Music Music Music!

Okay, so I mentioned an unposted post from earlier in the week about a benefit at Kleinhans for our county's suddenly unfunded culturals.  This half of this post is that post.

We got word of the concert in church on Sunday; this was appropriate, since the BPO was being conducted that night by one of our regular organists, and one of the featured soloists of the evening was also from our choir. Plus, I also recognized the name of one of the other soloists as being my trainer's sister; we'd tried to catch her in concert previously but never managed the schedules right, so this wound up being our night to meet Katy, hear Jenn, watch Paul's baton (and see numerous peeps from our church in the hall on the way out) for one of the best causes you can imagine.

I called it the "Concert for the People of Spaulding Lake" because that local enclave of the very very wealthy was really the source of the problem. Our county executive, a resident of that tract, insists on keeping property taxes ridiculously low in comparison to the rest of the state, while tacking on first-dollar surcharges of sales taxes and DMV registrations that everybody pays to make up the difference in the budget. (If you care about such minutiae, this piece from this week's Artvoice lays it out beautifully.) To further lower the burden on those poor McMillionaires to protect their nannies and Beemer payments, the 2011 budget cut dozens of long-standing cultural organizations from receiving county support- including Shakespeare in the Park, which has been an institution here for decades. Not a cut of their budget; a cut from the budget. Zero. Zilch. Geshphincto.

To help make up the difference, local artists came up with Give4Greatness, a grassroots effort (lowercase-g, the uppercase one being associated with the city's moronic mayor) to replace and even exceed the funds cut from the culturals to keep those Spaulding Lake taxes at historic lows.  Wednesday night's benefit went a long way toward those goals, as donors basically filled the entire non-balcony capacity of the BPO's music hall, on a few days notice and on an early weeknight, to tell our county executive that he could kiss our pasty white musicophilic asses through his killer efforts.

Eleanor worked past six, and Katy's sister moved up my workout to five, so we both got home just in time to change, slog down subs, and head to Kleinhans for the 7:00 curtain. We thereby missed the full orchestral rendition of the West Side Story overture, but were riveted for all that followed:

* Selections from Fiddler on the Roof  performed by the BPO and Jenn among the Musicalfare vocalists making the medley (my mind wandered to the likes of the Koch brothers as one of the vocalists sang "If I Were a Rich Man");

* The overture to Otto Nicolai’s 1849 opera, The Merry Wives of Windsor, based on Shakespeare’s play (which Paul explained in great detail; I spent a lot of undergraduate time with Falstaff and Prince Hal, and it was fun to hear these musical riffs on the dude);

* W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” sung by Loraine O’Donnell with Randall Kramer at the piano (both of whom nearly blew the roof off the dump);

* Jenn and friends returning for selections from Carousel  (Paul apologized for the weather not enabling us to change "June" to "April" as the busting-out-all-overer);

* “Somewhere Over the Rainbow," song  by Buffalo’s Harold Arlen and from the adaptation of the book by Chittenango, New York's L. Frank Baum);

* Selections by some of Buffalo’s foremost proponents of cabaret performance, pianist Chuck Basil and vocalists Kerrykate Abel and Katy Miner (Katy knocked out a version of "Unusual Way" from the musical Nine that could be heard from low Earth orbit, despite her being sick as a dog all of the preceding week); and

* A Music Man medley, then the all-company conclusion of pieces from A Chorus Line, composed by one-time BPO Pops Conductor Marvin Hamlisch and written by Buffalo’s own Michael Bennett.  And you think our cultural community isn't important, Chris Collins? Thirty years from now, the only place they're gonna see YOUR name is on a plaque outside a county landfill (if you're lucky), but the 21st century descendants of Arlen and Baum and Bennett will still be singing out for generations to come.

----

That was two nights ago. This will be two nights from now.

I forget how we came upon Sara Bareilles, but we have her 2007 CD titled "Little Voice." Earlier today, a Facebook friend from West-by-God Virginia, of all places, messaged me to tip me off to a contest Sara was running on her fan page, offering B-lo fans a chance at two ducats to her Sunday night show at Canisius, the price of entry being a sharing of the show info and a comment after "liking" her. (Hell, we already liked her, so why not?)  Eleanor likened her just now to evocations of Alanis Morrisette and Amanda Marshall; I'd throw in a pinch of Adele to complete the A-rated trilogy there.

If you don't know from her stuff, here- have a sample of the somewhat unplugged version of her probably biggest hit, which was included on a bonus EP with the disk wot we bought:

A slightly quieter Love Song

Stay tuned to see if we make it to Koessler on Sunday night. It would make a beautiful ending to an already wonderful musical week:)