Mannheim Steamroller

This is my long overdue post on my review of the Mannheim Steamroller show I went to on December 2nd. It's not exactly fresh in my mind anymore but maybe that's a good thing and so only my most lasting impressions will come to mind as I write this. It was early December when we went which was a great thing because it was the first real thing to get me into the spirit for the Christmas season. I decided to go partly for that reason. My parents paid for my ticket as an early Christmas gift. The ticket was better than $60 after service charges and all that. That's more than that White Stripes ticket was that I passed on earlier this fall. I kind of regret that now though. Anyway the show was basically free so there was that reason to go too. At the time I wasn't real familiar with Mannheim Steamroller except I knew my mom had a few of the CDs that she plays around Christmas. I think I've always heard them not knowing what they were only to find out what I was listening to all along was Mannheim Steamroller. So it's mostly Christmas music that they do but there's no singing or anything like that. They sort of jazz up the Christmas classics in their own style and the singing just is not a part of the equation. Which is part of the reason I think that I like it. Ordinarily it's not the sort of thing I listen to but it was enjoyable nonetheless. So enough of my brief description of Mannheim Steamroller and onto my thoughts about the show itself...Chip Davis had just a few words of introduction and some fairly dry humor which thankfully was kept to a minimum through the show. The songs basically went from one to another without interruption except for one intermission. We sat some distance from the stage but high enough to see well enough. They had screens with different things on them to watch which kept things interesting from a visual sense for those of us with the more distant vantage points. The highlight for me was a song marked in the program as Faeries which was an interpretation of a portion of Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies from the Nutcracker. It definitely had more life than the standard version. It was by far the most rockin thing I heard the whole night. If I have one criticism it was the volume that they put on the recorder that some lady was playing during the latter part of the show. It was much too loud over and above the rest of the music and was rather irritating. Overall I didn't have great great expectations of the show but I'd say my expectation were exceeded. Given the chance I'd go to see Mannheim Steamroller again sometime.

As a side note just before I left for the show I visited the official Mannheim Steamroller website. It was very lame. There's a lot of room for improvement there. The photo gallery is filled with some spectacularly uninteresting items. On the other hand I know first hand how much work can go into putting together an attractive website, but still it's pretty terrible all things considered.