It was hard not to be overwhelmed by much of what transpired opening night at the Boston Calling music festival at City Hall Plaza on Friday. No mean feat, since this was the festival’s shortest night: three acts, two stages, not quite four hours. Contrast that with the 11-hour, 18-act bills scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, a stepping stone toward the still-greater sprawl to come when Boston Calling moves to Harvard University’s athletic complex in Allston next year.
But if Friday’s bill — Sia, the enigmatic Australian pop star; Sufjan Stevens, a reliably inquisitive alt-pop troubadour; and Lisa Hannigan, an Irish singer-songwriter, with Aaron Dessner, a guitarist for the indie-rock band the National and the festival’s music curator — seemed economical on paper, its impact was anything but.
Sia’s headlining set was in its way the antithesis of outdoor-festival fare, closer in aspect to a modern-dance recital with a singer tucked in one corner. She began alone, stock still behind her microphone and two-tone bangs, on a virtually bare stage. Then the dancer Steph Mincone emerged from beneath the singer’s ponderous skirts, her manic gyrations embodying the passions and pains Sia’s songs conveyed.
The show, tightly choreographed to programmed tracks, included two further dancers, both men. While Sia performed atop a small platform upstage, dancers clambered, clashed, and grimaced around her. Their movements echoed small dramas played out on a video screen behind them, by familiar faces including Paul Dano and Kristen Wiig.
The interplay of live and potted aspects was constantly engaging, Sia’s clarion sound no less so, throughout a set that opened strong with “Alive,” “Diamonds,” and “Cheap Thrills,” and peaked with a devastating one-two finale of “Titanium” and “Chandelier.” The P.A. smoothed out some of the crinkles and yelps that on record give Sia’s voice its distinctive charge, but peal and poise more than compensated.
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Curiosity and sharp contrast also loomed large in Stevens’s show, an affair as eye-popping — day-glo aerobics togs and face paint, tinsel wigs, inflatable air dancers, a hulking suit of armor with a disco-ball chestplate — as it was ear-pleasing.
“Carrie & Lowell,” his most recent LP, is a thing of potent ache and elegiac beauty. But here Stevens seemed eager to lay ghosts to rest, at least initially.
“We’ve just gone around the world singing songs about death,” he brightly told the crowd after the bubbly opener “Seven Swans,” at the end of which he’d smashed his banjo. “So if you don’t mind, we’d like to have a little fun tonight.”
That declaration was reflected in a romp through a canon that mingles and mixes pensive balladry; smoothed-out soft-rock evocations; grooves and moves nicked from ’80s MTV funk and African pop; and meaningful nods to post-minimalist classical composition. Quiet songs like “Casimir Pulaski Day” and the title track from “Carrie & Lowell” had their place, standing in relief among more boisterous cuts from LPs “Illinois” and “The Age of Adz.”
The opening set offered the approachable appeal of Hannigan’s sweetly sandy voice with its lilting curl, a sympathetic band, and sturdy songs. Yet in its soft-spoken manner, this, too, felt anomalous for a pop festival’s initial gambit — almost as if to say, this is the way the end begins: not with a bang, but a whisper.
Steve Smith can be reached at steven.smith@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @nightafternight.
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A previous version misidentified the featured dancer Steph Mincone, who performed with Sia at Boston Calling.