Stream It Or Skip It?
For An Evening With Dua Lipa, airing on CBS and also streaming on Paramount+, the London-born singer puts her Grammy-winning dance-pop in a symphonic context, as Lipa takes over the city’s historic, intimate Royal Albert Hall for a performance with a full orchestra. It’s December, so you might expect a seasonal theme. But while Dua fondly recalls Lipa family memories of Christmas mornings around the tree, An Evening With, recorded last October, is mostly designed to celebrate the show’s release as her first live album. Sweeping strings and pulsing brass meet four-on-the-floor beats and the elegance of high fashion as Dua Lipa brings her biggest hits to the Royal Albert, welcomes Elton John for a run through their hit collabo “Cold Heart,” and even saves some time to herald the symphony of flavor that is a slice of New York City pizza.
Opening Shot: An elaborate S-curve winds its way through Royal Albert Hall. As a fleet of over 50 musicians launch into “Houdini,” 6,000 voices greet Dua Lipa’s regal entrance in a red Gaultier gown complete with opera gloves.
The Gist: Cellos, violins, flutes, oboes, trumpets: name the orchestral instrument, and it sounds pretty cool at “Houdini”’s 117 beats per minute. The sound of contemporary pop song structure getting swept up in classical music grandeur is also tailor-made for a James Bond theme song, so as they decided on a new 007, they better be considering Dua Lipa to sing the next theme. Lipa’s vocal is assured and expressive throughout An Evening With, which in addition to “Houdini” features her fronting the Heritage Orchestra and members of her touring band on songs like “Levitating,” “Training Season,” “These Walls,” and the Barbie hit “Dance the Night.”
Heritage is no stranger to blending the classical form with contemporary sounds. (The Great Britain-based orchestra has also performed with Nas, Bjork, and Spiritualized.) But there seems to be a real affinity between the additional musicians and Lipa, as we hear in the performance and see in footage for An Evening With rehearsals. While the singer quips that even her natural brunette hair color is her “going back to my roots,” she also stresses how her style of singing is a fit for what the classical musicians are doing. There is even another cutaway that features a reunion between Lipa and her first vocal coach from when she was a teenager.
The set for An Evening With also represents Lipa’s first live album, after a year where Radical Optimism topped the charts and she headlined Glastonbury. So the special also includes a quick jaunt through New York City, and Lipa’s memories of performing there for the first time. (Additionally, Lipa channels what she calls the city’s “main character energy” as she houses a couple slices of pizza to the delight of onlookers.) Now, her journey of seeing rooms and stages grow in size bit by bit has brought her all the way to a glittering S-curve that wraps around an orchestra. “The only place I wanted to do a special one-off, orchestra-based show was Royal Albert Hall.”
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Australian pop legend Kylie Minogue performs at Royal Albert Hall in An Audience with Kylie (Hulu), and takes questions from a celebrity audience. And in An Evening With, as Dua Lipa credits her earliest performances – while standing outside Lower East Side NYC mainstay the Mercury Lounge – it’s worth revisiting her starmaking performance at Glastonbury in 2017.
Our Take: This isn’t just the fitting of one thing into another. Musically, An Evening with Dua Lipa isn’t in the style utilized by Vitamin String Quartet to fuse pop songs from Billie Eilish and Robyn to Bridgerton’s Regency era aesthetic. It’s bigger than that, big enough to support the rich low end of Lipa’s mixed voice soprano and still allow her space for interpretation and flair. A song like the Future Nostalgia standout “Love Again” gets a jolt from its new orchestral arrangement, because it retains its dance-pop pep but accentuates the trumpet in its chorus – a live trumpet, which replaces the sample White Town’s “Your Woman” originally took from 1930s bandleader Lew Stone. Trumpet features on Lipa’s “Maria,” too, alongside tasteful acoustic guitar and a strong stretch of her solo vocal. At every turn in An Evening With, Dua Lipa finds ways to add interesting touches to her most memorable songs. Which is great if you’re gonna add her first live album to your Spotify. But for the purposes of this special, it works wonders visually. From Dua Lipa, to the musicians, to the lively Royal Albert audience, there is palpable joy in the room.
Sex and Skin: Nothing here – it’s all custom couture and Chanel on display in An Evening With.
Parting Shot: The big set-closer is a rousing one, as Dua Lipa sings “Dance the Night” in a medley twofer with “Don’t Start Now,” which really benefits from symphony-sizing its disco bump.
Sleeper Star: Dua Lipa is having a great time in An Evening With. But so are the members of her regular touring band as they interact with her material in this larger orchestral format. Keyboardist Georgia Ward’s solo on “Illusion” is a highlight, and throughout the set, drummer Adam Wade lives up to his “Smiley” nickname.
Most Pilot-y Line: Radical Optimism, Dua Lipa’s third studio record, was written while she was on tour. She says the Royal Albert performance is a chance to connect with the songs in a purpose-built environment. “This show gets closer to the music, and all the organic sounds. It just felt right to hear these songs like this.”
Our Call: Stream It! Dua Lipa puts the “classy” back in “classical” in An Evening With, as her undeniable star power and comfort with the format inform the symphonic sounds that reimagine her biggest songs.
Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.
