Barry O’Sullivan
When: Sunday 1 June 2025
Where: Sydney Opera House
Pat Metheny once again took the stage at the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall for Vivid LIVE. However, unlike his previous performance in Sydney in 2020 at the State Theatre this show was to be a one-man band.
This solo appearance filtered out some of the die-hard Metheny Ensemble fans who would have come for the pyrotechnics of a Metheny Group performance and delivered him a capacity crowd of his guitar devotees, who applauded enthusiastically at his arrival on stage and to his delivery of every tune, performed on a selection of some of his favourite instruments deftly crafted by the Canadian Linda Manzer.
Metheny’s catalogue is a huge one, amassing some fifty-plus albums and accumulating twenty Grammys in ten different categories since his 1976 Bright Size Life debut in 1976. His foray into Brazillian themes with his long-time musical partner the late Lyle Mays on Still Life (Talking) in 1987 has always been on my Desert Island disc list and his contributions to John Zorn’s Masada Project are a standout in his catalogue as well.
The staging and lighting effects were simplistic. A single guitar on its stand, a stool, several amplifiers, fold-backs and pedals with floor synthesisers, in front of black draped shapes of what could be more guitars? Maybe? The nerds were on edge!
Here was Pat alone, his first large-scale foray into the extended solo performance, which would develop into a kind of intimate conversation with his audience about learning his first chords(that damm F chord!), of growing up in a family of trumpet players, his watching The Beatles performing with guitars on the Ed Sullivan Show, the imaginative guitarist went about creating something uniquely intimate something entirely impossible to achieve if playing with a full band on stage.
Cleverly switching between fingerstyle and flat pick for a superbly delivered medley of five songs, which included Minuano, and amplified with a microphone in the body of his instrument of choice to bring out the rich tone of his arrangements, he ended the set with This Is Not America from the album of the soundtrack to The Falcon and the Snowman. We were hooked, line and sinker!
Moving on after another sit-down and chat about learning the chords of The House of the Rising Sun came his music favourites from the Grammy Award-winning album Beyond the Missouri Sky, which he recorded with bassist Charlie Haden in 1997. Another intimate chat about that recording experience with Haden preluded beautiful renditions of Waltz For Ruth, Our Spanish Love and the crowd-pleaser title track, with a soft low drone from a floor pedal and climaxing the set with the love theme from Morrocone’s Cinema Paradiso.
Then, a switch in style and instrument to the twelve-string baritone guitar for a brief but ecstatic session of hard-driving rhythms to satisfy those nerds who might have been thinking this is all a wee bit soft.
A forty-two-string custom-built Manzer hybrid guitar was brought on stage for Metheny to put it through its paces with the technique of utilizing the right hand on the top fretboard playing out the melody, the left on the conventional board playing the baseline, with the third head used to play the harp-like strings. Fascinating guitar methodology on an instrument nicknamed the Pikasso, leaving the nerds in dreamland while he flipped between instruments with delightful renditions of songs from Moon Dial and Dream Box as well as his lushly atmospheric interpretations of Alfie, Rainy Days and Mondays, And I Love Her and Here, There and Everywhere. Here was a master in control of his craft.
Suddenly, stage hands appeared and de-robed the draped-shaped objects in the background in a prelude to the piece de resistance of the evening, revealing a semi-hollow baritone and a bass guitar mounted on separate stands, a snare drum and high hat and at the back of the stage, and an array of acoustic and electronic instruments controlled by him using solenoids and pneumatics, while he played a guitar synthesiser. Here was Barnum and Bailey Metheny, the showman, and we loved it! With the rattles and a drum kit in unison with our hero, who moved between instruments, he entertained the masses within a guitar heaven.
Three standing ovations and encores later and finishing with a superb rendition of Jimmy Webb’s Wichita Linesman, his audience departed believing that their legendary hero had served them well in a musical immersion with a little more insight into the man himself.
FIVE STARS *****