Arts Festival Review: Martha Wainwright

Martha Wainwright describes her look as "ageless" - she is poised on the stage dressed like a school-girl with hair all wispy like her grandmother's.

Similarly, her one-off performance at the Auckland Arts Festival transcends generations and channels the mood of several beautiful eras.

It is a chance for the Canadian songstress to pay tribute to some of her most indelible female inspirations - Edith Piaf and of course her dearly beloved mother, the late Kate McGarrigle - as well as to bellow her own tunes with raw abandon.

Armed only with an acoustic guitar and her foot for percussion, the slight singer fills the Town Hall with her immense voice and charm. Endearingly self-deprecating, she bridges her moody, sometimes rowdy, acoustic tunes with whimsical, carefree wit. Clearly woebegone music does not have to be depressing.

Wainwright, like her famous mother, father and brother is known for her melancholy, pointed tunes - airing her dirty laundry on stage if you will - but she says she stopped writing much of last year, fearing the stress of her mother's passing and birth of her premature son would plunge her song-writing into the depths of despair.

See, not only did Wainwright learn to sing at a young age, but she learned to feel.

She does, however, preview several of recently-penned songs that hint at a fourth album as deliciously moody as fans have come to expect. She peppers these and her earlier bruised, twisted songs Factory and Jesus and Mary with delicate numbers by her mother; I am a Diamond and Tell My Sister.

Then, commissioning her husband to play the grand piano, Wainwright dedicates Piaf's Adieu Mon Coeur to the victims of Christchurch.

The performance is rounded off with her own expletively-titled tune and a dramatic rendition of Dis Quand Reviendras-tu by French pop icon Barbara, proving that her own sense of drama is perfectly matched to the theatrical songs of France's most revered chanteuses.

Her enamoured Auckland audience is treated to an encore of Stormy Weather and the number Piaf fans were waiting for, La Vie en Rose, sans microphone, which does justice not only to her musical heroine, but to her own voice and the wonderful venue.

*When and where: Auckland Town Hall, Wednesday night