So! The concert!

Christina Courtin opened, and I was actually a little disappointed. In the time since I saw her perform last July, I’d built her up in my head as a paragon of soul-nourishing cuteness until she became my mental musical equivalent of Pushing Daisies. But tonight, she chose a much more aggressive set list, and as she skipped around, singing with her whole body, rather than being cute she just came across as spastic. Toward the end, she sang “Foreign County,” which helped, but the cuteness train had already jumped the tracks.

It was unfortunate, as I adore her voice and I always support musicians experimenting and moving in different directions, but… no. Not so much. Hopefully her upcoming CD will have more cuteness, like her cover of the Beatles’ “Honey Pie,” which caused puppies and kittens to spontaneously manifest into being all over the Union Hall stage. Oh well. If you were a foreign country, I’d still visit you, Christina!

(Good LORD I love my iPhone! It takes such pretty, pretty pictures!)

By the time Vienna Teng came onstage, I’d drifted up to the front of the room (it was a “standing room only”-type affair, so I was standing against the stage. As my luck would have it, they ended up maneuvering her piano so that she was sitting smack-dab in front of me! I could have reached out and poked her with a short stick, had I a mind to. Not quite a ruler, perhaps, but a yardstick would have been more than adequate.

She did a very long, very varied show, which included a cover of Radiohead’s “Idioteque.” I’ve never known her to do covers, so that was a fun surprise! She performed a lot of my favourite songs, including “Blue Caravan,” “Pontchartrain,” “Gravity,” “Unwritten Letter #1,” “Homecoming,” and “City Hall,” the last of which received RIOTOUS cheers. It’s clearly a song that means a great deal to a lot of people, and for good reason.

Her band remained–as always–excellent, especially her percussionist (Andrew Chen, IIRC?). See him rock in her encore performance of “Hope on Fire,” on YouTube already! God bless the internet. And DUDE, you see that head obscuring the shiny speaker in front of her? THAT’S MY HEAD! I have a sweet and photogenic head, yo.

And hmm, I realized in the process of writing this that I should probably blog about seeing Tim Burton speak at the Lincoln Center at some point, as it was quite awesome. Basically, what you should know is:

1. Tim Burton is awesome.
2. Sweeney Todd is going to be awesome.
3. I have conclusive proof that at least the musical numbers “My Friends,” “Epiphany,” and “Johanna” (the final one, sung by all the main players) are awesome, so one can infer the rest of the film will be awesome as well.

And there was much rejoicing.