Combining orchestral gravitas with hushed intimacy, Lianne La Havas and Jules Buckley make magic at the Barbican

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Lianne La Havas knows how to tantalise an audience. ‘It’s finished,’ she posted on Twitter last month, referring to her upcoming third album. The singer-songwriter, citing her joint Greek and Jamaican heritage as the source of her musical openness and curiosity, is an elusive but important presence within British soul. She takes her time, and each release proves why. Just last week she released her new single ‘Bittersweet’, her first solo release in roughly five years, which served as a reminder of her mastery of voice, groove, and soul.

She enjoyed a deservedly effusive audience last night at the gorgeous Barbican Hall. Joined by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the concert marked La Havas’ first collaboration with a live orchestra, surveying re-arranged material from across her two studio albums.

Steering the orchestra was Jules Buckley. The new Creative Artist in Association for the BBC SO, Buckley has a strong record of marrying orchestral arrangements with various forms of contemporary music, collaborating previously with the likes of Stormzy, Tori Amos, and Laura Mvula. His work at the BBC Proms last year, conducting a searing homage to Nina Simone, found its way into The House That Soul Built‘s ‘Best Gigs of 2019’ countdown.

Buckley described last night’s concert as the culmination of two to three months of extensive work. The key challenge, one assumes, was how to work a lavish orchestra around a repertoire admired for its intimate, folksy cadences and, in the case of La Havas’ sophomore Blood (2015), more sonically diverse and textured material. In the concert programme, La Havas describes wanting the arrangements to be ‘beautiful but in unexpected ways‘, acting as separate entities to the existing material.

With telling judgment and discretion, the orchestra was used to lift, finesse, and accentuate. The studio recording of ‘Gone’, a heartbreak ballad from La Havas’ debut album Is Your Love Big Enough (2012), has a visceral simplicity with just piano and vocals. Buckley and Havas fashioned the piece into a high drama outpouring, almost noir and theatrical in tone but no less powerful. The slightly cosmic ‘Unstoppable’, the lead single from Blood, was given an anthemic gravitas with lively brass, while the string section swelled behind La Havas’ repetitions of ‘hear me out‘ on ‘They Could Be Wrong’. Though not the most natural fit for an orchestral rendering, La Havas maintained the raw, lively feel of ‘Is Your Love Big Enough’ – tapping out the orchestra and bringing in the audience for the gospel hand claps.

Her voice – often a breezy, pitch-perfect lilt – is breathtaking. Packed with nuances, there is much to enjoy – from the slow, slightly ringing vibrato, to her ability to flick between full voice and whispery, heady tones so effortlessly. As dazzling as her low-mid range is, she is able to open up her vocal with no hint of strain, releasing some soaring power on the likes of ‘Grow’ and ‘Midnight’.

Understanding that not every song required the orchestra, La Havas chose wisely to strip back with acoustic performances of ‘Au Cinema’ and ‘Age’. The former, a sophisticated, romantic ditty, arguably bettered the (fuller) studio recording with its more intimate address. ‘Age’, about a fling with an older gentleman (‘it’s true,’ she told the audience), saw La Havas punctuating the witty and assertive lyric (‘So is it such a problem if he’s old? / As long as he does whatever he’s told’), reducing her voice to a whisper on certain lines.

She closed the set with a richly orchestrated rendition of her new single ‘Bittersweet’, which she belted out with passion.

The concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Tuesday 28th April at 7:30pm. It will be available for 30 days after broadcast via BBC Sounds.

All images courtesy of Mark Allan/BBC