Sing-along?

Last night I attended the Holiday Sing-along with the Seattle Symphony Chorale. I bought the tickets weeks ago. I was so excited to belt out tunes at Benaroya Hall. I conned three friends into going with me.

As we sat in our seats we took out our programs looking to see what songs we were going to sing we noticed a small note at the top of our programs, "The audience is invited to join in on the selections listed in bold." Apparently, it was a selected sing-along. We were invited to take part in approximately 40% of the music. The evening was not exactly panning out the way I thought it would.

Especially odd was the local weatherman, Jeff Dubois, they got to MC the event. Why do you need an MC at a chorale performance? The answer is you don't. In between classical sets to have a weatherman doing "shtick" was just wrong on many, many levels.

Overall, the music was pretty, but it didn't fill Benaroya. I didn't realize that it was only the chorale and not any part of the symphony. They had an organ player who rotated between the piano and organ. It was actually kind of quiet.

The two highlights of the evening were Fantasie on Adeste Fideles which was an organ solo which was unique, to say the least. During the song the dad in the row in front of us leaned over to his son and said, "Do you think he's gone mad?" I thought the dad might be right. During the song I counted five kids that had to be taken out of the hall crying because the song was just too much for them. The show ended with exerpts from the Messiah which were indeed gorgeous and finally highlighted the specialty of the chorale. My recommendation for anyone is to just buy tickets to theMessiah performance and skip the "Sing-along."