Agnes Obel – Te Paepae Theatre, 29 September 2026: Review & Photo Gallery

30th September 2026

Agnes Obel returned to New Zealand for only her second show here, bringing a set built from piano, cello, percussion, electronics, voice and a visual language that seemed to bend the room around her. Dream Chambers opened the night with a very different kind of electronic spell.

It was a curious pairing. One artist works with the modular synth as a kind of laboratory; the other builds chamber-pop compositions that can feel as though they have been pulled from some half-remembered dream. Both, though, understand that atmosphere isn’t decoration. It is the music.

Dream Chambers

Jess Chambers, performing as Dream Chambers, stood almost alone at stage left, anchored behind her synth keyboard and surrounded by the equipment needed to create the set in real time. There were no long pauses between pieces, no obvious reset points and no friendly chatter to break the spell. One sound folded into the next, with Chambers moving between controls and key placements with the concentration of someone piloting a machine that could change direction at any second.

The effect was strangely captivating.

For an audience more accustomed to a singer stepping forward, saying hello and telling us what the next song is about, fully synthesised music can take a little adjustment. Where is the hook? Where is the chorus? What exactly are we supposed to hold on to?

And yet, heads stayed locked on Dream Chambers.

The room wasn’t particularly chatty. That silence could have felt awkward, but it didn’t. It felt more like concentration. Chambers’ work asks the listener to follow texture, pulse, tone and movement rather than lyrics, and there was something almost theatrical about watching the sound being constructed in front of us. The keyboard became less like an instrument and more like a control panel for an ever-changing stage.

That makes sense given Chambers’ wider practice. Her work moves between modular synthesis, voice, songwriting and screen composition, and 2026 has seen her expand further into film and television scoring, including the feature Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant and the series The Ridge. She has also been recognised with the 2026 Springboard Award from The Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi.

You could hear why.

There is a cinematic quality to the music, even when it refuses to behave like a conventional soundtrack. It suggests images without insisting on them. For anyone who spends time thinking about music for games, film or theatre, there is plenty here to chew on. You can easily imagine this kind of sound behind an indie pixel-art game, a tiny character wandering through an enormous digital landscape while a synth line changes with every room.

It was experimental without feeling like a lecture.

And then the lights changed, the stage reset, and the room moved into another world.

Agnes Obel

When Agnes Obel and her band appeared, the theatre was almost completely dark. There was no giant entrance, no theatrical countdown, no attempt to manufacture excitement. The music did that work.

The opening notes of Red Virgin Soil emerged from the darkness, with Obel at the piano and Julian Sartorius on drums and percussion, Marie-Claire Schlameus on cello and Hinako Omori on keys and synthesizers. The musicians were dressed in white, their figures standing out against a pale backdrop alongside their well placed array of instruments and cameras (more on that later).

Then came Fuel to Fire, and the room began to settle into Obel’s particular gravity.

Red light flooded parts of the stage during Fuel to Fire and Camera’s Rolling, turning the musicians’ shadows into part of the arrangement. It was a simple lighting idea, but it worked because the show never overloaded the eye. Even the permanent architectural lights around Te Paepae Theatre, those vertical tubes scattered across the walls, which might normally pull attention away from a performance, somehow added to the atmosphere when they appeared around the darker edges of the room.

The music itself remained the centre.

Obel has always occupied an unusual space between classical composition, chamber pop and electronic music. Her debut, Philharmonics, established that language, while Aventine, Citizen of Glass and Myopia pushed it into stranger territory. Her latest album, The Meaning of Flowers, released in September after a six-year gap, brings another shift, drawing on ideas around birth, growth, nature and interconnectedness.

Live, those ideas don’t need explaining.

They are felt.

The first real visual jolt came with The Meaning of Flowers. A projection of Obel and the musicians began to multiply across the screen, mirrored and repeated until the people onstage seemed to exist several times over. Later, Laymelli carried that visual language further. The projections didn’t feel like a music-video backdrop pasted behind the band. They behaved more like another instrument.

That distinction matters.

The best concert visuals don’t tell you what to think. They alter the room. Here, the images stretched the music’s sense of scale and made the theatre feel slightly unstable, as if the walls had stopped behaving properly.

Familiar brought one of the first big responses from the crowd. The opening notes were enough to produce a small roar, a release from an audience that had spent much of the evening sitting almost perfectly still. It was a reminder that Obel’s music can be intensely quiet without ever being passive.

The new material fitted naturally beside the older songs. Run Cried the Crawling brought another moment of concentration before Obel finally broke the spell and spoke to the crowd, asking if everyone was doing alright. It was a small exchange, almost shy, and somehow that made it more memorable. After so much carefully controlled sound, hearing her simply talk felt like someone opening a window.

The musicians deserved their own spotlight, too. Hinako Omori moved between keys and synthesizers with a light touch, adding colour without crowding the arrangements. Marie-Claire Schlameus gave the music a physical warmth, her cello lines adding weight beneath Obel’s voice. Julian Sartorius was particularly fascinating to watch, treating percussion less as a timekeeping device and more as a source of texture and movement.

Obel has spoken about the musicians’ own songwriting and solo practices, and it shows.

There is no weak link in this quartet.

It’s Happening Again began softly before gathering force, while Faustian Deal and Gemini showed how comfortably the newer songs sit beside the older catalogue. At times, the newer material was more vocally driven, and some of the words were harder to catch in the theatre. But perhaps that says something about Obel’s music. The voice is not always functioning as a conventional storyteller. Sometimes it is simply another texture in the arrangement.

And when the band reached Stretch Your Eyes, the whole performance seemed to expand.

The theatre had felt intimate for much of the evening. Suddenly it felt enormous.

That was the trick of the night. Obel didn’t need to overpower the room. She let small sounds accumulate until they became something much larger. A piano note. A breath. A cello phrase. A strange electronic pulse. Sartorius finding a rhythm in what sounds, from a distance, like almost nothing.

The encore arrived.

There had already been a standing ovation before the encore, which says plenty about how completely the audience had been drawn into the performance. When Obel returned for Words Are Dead, the room was immediately attentive again.

Then came Riverside.

The opening notes produced an audible gasp from sections of the crowd. It was one of those lovely live-music reactions that can’t be manufactured. People recognised the song almost instantly, and for a moment the room shifted from quiet appreciation into something warmer and more communal.

The Curse closed the night, followed by another long standing ovation.

For an artist who can make a packed theatre feel like a private room, that response felt fitting.

Walking out into Auckland on a Tuesday night, the contrast was almost funny. Outside was traffic, fluorescent light, people checking phones and figuring out where to eat. Inside, for roughly 90 minutes, Agnes Obel had created a place where time seemed to slow down.

And perhaps that’s what connected Dream Chambers and Agnes Obel so neatly. Neither artist needs to fill every second. Both trust sound, space and light to do some of the talking.

Dream Chambers left me still wondering exactly how I feel about fully synthesised music, which is probably a pretty good sign. Agnes Obel, meanwhile, made the answer easier. Her music doesn’t demand that you understand every detail. It asks you to listen closely.