Oh Land

I have a new singer that I am obsessed with. This is Oh Land, aka Nanna Øland Fabricius.

The first thing I thought after watching this was, “damn, look at that body movement, she must have some kind of classical dance training.” And indeed she does, as the wiki page informed me. She belonged to the Royal Danish and Swedish Ballet Schools until an injury forced her to quit.

And she's got some beautiful modelish style too, as so many Scandinavians seem to have. So many lovely bloggers are from Sweden and Finland! What is it about the Nordic countries!?

The Machine

It's fair time in NY State. Yes, that is something a little different than NYC. So a friend and I kicked it over to the fairgrounds in the evening for the night's entertainment block. Bruno Mars was playing the main stage at 8, but my friend and I weaved though the many carts of fried dough and lemon squeeze to get to the smaller stage where The Machine was playing. I haven't been to a show since Hollywood Undead last summer and had all but forgotten what it's like to have a kick drum rattle my atrium.  

The Machine is a Pink Floyd cover band. Personally, I don't know much about Pink Floyd. I knew 3 of the songs they played in their nearly 2 hour set: Wish You Were Here, Comfortably Numb, and Another Brink in the Wall... which isn't necessarily something to be proud of. The band was extremely fog machine-happy, which worked since they were a psychedelic band anyway. They also had a circular screen behind them on which they projected a Windows Media Player-esque trippy background.

The audience was completely in love. Many of them were probably the parents of the kids who were jumping around at Bruno Mars, but there were handfuls of people who were under thirty. I observed a man in the front row who was bobbing his Yankees hat and singing along to every single song. During the more well-known songs (the ones I knew), the band pointed the mics our way and let us sing the choruses. I don't know what kind of response the band is used to, but they were beaming. Some hippies even crawled out of the woodwork for the show and hippie-danced at the side of the stage (you know what I mean, slow motion flailing around).

The lead guitarist and singer was great, the guy on the keys was totally in it, the bass player busted out a 12-string guitar at one point, and their drummer was a woman! Rock on, sister.

   

The New York State Fair actually gets some really good bands. I'll be back on Saturday for Hot Chelle Ray. They also have a lot of well-known bands including Sugarland, Maroon5, and Cee-lo Green. Not too shabby from being a couple hours away from the NYC.

After have our eardrums punished, my accomplice and I braked for the greatest fried food that the fair had to offer. And then visited the barn of sheep, because fairs are, of course, a free petting zoo.

  

CSO @ Ravinia

Bear with me while I completely nerd-out for a moment. Something monumental has happened that my high school mind has been craving since 2003. I attended the Lord of the Rings Symphony at Ravinia, put on by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (get all your laughs out now).

I was a total LOTR geek in high school. I've read the books, have the extended DVDs, and own all the soundtracks. It was those movies that got me interested in film and the film making process in the first place. I owe the kiwis a lot.

Howard Shore doesn't need his Academy Award to tell him that his score is brilliant. Anyone familiar with the LOTR story knows that the entire world that Tolkien created revolves around different cultures. Hobbits are homely and folksy, elves are immortal and ethereal, people from Rohan are centered on their equines and are slightly Anglo-Saxon. Each culture needs their own distinct melodies and “theme music.” Howard Shore gave them a musical identity.

I had some kind of pre-teen fangirly spaz-out when I realized that I was going to be home for this performance. Ravinia itself is always a good time no matter who is playing, as it is one huge evening picnic. The great thing about the place is that many of the people that come usually wouldn't be the type to go into Chicago to sit through a full symphony at a concert hall. The community picnic aspect is what attracts people to bring their children or a group of friends. This show in particular was the marriage of film and classical music, something that would be attractive to an entirely different crowd than usual. No wonder the lawn looked more like Bonnaroo than a crowd in their opera going finest.

  (I think this picture is hilarious beyond words)

You usually drop $10 for lawn seats, plop your blanket somewhere on the 36 acres of wooded lawn space, and bring your Playmate cooler with a as much food as you can stuff in it. Regulars will have mini tables topped with wine, cheese, and fancy finger food. But I've seen people sneak in Chinese take-out or styrofoam containers of fried chicken. My best friend and her boyfriend brought cheeses, hummus, and a shrimp ring. I brought a picnic backpack set that has been dormant in my crawl space for the past 15 years, fruit, French bread, wine, and some awesome scones that I baked that afternoon. Our amount of food coma was perfect for laying back and staring at the night sky while listening to the show.

The actual symphony was not was I was expecting. I thought it was going to be about 3 hours of selections from all 3 movies. Wrong! The theatrical version of Fellowship of the Ring was screened over the orchestra in the pavilion. There was the usual spoken audio and sound effects, but the score was cut and performed live instead. From our blanket on the lawn, we could only see the top half of the movie but we didn't mind. We've seen the movie enough times to know exactly what was going on. And we weren't the only ones. I was amused to see a guy who was on his way to the bathroom with a beer can in hand shout “SARUMAN!” at the exact same moment that an Orc on screen did.

The music was great, of course, as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is one of the top orchestras in the country. The female vocalist who sang the solos was amazing. My only complaint was that the choir as a whole was a little less powerful than in the recorded score. I'm not sure how long the CSO had to rehearse, but I would imagine that learning a new language wouldn't be the easiest thing. Sure, opera singers have to sing in different languages all the time, but the French and Italian languages are actually spoken regularly. You can't say the same thing for the languages Tolkien created. It might have just been a lack of phonetic confidence.

I loved any time that they played the Isengard theme. It is supposed to sound very mechanized and a little bit off, since it is set in 5/4. The percussion section uses some kind of metal instruments to give that industrial sound. I don't mean metal as in the type of rock music. I mean it sounded like they were shaking metal chain links and banging on anvils, which they probably were. We couldn't see the orchestra from our spot on the lawn but I would have loved to see the percussionists in their tuxes whacking away at some grungy, rusty construction equipment. 

Thank you, Ravinia Festival, for fulfilling my mid-teenage mind's dreams!