Amsterdam Carre doesn’t actually exist as an album. It is available (further questions would be either naive or impolite) as a bootleg, and it is a recording of a concert that Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnsons) gave in the summer of last year in Amsterdam, as part of his 2009 series of concerts with various symphony orchestras in Europe.

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Collaborations of pop/rock musicians with symphony orchestras are often treated with suspicion. Understandably, for we’ve seen enough bad examples. A positive review of a pop album featuring a symphony orchestra must, therefore, explain what the album is not, so as to appease the skeptics. Firstly, Amsterdam Carre isn’t a claim to validation. The project is not an attempt to show that pop-music can be played with strings and oboe. It is not a comraderie of convenience, in the hope that some of the refinement of classical music will rub onto pop tunes. The music of Antony and the Johnsons doesn’t need to borrow sophistication nor prestige. Secondly, Amsterdam Carre is not a display of the epic or tear-jerking powers of a symphony orchestra. The songs are not loaded with cascades of grave passages or corny violin trills. All the arrangements are done with good taste and a sense of moderation, without drowning the songs themselves in the process of make-over. Sometimes the contribution of the orchestra is impressively minimalistic, providing a modest frame for Antony’s beautiful, vibrating voice (‘Water and Dust’, ‘Another World’). A quiet piano accompaniment often remains the bedrock of the orchestration, just like in the original. Other times the orchestra rushes into a Disney soundtrack-style coda (‘I fell in love with a dead boy’), but never with unjustified pathos.

The setlist of the concert stretches over the group’s three albums, but also includes a new song – ‘Salt Silver Oxygen’ – and a cover of Beyonce’s ‘Crazy in Love’. The latter is actually the produt of a double make-over. The group first transformed the groovy r’n’b hit into a touching piano and percussion ballad, bringing out the melody of a song which, for all we knew, had none. Then came the orchestra arrangement, which added operatic sorrowfulness to the sound (a studio version of it was released in August of last year, along with a video). This track is the jewel of the bootleg.