Santa Rosa, CA (July 13, 2007) - Inspired by the traditions of cabaret, musicals, and opera, Rufus Wainwright brings his richly orchestrated, theatrical pop music to Santa Rosa's Wells Fargo Center for the Arts, August 2 at 8pm. The concert will feature Wainwright's popular and critically acclaimed work, including selections from his new album Release the Stars with 12 new songs that are at once grand and intimate.

Wainwright is lauded by his peers as the most extraordinary songwriter of his generation. Elton John refers to him as "the as-yet unheralded American treasure," while Martin Scorsese, for whom Wainwright played a lounge singer in The Aviator, calls him a "one-man Greek chorus." The son of folk singers Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, Wainwright comes from a family of gifted artists. His younger sister, Martha Wainwright is a pop-rock singer-songwriter. As children, Rufus and his sister toured with their mother in the group The McGarrigle Sisters and Family. 

When Wainwright was preparing to go to Berlin last summer to record his new album, the first he would produce himself, he envisioned it as "a kind of pared down bare bones affair." But something dramatically different took hold once Wainwright got there, as opening track "Do I Disappoint You," which boasts an impressive orchestral sweep to match the "sturm und drang" of the lyrics, amply illustrates.

"Some people go to Berlin to get more cutting edge. I went and started wearing lederhosen and going to visit baroque palaces," Wainwright recounts with a laugh. "The Germany I was enthused with was more old fashioned and kind of romantic. I just got there, and the next thing you know, I had this huge gilded album. It was kind of an amazing experience because I didn't intend it to be that way."

With Release the Stars, his fifth album in a decade, Wainwright artfully establishes the intimacy he was reaching for, while creating a work even more ambitious in scope than his acclaimed 2004 release, Want Two. It's as if he's exchanging confidences one-on-one from the stage of New York City's Metropolitan Opera House in the middle of, say, Aida. There is ravishing sound everywhere, yet it all serves to underscore Wainwright's own performance as commentator, confessor, leading man. On this grand scale, his brilliant, idiosyncratic gifts as a songwriter and vocalist come into even greater focus. The emotions are heightened; his stories more vivid, dramatic, funny, real, and at times very moving. Release the Stars is as direct and personal as Wainwright initially imagined it would be.

Rufus Wainwright performs along with special guests Sean Lennon and A Fine Frenzy Thursday, August 2 nd at 8pm at the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts. Tickets ($39.50, $45) are available at the Box Office located at 50 Mark West Springs Road in Santa Rosa , by phone at 707-546-3600, and online at www.wellsfargocenterarts.com .