He has a vibrant stage presence, but sometimes tries his audience's patience with his ego-petting antics. If so far Rufus' vagaries could be either overlooked or forgiven, depending on whether one was a detatched listener or an ardent fan, on his latest album, 'All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu', they demand to be looked at in the eye. On this record, Wainwright does without the rich orchestrations that he is known and praised for, and which have been a strong mitigating argument for all his quirks. He sings accompanying himself on the piano. Three of the songs are Shakespeare sonnets set to music, one is based on a message he left on his sister's answering machine, and one is the closing aria of a French-language opera he wrote last year, no less. (I rest my case).

Upon entering BOZAR's lush concert hall everyone got a flyer with the code of manners for the evening: applause is not welcome during the first part of the performance. 'Great, I told myself. More pretense.' The other side of the flyer contained quotes of glorifying reviews of 'Songs for Lulu'. Aggravated and even with a dose of schadenfreude, I was looking from my balcony seat down into the hall, half-empty only fifteen minutes before the scheduled start. His solid fan-base must have been expecting the fifteen minutes delay, though: when the lights went out, Rufus appeared in front of a full audience. Wearing a black floor-length feathered gown, he made his way towards the piano with a methodically slow gait and then kicked off the set with the album opener 'Who are you New York'.

Wainwright went on to perform the rest of the songs from his latest album in silece, safe for a few coughs. Nobody applauded nor spoke, no phones went off. In the awe-inspiring stillness, even shuffling in one's chair was made to seem irreverential. If one could afford to get impatient with 'Songs for Lulu' in the privacy of one's home, at BOZAR one had little choice but to countenance the performance. And for once, a shameless demand for attention worked in Rufus' favor. It turned out that the album was best savored sitting on a hard chair, with the importance of that music impressed upon the listener. The performance demanded an extra effort of the listener: to follow through Rufus' radio-unfriendly melodies, often sadistically unresolved for a great chunk of the song; to sympathize with the desolation in his slice of life lyrics ('My mother's in hospital, my sister's at the opera/I'm in love, but let's not talk about it/There's so much to tell you'); to make sense of Shakespeare's role in all that.

I won't claim that the concert was a lustration of the album. Songs like 'Martha' and 'A Woman's face' could have used more sophistication, and 'The Dream', the most accessible song on the album with its life-affirming buoyancy, disrupted the meditative atmosphere. Some codas could have been shorter, and some inflections better structured. Most of the song lyrics are nostalgia-inducing: nostalgia for Rufus' good old eloquence and irony, that is. Finally, the reason why listening to the album had been so taxing was not the fact of its departure from pop standards, but the half-heartedness of that departure. 'Songs for Lulu' is insecurely straddling the line between chanson and academism, with not enough grip on either side.

After Rufus left the stage in the same studied manner, the applause erupted. He came back for the second half of the show more casually attired, waving, chatting away, and yes, thanking us for our earlier concentration. He went through his older repertoire, delivering hits such as 'Going to a town' and 'Matinee Idol', and fan favorites like 'Leaving for Paris' (which, he intimated, was factually true of the singer that evening). Rufus closed with a song by his recently deceased mother, folk icon Kate Garrigle, which demonstrated the extent of her influence on his own compositional style.