Musician Annie Clark, the multi-instrumentalist who performs under the name St. Vincent, is no stranger to reinvention.
Much like her creative heroes — David Bowie, Prince, David Byrne — Clark’s sound and stage presence have evolved throughout the nearly 20 years since her debut album, “Marry Me,” was released in 2007. Now Clark continues to defy genres by appearing with a full orchestra, including a performance with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra this weekend at Ravinia.
“Every night, really, truly is such an endorphin boost,” said the 43-year-old Clark, who splits her time between New York (which she calls “my heart’s home”), Los Angeles and her native Texas.
The “St. Vincent Live With Orchestra” project debuted last fall at London’s Royal Albert Hall as part of the longstanding BBC Proms series and was released as a live album in March. The reimagined versions of songs from across Clark’s catalog — including “Paris is Burning” and “Smoking Section” — were brought to life in collaboration with the composer and arranger Jules Buckley, whom Clark was introduced to through her longtime friend and keyboardist Rachel Eckroth.
This summer, Clark, Buckley and a small band of players — including Eckroth — have taken the show on the road for a tour with local orchestras that began in Pittsburgh in June, wound through Boston and New York, and will come to the Chicago suburbs before concluding in August at the Hollywood Bowl.
The project gave Clark a chance to dig through her archive for songs ripe for orchestral rearrangement and spotlight some of her lesser-known early work, which she says was inspired by composers like Igor Stravinsky.
“It all kind of started [by] going ‘all right, which songs in the catalog are going to be made better, cooler with a new dimension with the symphony?’” Clark said. “I definitely wanted to honor some of the songs from the earlier records that I haven’t touched in a really long time and give them their flowers.”
When we spoke in mid-June, Clark was in New York between tour dates. During the interview for this story, Clark was walking around the city when a man stopped her and asked for money. After she sweetly told him she didn’t have any cash on her, she ducked into a bodega, offering to buy him the pizza and Hawaiian punch he selected. “I got you, baby,” she said.
Back outside, she said into the phone, “There’s this kid, you know, he’s strung out. He needed something.”
And then, seamlessly, she dove back into talking about her music. “In this weird way, this concert became kind of like — I’m not nearly dead, thank God — but it became sort of a midlife career retrospective,” she said.
While the orchestral project is a totally new endeavor for the six-time Grammy-Award-winning Clark, it puts her in the company of many pop peers, who have also recently waded into the world of classical collaborations.
There’s Rosalía, whose latest album, “Lux,” was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra. And in Chicago this summer, Lucy Dacus and Ben Folds are among the rock singers appearing with the Chicago Philharmonic and Grant Park Orchestra, respectively, while Lizzo and her flute helped kick off CSO’s season at Ravinia, and hometown artist Andrew Bird will appear with the orchestra this fall.
Another prominent local example of rock-orchestra collaborations was Billy Corgan’s reimagination of the Smashing Pumpkins’ hit album “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.” Last fall, he debuted the project, backed by the Lyric Opera’s full orchestra and chorus, in a sold-out run of seven shows.
In the Corgan project, the songs were reimagined solely as symphonic works, without guitar or drum parts. In the St. Vincent universe, Clark does retain the role of world-class guitar shredder (Rolling Stone named Clark the 26th greatest guitarist of all time). She is joined onstage by her touring guitarist, bassist, drummer and keyboardist, in addition to the members of the orchestra.
While the trend of popular-star-goes-classical seems to be everywhere, it’s hardly new. In 1999, Metallica brought their heavy metal sound to a collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony on a series of live shows that resulted in the five-time platinum album “S&M.”
Still, the need for these types of crossover programs seems more urgent, as arts administrators in the classical universe look to attract broader audiences in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
CSO bassist Dan Carson said he understands the need to fill out a season with shows that have broad, mainstream appeal. When we spoke, Carson and his colleagues were fresh off their final shows at Symphony Center for the season: A three-night run of “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back,” in which the orchestra played John Williams’ score live.
He knows that these types of events, whether Downtown or at Ravinia, are a way to sell tickets. And while he said, “We obviously love Mozart and Mahler,” he also said there’s something about the buzz of a sold-out audience — dressed up as Princess Leia or Stormtroopers — that is infectious. “I want people to go nuts,” Carson said. “I really like the energy.”
And when artists of other genres — whether jazz singer Samara Joy or bluegrass-rooted Chris Thile — come to town, Carson said there’s generally a mutual respect. Though he said sometimes the music retrofitted for orchestral players isn’t so challenging.
“Something that’s common is that they’ll have an electric bass player, so having the orchestral bass in addition to that is almost a little bit redundant,” Carson said, “so we’ll just kind of add some maybe pizzicato, some plucking to give it some texture or something.”
Clark said that when she arrives in a new city, she likes “the process of slowly winning orchestras over,” but there’s typically only one rehearsal to do it.
“I like seeing them transition from ‘Oh man, when’s this going to be over?’ to ‘We had a good time with nice, talented people, and we enjoyed that.’”
For Clark, the way to do that is by being respectful; plus, she said, “The charts are really good.”
“It’s so beautiful. I mean, 60 incredible musicians playing music conducted by a great conductor,” Clark said. “When do 60 people come together to do anything? I just get to bathe in beauty.”
Courtney Kueppers is an arts and culture reporter at WBEZ.