Our first concert with our Orchestra Iowa season tickets!

And our seats turned out to be pretty freaking awesome.

Another show finished. Another audience delighted. Another standing ovation savored.

I had a voice lesson scheduled for right after today’s matinee, which somehow seemed like a brilliant idea a month ago when I scheduled everything. But my voice teacher and I just very wisely realized it was, in fact, a terrible idea. So I went right home, coincidentally as the 91.7 fm classical station played the “Goin’ Home” themes from Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony. Which was coincidentally written in Iowa. And which was also coincidentally written in 1893, which is roughly the time in which Hello, Dolly! takes place. Which is all pretty cool.

O Fortweeta

Fun fact: The very first CD I ever bought--out of all the CDs in the entire canon of recorded music to date--was Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana" by the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Rutgers University Choir under the baton of Eugene Ormandy. I bought it along with Freddy Mercury and Montserrat Caballé's "Barcelona." Because why buy Paul Simon's "The Rhythm of the Saints" or Green Day's "39/Smooth" or even Madonna's "The Immaculate Collection" like all the cool, well-socialized kids in 1990 when you can start your CD collection with obscure music that is totally weird-ass for a 22-year-old to listen to on a 5,000 lb. boom box in your parents' dining room?

In totally unrelated news, why am I still single?

#SparksOfJoy: A weekly post about something that makes me happy

Jean Sibelius: Symphony No. 2: An early 20th Century work that opens with a gorgeous, watery, almost circular pulse that deliciously grows and evolves and eventually explodes in a brassy, anthemic, triumphant statement of hearty Scandinavian pride. Its ebbing and flowing between muted contemplation and rousing, full-brass glory are textbook Romanticism, though it was written (in 1902) two years after the Romantic movement in music is conventionally defined as ending. I discovered this symphony via a CD that was shipped to me in error from an order I’d placed from a CD club in the mid-1990s, and I was literally enraptured by it within hearing its first subtle, pulsing phrases. Since then, I’ve heard it live more times than I can count, including once from the chorus seats (which are sold to the public for performances that don’t involve a chorus) above the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s mighty brass section in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall. The experience was profoundly transcendent for me.

Fun fact: Sibelius is probably most famous for his stirring 1889 tone poem Finlandia, which was written as a covert protest against growing censorship against the Russian Empire.

"Power play" is a hockey word. Look it up.

Last year today I was singing a power-play arrangement of “All I Want for Christmas is my Two Front Teeth” sporting authentic hockey gear and two magic-of-theater missing teeth in front of the power-play Orchestra Iowa in my beloved (and, obvs, power-play) Paramount Theatre.

Today today I’ll be tap-dancing with a merry band of bejinglebelled elves in the last of an eminently delightful five-week run of Elf the Musical at the always-eminently-delightful Theatre Cedar Rapids.

The only arguable difference here is I’ll be wearing brand-new work gloves to strike our set tonight.

Music To Build A Bookshelf By And By The Way Notice That My Music Library Isn’t ALL Show Tunes Just Mostly Show Tunes Because My Tastes Are Wondrously Diverse And Uber Manly Yo

LITANY OF COMPLAINTS:

• Canada apparently burned down the White House while I was asleep
• The Fake News media totally fake-newsily didn’t even cover it
• “Feisty Cherry” Diet Coke
• Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony is on the radio right now and I’m trapped because I love hearing the muted ti-ti-ti-tum-tum violin motifs in the third movement and I don’t want to leave the room and miss them
• Not even for a quick run to the bathroom
• Which will happen the moment the entire ti-ti-ti-tum-tum exposition has finished
• Trust me on this
• Because damn, we have a loud toilet
• Autocorrect automatically put the accent in Antonín just now but I had to add all the diacritics to Dvořák myself
• Plus it nonchalantly changed automatically to automagically
• Seriously, autocorrect?
• I’M the only one allowed to make up stupid words on my blog
• Forrealsly
• If autocorrect is going to keep this up, we might as well thank Canada for burning down the White House, disband the last coherent fragments of our country and convert our phone keyboards to Cyrillic right now
• Settings > General > Language & Region > iPhone Language > Russian
• до свидания

I just sang “All I Want for Christmas is my Two Front Teeth”

in authentic soccer gear with my teeth blacked out at the stunning Paramount Theatre with the magnificent Orchestra Iowa behind me. Plus I get to do it again tonight. And then again tomorrow. Bliss.

Get your pucks to the Paramount

for your first and undoubtedly last opportunity to watch me (and four other brutes) sing and dance merry holiday tunes IN REAL HOCKEY VESTMENTS. Because it’s not Christmas without the traditional Dance of the Slapshotplum Fairies and Straightpeople. Or something like that.

I am now in the temporary possession of a well-worn hockey stick and a Cedar Rapids RoughRiders jersey -- just like in my senior picture!

If you're wondering exactly WHY I'm now in the temporary possession of a well-worn hockey stick and a Cedar Rapids RoughRiders jersey just like in my senior picture -- because of course you are -- you're just going to have to come see the Orchestra Iowa Holiday Spectacular pops concert at the architecturally extravagant Paramount Theatre this weekend to find out. It's guaranteed to be a Christmas touchdown!

Get your tickets right now this very minute by clicking here.

Brutish

We just had our first music and choreography rehearsals for the Orchestra Iowa holiday pops concert. And we’ve now discovered an interplanetary cosmos of music—holiday or otherwise—that lives in an unexplored dimension far beyond our mortal understanding of the allegro-legato continuum:

Orchestra Iowa intermission in my beloved Paramount Theatre!

We just heard Mozart’s sprightly, nimble (well, they’re all pretty nimble) Piano Concerto No. 21 (from house left row J on the aisle where I don’t think there’s any better vantage point in the city to watch the pianist’s nimble hands) and now we’re about to wallow in the glorious bombast of Beethoven’s mighty Symphony No. 5. And before the concert we both ATE KALE.

It doesn’t get any more Just Can’t Even than this!

It’s beginning to fit a lot like Christmas!

I just got fitted for a custom costume piece for a small-group number I’m singing in the Orchestra Iowa holiday concert.

Halloween? Thanksgiving? You’re just in my way now.

Sunday Sibelius

The first ebbing, flowing, stalwart strains of the opening movement of Sibelius' Symphony No. 2 are all you need to underscore a perfect fall day. And the final rolling crashes of brass are all you need to sustain you through winter. Sibelius is the master of redefining the emotions and lush tonal visuals of Romanticism for the 20th century. Bliss.

Flashback Sunday: Exhibition Edition

A year ago tonight I was sitting with thousands of my closest friends on the vast lawn of the Brucemore mansion historical site listening to the final summer outdoor concert of the mighty Orchestra Iowa. The concert is cleverly called Brucemorchestra, and it's an epic, pull-out-the-stops evening of glorious music and literally glowing civic pride.

Last year's concert finished with Modest Mussorgsky's mighty "Pictures at an Exhibition," which wavers over the years on and off top 10 favorite orchestral works. It was originally written just for piano in 1874 as a musical narrative of -- you guessed it -- pictures at an art exhibition. The work comprises a series of short pieces that musically describe the separate works of art in the exhibition, and they're all connected by endless variations on a theme called "Promenade" ... which is basically just music to accompany you as you walk from picture to picture.

There are probably 40 orchestral arrangements of this piano work that have been scored in the century-plus time since it was written. Impressionist Maurice Ravel's gloriously brass-heavy version written in 1922 is arguably the most popular, and not only is it my favorite but it was the version Orchestra Iowa played a year ago on the Brucemore lawn.

And if that weren't enough to make me geek out like a giddy schoolboy at orchestra prom, the director told us all to light up our phones and wave them rock-concert-style during the epic (and earth-shakingly brass-heavy) last mini-movement celebrating the dramatic picture of the Great Gate of Kiev. Which as you might guess put me on ridiculous-joy overload as the brass thundered through us to rattle our bones and the gleeful audience alternated between waving our phones and taking pictures of the glorious spectacle and I pretty much experienced the Rapture. (And you know what? Kirk Cameron wasn't there. And neither was Donald Trump.)

And now it's safe to say "Pictures at an Exhibition" is solidly back in my top 10 favorite orchestral works. And I probably need to charge my phone again.

Happy 176th birthday, Antonín Dvořák!

And happy one-year anniversary of my freedom from Cymbalta -- according to the essay below that just popped up on Facebook. I'm sometimes glad Facebook reminds me of these memories to show me what I've survived and how far I've come ... and how I couldn't have done it without my family, my friends and even my little joys like gorgeously thematic symphonies.

It is 9:30 pm on what would have been Czech composer Antonín Dvořák's 175th birthday, and as my dad and I drove around tonight on our Thursday evening errands we listened to Dvořák's Symphony No. 9 -- also called "From the New World" due to its early American musical themes and the fact that he wrote it in the United States -- almost in its entirety.

It's the last symphony he composed -- and inarguably his most famous -- and in my opinion its brilliance lies in its endless accessibility. Its dominant six-note theme, often sung to the words of the folk song "Goin' Home," is never far from the surface no matter how many variations or complex contrapuntal themes he weaves it through.

As a composer, he was rooted firmly among the late Romantics with their heroic storylines and their soaring emotions and their confident nods to the nascent but growing fascination with the shimmering textures of the Impressionists and the gorgeous discordances of what would soon be revered around the world as American jazz. And this symphony sits right at the confluence of all that history, all that emotion, all that foresight and all that promise. And all with a mere six-note theme.

I'm trying not to make everything I write an endless litany of poor-little-bipolar-boy horror stories about deep depressive dives or unfairly short manic episodes or the spirit-killing side effects of my constantly evolving med cocktails. Honest. But I took my final Cymbalta 72 hours ago and my withdrawal side effects -- which I've been hoping would have waned to nothing by now -- spiked to soul-crushing levels of rapid-fire misery this afternoon and they seem to have gotten even worse in the last few hours. I'm dizzy and floaty and tingly and chompy and bouncy and unsteady and sometimes even actually confused. And I don't even have enough understanding of what's happening to me to know when the waves will hit or how strong they'll be or even when it's safe to stand up and assume I'll remain vertical.

But tonight, driving around with my dad, listening to music that has soothed and exhilarated and inspired and sustained me for 40+ years, knowing enough about it that I could come home and organize my thoughts and write about it all for anyone who cares to read my parades of paragraph-long sentences ... it all gave me a calming sense of purpose. Of much-needed focus. Of obligation to myself and to my family and friends to keep going and to trust that I'll come out at the end whole and balanced and maybe profoundly exhausted but thoroughly tested and ultimately triumphant.

Just like those six little notes.