To the chagrin of my mother and sister, I truly hate most pop Christmas music. The stuff on the radio is bland, trite, old, and overplayed - when you only have about 100 Christmas songs in rotation and you're wall-to-wall Christmas from Thanksgiving onward, you tend to repeat just a little. By this time every year, I'm ready for anything else. Justin Timberlake begins to have a slight appeal, and that's just sad.
That said, we went to the most amazing concert last night. For those who haven't experienced Trans-Siberian Orchestra live, imagine this: mix Christmas standards with a narrator who really wants to be Morgan Freeman, a director who looks - I'm quoting this - "like Alice Cooper mixed with a Super Mario Brother," a bunch of electric guitars, keyboards, and an electric violin, a few string players from the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, some pretty excellent singers, lasers, and freaking hot flares (really, it was like standing in front of the fireplace), and you have TSO's Christmas show. The manager used to manage Scorpions and Aerosmith. Now he does Christmas rock operas.
I can live with Christmas rock operas.
The best part came after the Christmas portion of the show, when they broke into some of their other numbers. We got "Layla." We got "Flight of the Bumblebee." We then got the sexy rock opera version of the Queen of the Night solo from The Magic Flute. My favorite moment had to be "O Fortuna" - the audience wasn't initially sold on the idea of a song in Latin, but heck, this is Birmingham. I was ready to head bang with the band. I didn't realize one could head bang to Classical music, but I'm convinced.
If TSO were taught, we wouldn't have this mass aversion to Classical music. Seriously. See this band.
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