more lord, more rings

Ooh ooh ooh! Ooh! Ooh! Wolf Trap has scheduled the Two Towers for next summer! I don't know yet if I'll be singing in it, but it's on my calendar for August 28 & 29!

what a day what a day for an auto-da-fé

Right, so, I sang Candide on Sunday. I think it went really well. I certainly felt like I was singing well. And the conductor cooled his bat-out-of-hell tempos a bit for the performance, so we got out more of the words than in the other rehearsals with him.

An unfortunate fact of the hall is that you can't hear a dang thing when you're seated at the back of the stage. So the soloists and narrator were chatting away and it sounded like mush. Completely unintelligible. It was kind of sad not to get to appreciate this performance that was, judging by the audience's reaction, hilarious.

E.C. took pictures of us at rehearsal on Saturday, so she got two free tickets and took Miss Shirley. N.Lu and S.Vix came, too, but left at intermission because their butts were wet. (There was a lot of rain during the day and I gather the lawn was not very hospitable.) Everyone said they liked it, so, yay!

I love when people come to my performances. I know I'm just one completely indistinguishable voice in a big mass of performers, but it means a lot to me when people come to see me.

That's it for my series of random choir concerts - no more performing til...probably December! Crazy!

Blog posts about the show: Someone at the park got to party with Jason Alexander. (Also, a bit about rehearsal.) An audience member. Another one. (Nobody mentions the chorus. Sigh.) And another. (Which mentions the chorus, but inaccurately - we were amplified, too.) And here are some official photos. (You can see me in one of them, if you're looking really closely and know what the woman standing next to me looks like.) Another official post, mostly about Jason Alexander.

candide

Of all the random things I signed up to sing this summer, Candide was the one I was most excited about. And it turned out to be the most difficult. Candide is a comic operetta by Leonard Bernstein based on the 18th-century novel by Voltaire. It's about how it's dumb to go around saying everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. It's satirical and dirty and very entertaining. There's a big aria about syphilis.

The notes aren't hard, if you're me and have had them memorized for over a decade. But stylistically it's tough. We're supposed to be singing like an opera chorus, which means like soloists who are trying to make it but are choosing to blend. I normally sing in a sweet little choir voice. This is not that.

Also, Bernstein wrote stuff that is insanely difficult to sing in tune. Like this chorus, which is lovely but REALLY wants to go flat. Like, a half step flat. Or more. (The accompaniment helps a little, but mostly I have to raise my eyebrows a lot.)

Come hear it for yourself Sunday night. It's great music and a fun show, and this guy is in it. Yeah, apparently he has a great Broadway voice - who knew? (I won't hear him until Sunday afternoon at the dress rehearsal.)

oh, I only talked about the audience before

Michael Stipe was happy. The band rocked. The first song they played was Finest Worksong, which was a pretty awesome declaration: "We are going to play old music and it is going to rock." And it did. It was great! I'm just going to keep repeating this. It was great! Yay R.E.M.! Yay! Great!

They were so great that I very briefly toyed with trying to see them on Long Island on Saturday. There are good tickets available...if it were Manhattan, I might go for it, but I don't really want to get involved with multiple trains and buses. (The Manhattan show is on a weeknight.) Anyway, anyone who lives anywhere else they're going should consider going. All the reviews I've seen have been good, and they're playing lots of old stuff.

Yay! Great!

rocking awesome concert awesomeness

That's Mike Mills singing "(Don't Go Back To) Rockville." I think they're contractually obligated to do that every time they sing around here. (Excellent essay on the genesis of Rockville and the nature of memory and truth and whatnot.)

Setlist.

My review: Awesome. This was definitely the best of the three times I've seen them (Minneapolis 1995, around here in 2003). I had the best seats of the three times, and the crowd was super energetic and fun, other than the loser guys next to Spice who kept leaving and coming back while we were getting our dance on.

peer gone

Peer Gynt is over now. It was really a pleasure to sing. Also, I'm told by people who came to the concert that it was fantastic. And most of these people didn't even give birth to me.

Tonight when we finished there was tons of lightning. As I drove home I put on a recording I'd been using to practice. The first few miles of my drive home are along a dark winding woodsy road - with In the Hall of the Mountain King playing and lightning turning the sky purple. Not a bad end to the evening.

The conductor has apparently been taking this Peer Gynt show on the road for the centennial of Grieg's death, so if you get a chance, you should definitely check it out. And if you can, arrange for lightning afterward.

velsignede morgen

Tonight was the opening night for Peer Gynt. It went quite well. This is our biggest choral moment. (That is not us singing it, obviously, but OAMers should definitely look at who *is* singing it.) It's right near the end of the piece, we have to remember our starting pitch through about 30 seconds of narration, and the orchestra comes in soon enough after we sing that we really ought to end it in the same key we started in. (Those of you who have sung in choirs will know that this is really hard.) And the conductor is taking it suuuuper slow and milking it for all its got. Good stuff.

And to balance out that awesome moment, a totally dumb moment: We sing "slagt ham" a whole bunch of times in one section. It means "slaughter him!" and it's really loud and fast and violent. There's a series of them where someone says a line, then we yell - ok, sing - "slagt ham!" while the orchestra plays two notes really fast. Well, the first one of those? We didn't sing it. It was like the whole choir agreed to not bother coming in. Heh heh. Oops. (After that, we paid attention.)

a ticket offer

If you follow this link, you'll see some $20 orchestra tickets for Peer Gynt. Performances are tonight, tomorrow afternoon, and Saturday night.

slagt ham!

If anyone here in the area is looking for entertainment this Thursday-Saturday, I'm singing in this. (Yknow, me and 75 of my closest friends.) This is another gig where the choir doesn't sing that much, so I look forward to sitting right behind a fantastic orchestra for three performances of Peer Gynt, while getting up and singing occasionally. If you can go to the Friday afternoon show, let me know and I'll forward you a two-for-the-price-of-one ticket offer.

festival au desert

I think it would be very cool to go to this one year.

more blog reviews

This dude liked it. Also, one of his friends uses a picture of Éomer as his avatar. Nerdy awesomeness. This review is sandwiched between personal life news that is probably only interesting if you know the person. Which I don't. Ooh! Here's an official wolf trap blog with a photo slideshow! And here's a compilation o' reviews, including one really really glowing one. Yay.

UPDATE, 5/24: More! A particularly well-written glowing review; someone who got cold and left but was nice about it; another cold fan. This fan took pictures.

UPDATE, 5/26: We were EPIC WIN. Another singer gives even more detail, with funny conductor quotes.

UPDATE, 5/27: They liked it at theonering.net. A happy, wet geek calls the show "magnificent."

UPDATE, 6/18: People are still blogging about it! (Woo!) This dude liked. We were clear and stuff. Someone posted more pictures.

logistics of the ring

So yeah, it was great again tonight! We had a bigger audience with even more cheering. Yay. I've never gotten an audience response like that before. I mean, wow. People love them some Tolkien. They cheered the first time the strings played the Ring theme. They cheered the end of the first act. They cheered the beginning of the second act. They applauded every giant swelling Fellowship theme. Lots of people (not just one dude, like last night) cheered when Aragorn chopped off the one Orc's head. And, man, at the end? About four major outbursts of applause during the end credits. That's our biggest singing moment, so it was partly like, yay, thank you, and partly like, shut up, we're singing here.

Here's how it worked: We had a version of the movie without the music. It had all the sound effects and all the talking, and it had subtitles so you could follow the dialogue when we were drowning it out. This was also good for me, because I was watching it on a giant screen above the conductors' head. Since the sound was going out into the hall, not back at us, we couldn't make out the words most of the time, but we could follow along by reading the subtitles backwards.

The conductor's monitor showed the movie with moving lines and blobs and stuff superimposed to show him when the cues were coming up. (I read about it on this random person's blog - I couldn't see that screen, of course.) He's conducted this nine times now - a significant number, if you know your Fellowship - so he's an expert. And he's like a hobbit. Ok, it's impossible to imagine a hobbit taking charge of 150 performers, but if a hobbit *could* be a conductor, it would be this guy. When the choir presented him with a little gift before tonight's show, he made an "ooh hoo hoo hooo!" exclamation of happiness.

Here are some more of my post-show blog search results: This one makes me wish I could see it myself. Here's another fan. This one left at intermission and was shocked (shocked!) by such things as Wolf Trap being outdoors and employing volunteers as ushers. And this blogger doesn't have much to say.

I took a picture

We couldn't see the screen very well during the dress rehearsal yesterday afternoon, but that put us in good company with the conductor, whose little monitor kept dropping out. Our problem pretty much took care of itself when the sun went down, and apparently they fixed his monitor, too.

But it was a little worrisome when the string players' music stand lights flickered and went out during the performance. Orchestra musicians are union and they're super strict about their contracts. Toward the end of the dress rehearsal, when we had about five more minutes of music and the boy soprano hadn't sung his big final solo yet, the orchestra hit quitting time and stopped playing mid-phrase. I know they do this, but it's still kind of freaky when it happens. And when the lights flickered, I thought, what if playing without stand lights isn't in their contract? Are they going to walk off stage now?

wow

Ok, so, the concert? Amazing. Phenomenal. Fantastic. And I can say this as an audience member as much as a performer, really. Yeah, I was in the choir. But I was singing less than half the time (probably less than 10% of the time) and the rest of the time I got to sit back and watch the movie, backwards, on a giant screen above the conductor's head. Ok, when I wasn't frantically counting (forty-two, two three four five, forty-three, two three four five...) or fantasizing about the warmer clothes I'll wear tomorrow night.

Anyway, back to my point: Adding live music makes this pretty-great movie freaking amazing.

If tonight's audience is anything to judge by (sigh) there's a lot of tickets available for tomorrow night. I'm hoping it was partly the weather that kept the audience small. And, ok, there weren't that many of them, but they were *so* enthusiastic. It was great fun to perform for them.

getcher half-price tickets right here

If any loyal readers are on the fence about coming to see this this week (Wednesday and Thursday at Wolf Trap), let me tempt you with this half-price ticket offer. The password is Frodo. Half price tickets, my friends.

nerdy excitement

Tonight I joined a new choir (I know, I know) and I am so excited about it. Why, you ask? Well, many reasons, but partly because we were singing in Elvish tonight. But Elvish is a made-up language, you say! Yes, but one which is very important if one is going to be performing THIS. Everyone should come see it, because can you imagine a better way to spend a lovely May evening? No? Neither can I. Go buy a ticket.

spice girls

Um...I don't suppose anyone's crazy enough to pay $122.50 plus insane Ticketmaster fees to see the Spice Girls with me? They just added a D.C. date.

trekkspill

Ok, a number of people guessed the instrument, so here it is being played by both bands.

TMBG:


KFME:


Yep - it's the accordion. Favored instrument of random bands the world over.

cmon, smart people

Quiz update: Giddysinger is the only one who's guessed what instrument was played by both TMBG and KFME this weekend, and it wasn't so much a "guess" as the fact that he knows both bands. So, you people who have vague knowledge of They Might Be Giants: what instrument is played by John Linnell and might also be played by a trio that performs traditional Finnish and Russian music?

Hints: it's not a jingle bell stick thing; that was only They Might Be Giants. Also not a double bass, which was only played by the Karelian Folk Music Ensemble. Also not trombone (TMBG), harmonica (KFME), theremin (TMBG) or goat horn (KFME). Picture to follow when you're sick of guessing or everybody gets it.

they might be awesome

Last night (after the gizzard dinner) S.Vix and I went to see They Might Be Giants at the 9:30 club. We ran into a friend of mine from middle school and her brother. He asked how many times I'd seen them at this club...I'm going with at least three or so. Then I started counting all the other times I'd seen them, and the total is around 10. Which is nothing compared to one friend's brother I met, who'd seen them more than 20 times - and he was about 23 years old.

And they were awesome. They played the songs everyone knows, and I was particularly excited to hear Purple Toupee, Whistling in the Dark, The Famous Person Polka, and - one of my concert favorites - Dr. Worm.

Quiz for you: S.Vix and I kicked off the evening with a concert by the Karelian Folk Music Ensemble at the Kennedy Center's Millenium Stage. The Karelians played Finnish music in the Christmas show two years ago when it was Scandinavian-themed. So. What single musical instrument do KFME and TMBG share?