This Is Halloween

Kris surprised me on my birthday with tickets to the MSO (that's Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra) playing the music of The Nightmare Before Christmas at the Riverside.  Apparently we had been watching TV back in August and a commercial came on for it, and I said something about how cool it would be to see that.  I absolutely love that movie and the music.  I was a little surprised since I only had two days’ notice that we were going.  I had actually read that Danny Elfman himself was going to be conducting a show or two in NYC this Halloween and thought that would have been so cool to see, but the seeing MSO playing his music live is the next best thing.

If you aren’t familiar with Danny Elfman, the guy is a musical genius.  He was the frontman for Oingo Boingo for years, and then took to scoring television and movies.  I think he started doing it back in the mid-80’s, and is pretty much Tim Burton’s go to guy for backing music to his movies.  I am sure you have heard his music somewhere over the last 30 years in either TV or film, and if you ever look for the list of movies he has written the music for you’ll be shocked at what he has done.  How he hasn’t won an Oscar yet for best original score, I’ll never know.

So there was a large movie screen over the orchestra, like I said, they played the movie score live to the movie, with only a vocal track being played.   

You would have never known the difference.  It was perfect!  And from where we were sitting, I could see the conductor’s monitor that he was watching to make sure everyone was hitting their cues.  It was pretty cool.  This was one of the best gifts Kris and the girls have ever gotten me.  And I am glad Kris came along, because I know she is not a fan of that particular movie, but it was fun having her there to experience it with me.  I think I would definitely do something like this again, go to a live scoring of a movie by the symphony.