I Believe Two Things

I can’t rave enough about the Harvard Pops, and last night’s concert may have been the best since Pops Gets Cursed in 2006, which got huge points for  introducing me to Wicked.

Sammi Biegler, whom you can watch on YouTube singing Mack the Knife from last year’s Pops Jumps the Shark concert, even came back after graduating (as Pops members are wont to do) to portray The Rules in the game of Risk.

They put to excellent use Ernst Toch’s Geographical Fugue (performed there by a different group), and I declare here that Larry O’Keefe’s short opera The Magic Futon, which the Pops commissioned and premiered four years ago, knows no rival.  Of course, you’d only be able to judge for yourself if you attended the concert.

Let that be a lesson: attend the next one.  (Then you’d also know that the title of this post is probably my favorite lyric from the show.)

Pandora often plays new music I end up enjoying. That’s its job.

Yesterday, asked to play music similar to Hayley Westenra, it completely floored me by introducing Vienna Teng’s Lullaby for a Storm Night. She describes the song this way in a YouTube video from a Dusseldorf performance:

It’s a relatively old song of mine. I wrote it when I was 17 years old, when I was taking an English class where I had to write a very long paper, and I didn’t want to write the paper, so I wrote the song instead.

This is a song about a rainy evening – a thunderstorm. The thunderstorm went on all night. It rained so hard that – because my school is a California school and we’re not used to weather – it actually flooded the whole school, so I had one more day to finish the paper for English class.

The songs on Teng’s MySpace page are even better. Topping it all off, she’s a computer scientist with a BS from Stanford.

I know where I’ll be on December 5th.

One of the best musicians I’ve heard in a long time will be performing in Middleboro next week: Ms. Kayla Ringelheim.  Of course, that’s the weekend I’ll be confined nicely within the Boston city limits (for a change).  I of course already marked her October 17th appearance (with Antje Duvekot) on my calendar.

This is the music that finally got me to stop listening to Wicked incessantly – and if you know me, you know that’s saying a lot.  Of course, you should immediately buy both her albums on iTunes.