It’s my first time at the Royal Albert Hall, so I don’t know until I arrive that it has 12 entrances. It’s a huge clock face, and I whirl away a few minutes as a hand walking around to find the box office. Later, when Aoba plays, time will stand still entirely.
I have to take a pinch-me moment when I sit and see how close I am to the stage, then a second moment when I realize with all the joy of a small child that these rows of chairs in the wings are mounted in such a way that allows the sitter to turn them to better face the front. They spin around! And so I spin to face the support – Liana Flores.
With a voice as smooth as double cream, delicate acoustic guitar trills, a gently stirring drum and sometimes a shot of cello, Flores and her three-piece backing band pour out for us a tall glass of the most refreshing bossa nova. She seems as at ease as her music; her guitar case is laid next to her, and the soft orange lighting could convincingly be a product of her performance rather than a staging element of it. The face of her guitar catches a spotlight with every other slight twist of her strum like sun sparkling off water, and we are cast onto that hazy summer lake, air heavy with humidity and the chirps of lazy fauna.
In the interval, while birdsong sounds through the speakers, the stage is dressed – with a semicircle of chairs, instruments and usual accoutrement, but also with a small central table that spills over with plant life. When Ichiko Aoba floats to the stage, she too is wearing greenery – a wreath of leaves in her long dark hair – and a white dress that looks almost like Grecian robes. She might have been plucked down straight from a classically painted ceiling.
The set opens with ‘Kokoro no Sekai’, performed by Aoba alone with her acoustic guitar under a single silvery light, and immediately a deeply existential peace floods the room, floor to high, high ceiling. Aoba’s voice is truly otherworldly; the tops of her register are glasslike in their clarity and resonance. The lower notes are not voice but a petal-carrying breeze.
She softly and earnestly thanks the audience before her second song, Space Orphans’. Now using a synthesizer, she coaxes from it quiet bird-ish whistles that cue Taro Umebayashi and (eight of) 12 Ensemble to take to the stage. The song twinkles like storybook stars, until her fellow musicians begin and expand its sound to the scope of a real, full night sky. Aoba’s lone performance is captivating, shining, but when broadened like it is here, held lofty by orchestral accompaniment, she truly stuns.
The percussion employed is, in keeping with the birdsong and greenery, joyously organic; dry grass and nutshell rattles are shaken as if by the breeze that Aoba’s voice rides. The field recordings of the interval are also carried through the performance. The roof of the Royal Albert Hall is tonight cast off and invited in is the sky and wind and moonlight. In reality, this moonlight is all Aoba’s touring lighting crew, who conjure, from bulbs and wires, fireflies, stars, canopy-dappled sun, and spotlights that recognize each musician on stage with as much regard as Aoba.
Photo: Temi Adegbayibi
From here on I lose track of song breaks and starts; Aoba has frozen time and barely a breath is drawn from the audience for the rest of the night (besides the sniffs that accompany the many tears that are drawn). To continue to describe the performances by Aoba, Umebayashi and 12 Ensemble, I’m in danger of listing all the synonyms for ‘beautiful’ or sounding like I’m reciting that much-memed Lady Gaga quote (“talented, brilliant, incredible, amazing, show-stopping, spectacular”), but both of these are applicable.
Aoba shines not just with her bright white garb and soaring voice, but with her grace. She repeats gentle thank you’s in unconfident English, takes the time to introduce each of the involved musicians and crew members, rallying their individual rounds of applause, and upon receiving fervent, standing call to encore, seems genuinely and sweetly taken aback.
As the house lights come up, as we vacate our seats, as we file out into the actual, London night, the world seems calmer. Time restarts, but my heart feels bigger somehow, and looking at the hushed, dewy-eyed, smiling faces around me, I think everyone else’s here does too.
