I've been meaning to see Tognetti play his violin for years now. For thirty five bucks I also got to see him play the keyboard ala Warren Ellis, or more accurately, Leonard Cohen. (OK, he didn't actually make a big deal of switching it on.) Shades of Dylan in a park in London in 2004? I guess I can see why Ellis will never play with these guys.
I think Satu Vänskä usually plays second fiddle to Tognetti, but this was certainly her night. She was super-awesomely-excellent on the violin. Her repartee made it clear she was amongst (north shore, Vaucluse) friends. They did two renditions of Reznor's Something I can never have (the latter the entirety of the encore), citing Natural Born Killers, somewhat spartan and cleaned-up where Reznor does fragile violence, which is inward directed and hence somehow OK. Some other songs that I can't name verged on the twee. I had to wonder if we've seen all this before with Fourplay's "infamous" Metallica cover. And that was back when I was a kid. They closed out the main set with some pleasant Vivaldi before an aborted encore and then the reprise.
I got wondering if they should have kept their other night jobs; did almost everyone in the crowd wish they were playing something else, or with their old bands? Guests Jim Moginie (Midnight Oil) and Brian Ritchie (Violent Femmes) left me hungry for words with bite.
The warm-up was a poetry-slam over some nice violin work by one of the ACO blokes. They called themselves Marcie.