Take away Elton John’s excesses–the outlandish costumes, the drugs, the syrupy orchestrations, the jewelry–take away his band, take away even his youth, and what remains?
John’s daring, marathon solo piano performance at the Arie Crown Theatre on Tuesday
night provided an unexpected answer.
He presented himself not as master pop craftsman or king of soft-rock schmaltz, but as a serious artist with a 30-years-in-the-making body of work that can’t be measured merely in terms of his abundant, instantly recognizable hits.
Aside from the rhinestone trim on his powder-blue suit, John was an understated presence, and the music matched his wardrobe. Even when obliging the crowd with his hits, he emphasized his reflective side.
A stately rendition of “Your Song” gave the facile tune added weight, and John filled “Rocket Man” with pregnant pauses before ending with melodramatic crescendos.
His voice was a bit frayed, but it remained full and forceful, particularly as John’s deliberate phrasing imbued his finale, “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me,” with stately grandeur.
That song’s implications are undoubtedly greater for John at 52 than when he and lyricist Bernie Taupin wrote it more than 25 years ago.
At a career point where nearly all his peers play it safe, though, he took admirable risks, delving into some of the most obscure corners of his catalog, and one of the darkest.
John touched on his little-noticed debut on “Skyline Pigeon,” detailed his prickly relationship with his muse on “Harmony,” and delivered the Nighthawks-meets-Bach oddity “Better Off Dead.” “Ticking,” was his most audacious moment, and one of his finest, as John tersely sang a prophetic tale of violent, alienated youth from 1974.
It was about the farthest imaginable point in John’s songbook from Lion King ballads and Princess Diana elegies. Instead of royalty, he sang about outcasts and misfits, from the whore in “Sweet Painted Lady” to, inevitably, Marilyn Monroe herself in a spare rendition of “Candle in the Wind” that replaced mawkish sentiment with something deeper.
As admirable as these intentions were, the subdued presentation dragged at times. No decent soul could begrudge John his sober dignity, but at times one pined for the outrageous rock ‘n’ roller of his younger, more turbulent days.
Fortunately, John managed to balance maturity and mischief by frequently returning to his roots in the African-American music he first performed backing R&B musicians in the mid-’60s.
He played the gospel preacher on a slow-boiling “Philadelphia Freedom,” and stabbed his keyboard ferociously during the New Orleans syncopations of “Honky Cat.”
John finished “Bennie and the Jets” with a rambunctious blast of barrelhouse boogie, mugging, bobbing his head, thrusting his pelvis into the underside of his instrument. It was a moment of unrestrained exhilaration at show’s end, and no one could say he hadn’t earned it.
