kd lang – a performance filled with emotion. Photo by Ian Harvey.

kd lang
Symphony Hall, Birmingham

A strange thing happens when kd lang sings . . . the audience seems to hold its breath for each entire song.

It happened again and again last night as the Canadian singer-songwriter enraptured Symphony Hall with a voice so pure and beguiling that it demands total, undivided attention.

From torch songs to country-tinged numbers and ethereal covers, lang’s 90-minute show was marked by total, reverential silence during each song and wild applause between them.

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There were the big hits, Constant Craving and Miss Chatelaine from her breakthrough album Ingenue, a generous selection of songs from her gorgeous new album, Watershed, and some outstanding cover versions.

Jane Sibbery’s The Valley was followed by an astonishing performance of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah that truly made the hairs on the back of the neck stand on end as lang’s voice soared into the heavens.

This is a singer who doesn’t just sing a song, she inhabits it.

For those who only know lang from her somewhat dour promotional pictures and CD covers there was a big surprise – she’s quite the comedian too. Go along expecting Gordon Brown and you’re confronted with a witty and charming Victoria Wood, all beaming smiles and delight.

Barefoot and dressed in an shapeless, androgynous, three-piece white suit, she executed a comic dance routine, flirted with her adoring audience and, as probably the world’s most high-profile lesbian, had great fun playing with the word “puff” in “a song about smoking”.

She introduced her five-piece all-male backing band by joking: “Why at my age have I taken to surrounding myself with handsome young men?”

That band provided the perfect laid back canvas for lang to build her performance on, with tasteful, spare arrangements and rich four-piece harmonies.

She ended the show with two encores and standing ovations, playing banjo for Jealous Dog off the new album, singing a solo version of A Kiss To Build A Dream on, her famous duet with Tony Bennett, and ending with Shadow and The Frame from Watershed, a new song that already sounds like a classic.

By Ian Harvey