Velvet-voiced Feist worth the wait

The evening may have gotten off to a slow start, but velvet-voiced Canadian singer-songwriter Feist’s performance at Cork Opera House on Saturday night was worth waiting for.

Irish-Nordic folk trio Slow Moving Clouds took to the stage for a few songs, starting at nearly half ten: “We are your prawn cocktail starter,” Cork cellist and singer Kevin Murphy quipped.

If so, the main course came out cold. The chanteuse emerged at quarter past eleven, clutching a bouquet of flowers, and had to be given extra time by Opera House management so she could play a set of reasonable length.

But if the delays were caused by the happy, familial haphazardness that had descended on musicians on the penultimate night of Sounds from a Safe Harbour, surely that’s part of the point of this festival: to unlock artists from the alienating, creatively stifling grind of touring and to permit them to enjoy playing together and collaborating.

Feist has spent days in Cork, attending two showings of Swan Lake/Loch na hEala, as well as spending time rehearsing with other musicians for two festival projects, Odyssey, based on words from the Homeric epic poem, which took place in the Kino, and also due to play in Sunday's closing show Lhasa, a tribute to Mexican-American singer Lhasa de Sela.

Before being joined by her backing band, the first half of her set was performed solo and included songs from her most recent album, 2017’s Pleasure, with breathtakingly sophisticated and beautiful vocal looping on a more introspective and less upbeat version of her 2004 hit Mushaboom.

Ariel Engel, a fellow Canadian who was performing at SFSH as La Force and who has stepped into Feist’s shoes in alternative outfit Broken Social Scene, joined Feist for a beautiful and otherworldly rendition of Antony and the Johnsons’ Another World, the highlight of the night.

To close, she was joined by the choir from the Odyssey project, amongst their number, musicians including Bryce Dessner and festival director Mary Hickson, for one of the songs emerging from the collaboration, adding to the sense that this was very much a family affair.