Utah Symphony: Video Games Live

I went to see the Utah Symphony perform Video Games Live last night at Abravanel Hall in Salt Lake City. Does that sound like an incredibly nerdy thing to do? Yes, yes it does. But it was awesome, and would have been appreciated by any music lover, even without knowing the video games from which the music came. The entire performance is basically symphonic and choir arrangements of various popular video game music. The arrangements were created by veterans of the business who have won many awards for their incredible scores. Visual presentations accompanied each of the performances.

The evening opened with a quick fly through of the early days of gaming. A game of Pong was shown on the screen and the Symphony provided the bloops and bleeps of the bouncing "ball". It then moved through the more obscure games of the late 70s and 80s. After this opening piece the hosts of the show introduced the evening. I don't remember the exact order, but from there we listened to pieces involving Metal Gear Solid, Medal of Honor (set to actual footage from WWII), Super Mario Brothers (of course), Kingdom Hearts, Advent Rising, and Halo.

They also had with them the guy from this video playing Super Mario Brothers on the piano blindfolded. He also performed, without the blindfold, an arrangement of Final Fantasy music, as well as more intense SMB music. He was quite incredible.

For the encore they played "One Winged Angel (Sephiroth's Theme)" from Final Fantasy VII, an amazing song. And for a second encore they played the music from Castlevania. I really wish they had played more from Final Fantasy VII, specifically "Aerith's Theme" (Or "Aeris' Theme" depending on which spelling you use, the original US release had her name as Aeris, but the Japanese-English version used Aerith). That piece is incredible, one of my favorites, but alas it was only briefly heard during the piano arrangement mentioned above.

The crowd was more diverse than I had expected. There were a number of older couples there, who I now realize were likely season ticket holders and were probably somewhat unaware what the evening was going to be. There were also a number of girls there upon their own free will (meaning, not with husbands or boyfriends), including the two girls a few seats from me who were really into it the whole time, and I agree with the one in the red dress - they should have played more Final Fantasy music. (P.S. to those girls, you were hot, I'm a little confused as to how you haven't been snapped up by guys yet, hot gamer girls are not a common find.... just sayin'. So if you somehow happen to read this, and were one of the two very attractive girls sitting in the middle of the 2nd row on the 2nd tier for Saturday night's performance, send me an email and we'll talk ;-) Oh, and the married guy in front of me kept looking at your legs, hard to blame him though, the dress with the side slit up to the mid-thigh made it hard to look at anything else.)

Aaaaannyways, I enjoyed the show. I originally heard about these performance when they did their premiere show in 2003, I waited and vigilantly checked the website to hear about their tour, but no information came. Then came summer 2004 and I went home for the summer and forgot about it. I was very glad to hear about this performance from the program handed out at the Peer Gynt performance I went to a number of weeks ago. I had basically been waiting 5 years to see this show. So I'm glad I got to go, it was awesome.

Today, after church, I watched The Return of the King (extended edition, of course). I also cooked some brownies (I've been told my brownies are divine) and ate those with vanilla ice-cream. I haven't watched any LOTR in the past 4-5 months. The music in those films is incredible as well. I'm so glad that Peter Jackson did them justice and produced amazing works that can touch my emotions. Really, those movies are absolutely incredible if you understand the interaction and growth of the characters.