Las Vegas in Vienna

We finished up our European concert tour last night with the strangest thing I've ever seen - noto necessarily strange in a bad way, but really bizarre. I called Las Vegas Rhapsody completely bizarre, yet totally enjoyable.

This concert is essentially a meeting of the minds of a German-born, New-York-Based singer with a flare for the weird and a genius Japanese pianist. They perform arrangements of showtunes with an orchestra, and make quite a show of it. The singer wore a cream suit jacket with charcoal pants, and the pianist, according to those who could see him, wore skinny pants and bright red socks. The orchestra was great, and the conductor looked like Einstein with a chrome dome. More on him later.

This concert featured several interesting numbers - the second movement was an orchestral piece, except with the singer harmonizing in ooh's and ah's over the music for three minutes. My thought was that he has trouble being on stage without performing. Once he came on stage after the intro piece, he never stopped making sounds. Sounds is a good way to put it - he did an arrangement of "You Go To My Head" that mostly consisted of what I can only describe as respiratory beatboxing...which is comprised of sniffing and uncomfortable grunting, essentially. Then he did some songs that featured bird call whistles and really terrible southern accents. There was a version of "My Favorite Things" that was actually really cool, where the orchestra played in 5 the whole time while he sang in 3. This arrangement was also essentially a sombre war march with minor and scary timpani. My personal favorite part was that in between songs, he'd do little explanations and introductions in German, but as soon as he said the English titles of a song or a show, he was all-American. For example: "Las Vegas! Fun, lights, happy times...!"

The audience sat straight faced through this entire thing as if they were watching some grand work of art.

We cracked up every few minutes.

The whole thing culminated in two encores. In the first, the conductor brought out his clarinet and accompanied with the piano to "I've Got The World On A String." It was...slightly awful. I'm almost positive the conductor hadn't picked this clarinet up in about 30 years. There are two clarinet players around the blog somewhere - I'm sure one of them will review.

And the whole thing ended with "Send In The Clowns." So...that happened.

We bookended the trip nicely, starting with Harlem Gospel Singers and ending with this interesting piece of work. We board the plane home in 45 minutes...see you soon, America!