Ben Folds @ Sydney Opera House

Part of the great appeal of watching Ben Folds is your certainty that by concert’s end, you and he are going to be best friends. His eyes will light up at your suggestion he join you for a mate’s housewarming over in Marrickville, and once there he’ll charm the entire party with amusing anecdotes about Adelaide while offhandedly playing a sprightly jazz standard, occasionally trailing off from his story to point at you and say, “This guy!” before high-fiving Dennis Rodman and mixing everybody killer mojitos.

In short, he’s an engaging performer. Folds appeared alongside the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and it was a curious point of comparison since a few days earlier Tori Amos had performed with these musicians in the very same room. The difference was striking. In both instances the orchestra was firing on full cylinders, but while the Amos performance utilised it as grand adornment, Folds revelled in the potential of having an entire freakin’ orchestra to play with. This was most evident during the second set when, following an epic ‘Zak And Sara’, he launched into ‘Rock This Bitch’, the customary composed-on-the-spot Folds is now happily obliged to play at every gig. Beginning with the violas (“Violas always get screwed over in an orchestra,” he observed), Folds added instrument on instrument until we arrived at ‘Rock This Bitch In The Morning’. The SSO was not simply a blanketing support to this set; rather Folds and the orchestra entwined to bring entirely new perspectives to the songs.

The gig was a fairly comprehensive cross-section of Folds’ work over the past 17 years. His more recent output (‘Picture Window’ from the Nick Hornby collaborative album, Lonely Avenue, or 2008’s ‘Cologne’ – pleasant, if far from the top of the pile) weaved in superbly with early-day favourites such as ‘Brick’. I was also able to cross an item off my bucket list by at last hearing a medley of ‘Cigarette’ and ‘Fred Jones, Part 2’, which, with the cello-rich heartbreak of the latter, left me stunned.

Towards the end, Folds gave a splendid message of support to the SSO (great orchestras make great cities), and encouraged his audience to return and check out the real masters – Debussy, Ravel, et cetera. Giving the stunning landscape our orchestra is able to shape, I’ve no doubt many folk will be doing just that.