La Vie En Rose," a capella, the Wainwright lungs more than enough for the Paramount's vastness, mingling Piaf's towering, useless grandeur with country's broadly held vowels. Rufus and she whisper to each other as she departs, following "La Complainte de la Butte," and then, all at once, he's crying and not gracefully, but the way you or I do, with a nose suddenly runny.

It's because, he says later, listening to him and his sister sing together was one of their mother's favorite things, and he chokes up again. "Dinner At Eight" brings his father to the stage (in song--it's Rufus confronting Loudon about his absence).

A death in a musical family seems like a string snapping--a shock of vibration communicated viscerally to the rest.

Martha returns with her baby, and then there's "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk," the Wainwright anthem, that you can see he is trying to get through--not just trying, he's devotedly singing out. If his voice breaks, he stops and takes another run at it. He will sing every note.

You almost hear the standing ovation before you see it--the sound of seats snapping up en masse.