Swell Music Season Start A bit of a pun, that, as last night we went to see The Frames at the Sydney Opera House, billed as "Glenn Hansard & The Frames", a result, apparently, of Mr. Hansard commencing a solo career or side project, in addition to his previous efforts following the film Once as the Swell Season, with Marketa Irglova. Hansard spent a portion of the show, which ran for about three hours, alone on stage, or duetting with Lisa Hannigan, who also opened the evening. I spent some years remembering and forgetting to follow up on my brother's recommendation to listen to the Frames, finally only buying a relatively recent release by the band and enjoying it no end, not to mention how much I think Once is a lovely movie. The show gave me a chance to hear songs from across their catalog, which goes back about twenty years, and left me thinking I've got some catching up to do. Any band with a title track song named after a Werner Herzog movie (Fitzcarroldo) has to be ranked among the very best arts bands of all time - but they are more, really. Hansard spoke of his "busker's arm" problem, in which he strikes his guitar harder than is necessary under amplified conditions. "I've finally found strings that will stay on, but the guitar suffers," he told us, and sure enough, his two acoustic guitars, as can be seen in Once have indeed suffered, with holes worn into them along the striking pattern above and below the resonator. But this is more the point: he and the band are entertainers. They are having a great time, but all the better when the crowd is with them. Encouraging the Sydney Opera House attendees to forget themselves and their prestigious environment for the evening, Hansard and the band had us singing along, snapping our fingers, and, if not dancing in the aisles, engaging otherwise, including, at one point, helping out with forgotten lyrics. (We might all have been better served, however, with less participation during the instances when Hansard or the ensemble assembled at the edge of the stage to play without amplification - a bit too big of a venue to transmit the sound effectively, at least for the songs performed.) We were also treated to an acapella rendition of the Bright Eyes tune "Devil Town", during a broken-string hiatus. I haven't seen a performance as purely fun as this in a while. They walked off the stage at 11:30, playing as they went, Leonard Cohen's "Passing Through", and as we left the Opera House after them, I swear they were still playing in the dressing rooms. Just too much fun to stop.