Music review: Regina Spektor

Over the past 15 years, the New York singer/pianist Regina Spektor has added any number of beautiful, clever, quirky compositions to the modern American songbook. But conscious of her Russian émigré status, she chose to open this concert with someone else’s words, reciting the Emma Lazarus poem, “The New Colossus,” originally inspired by Jewish refugees arriving at Ellis Island and etched into the very fabric of the Statue of Liberty – “the mother of exiles” – as her act of defiance now that there is “another asshole in the White House”.