St. Vincent Plays Montreal Jazz Fest With Full Orchestra June 28

Annie Clark, performing as St. Vincent, is bringing her songs to life with a full orchestra at the Montreal Jazz Festival on June 28, a year and a half after a transformative performance at London's prestigious BBC Proms.

"I felt like I was surfing on a wave," Clark said of her September 2025 appearance at the Royal Albert Hall, where she performed her compositions arranged for symphony orchestra. That experience sparked something—the realization that the orchestral arrangements could reveal new dimensions in songs she wrote for electronic production.

The Montreal concert features arrangements by conductor Jules Buckley and Rachel Eckroth, Clark's longtime keyboardist. Rather than simply layering strings over her original recordings, these reworkings are sophisticated reimaginings. Songs from her album Masseduction like Slow Disco and Smoking Section take on entirely new emotional weight in orchestral form. Smoking Section, originally performed as a kind of breathless defeat, becomes what Clark describes as a "triumphal sadness" with the orchestra—the line "It's not the end" suddenly rings true where it felt hopeless before.

Clark credits her early influences—Stravinski, Tchaïkovski, Debussy, Arvo Pärt, and film composers—for making the orchestral arrangements feel natural rather than imposed. "Several of my compositions, those of the first albums especially, are influenced by the music of film and the work of Stravinski, Tchaïkovski, Debussy, Arvo Pärt. It's for that reason that the orchestra never sounds forced," she said.

The concert takes place at the Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier of the Place des Arts.