But then Wainwright, 37, the category-defying son of musicians Loudon Wainwright III and the late Kate McGarrigle, has always traveled his own, often unpredictable route. His recent forays include a lush Judy Garland tribute and the spare solo album "All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu," which includes three Shakespeare settings.
This week, Wainwright's cycle "Five Shakespeare Sonnets" receives its delayed world premiere at Davies, with the composer as vocal soloist. The performances are a kind of double premiere. Michael Francis, a late replacement for conductor-pianist Jeffrey Kahane, is making his San Francisco Symphony debut on the podium. Kurt Weill and Darius Milhaud share the bill with Wainwright.
Fresh from a pre-concert sound check at Oakland's Fox Theater while wearing his pop music hat, Wainwright sat down to talk about the pleasures and snares of setting Shakespeare to music. His attire - plaid shorts, sandals, navy-blue shirt with sleeves rolled halfway up his forearms - and a breezy, sometimes swirling conversational style set a casually effervescent tone.
'Orbiting' the sonnets
"I never actually studied the sonnets in school," he recalled, "but I've sort of been orbiting them for years." His mother offered an early, disarming introduction. "She spoke of 'The expense ... in a waste of shame' (Sonnet 129) as 'the masturbating one.' I think she was trying to make culture look cool to a teenager: 'He's writing about what you're doing.' "
When Wainwright did get around to trying a sonnet setting, with "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes," his father was unimpressed with his son's work on Sonnet 29. "At the end he said, 'That was terrible. You can't understand any of the words. It's meandering.' "
Wainwright peered off with a small smile. "I did definitely run into some heavy-duty criticism from my family right off the bat. To be honest, I think he was wrong. But in retrospect it was kind of great. Once again, my dad toughens me up."
Wainwright got a more receptive reaction from Robert Wilson, the avant-garde theater and opera director who was planning a Shakespeare stage production for the Berliner Ensemble. The elaborately costumed and stylized "Shakespeares Sonette," with music by Wainwright, premiered in Berlin in April 2009.
It was a heady time for the composer. His "Prima Donna" opera opened three months later in Manchester, England, after plans for a Metropolitan Opera premiere ran aground over a dispute about the language of the libretto (it's in French). Wainwright's mother died in January of this year.
"It really was the most intense couple of years of my life," Wainwright said. "I needed some serious wisdom in the picture. Reading these poems gave me this incredible perspective on everything, whether it was love or death or aging or youth, desire, loneliness - everything. I was very vulnerable, which is a good time to read them. That's when the poetry really takes hold."
The five sonnets in the current cycle include the one his mother pressed on him as a teenager and Wainwright's favorite, Sonnet 20 ("A woman's face with nature's own hand painted"). No sooner had he declared that allegiance than Wainwright put in a bid for another.
" 'When most I wink, then do mine eyes see best' (Sonnet 43, also in the Davies cycle) is starting to take precedence," he mused. "It shifts. These are the kinds of works that once you latch onto two or three of them, you have them in your mind your whole life."
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