Caveat Lector

I did not know that the UW runs a four-week summer choir that’s open to the community. Now I know, because I went to their concert Saturday night and thoroughly enjoyed it.

The theme being “Spice Up Your Life,” naturally David and I hit the new Indian restaurant in town, Maharani, beforehand. It’s a solid restaurant with service a cut above standard Madison “Is everything okay?” behavior. I never thought we’d see waiters ceremoniously pulling out chairs and unfolding napkins once we’d left Fairfax (where that level of service is standard, even in inexpensive restaurants), but there it was, right down to hot towels at the end of dinner. For Madison, quite decadent!

I love me some good pakoras, and Maharani’s are very good, crisp rather than mealy. We can recommend the combined vegetarian appetizer; everything on it was tasty. The onion kulcha was excellent as well (I like my neighborhood’s Taj fine, but it tends to burn its naan). We’ll be going back, if only so that I can take a crack at the South Indian page of the menu.

The summer choir, I am told, puts itself together in four weeks flat, three rehearsals a week. That’s fairly intense—and not a lot of time to just let the music sink in. For that reason, it’s fairly clear why the choral timbre didn’t vary much (a Renaissance madrigal really ought to have a different timbre from a Brahms piece), lines weren’t shaped dynamically, and a few cutoffs were a mite sloppy. The sound was nice and full and even, though, and there was dynamic variation, just not on the line-shaping level.

PDQ Bach’s “The Seasonings” formed the concert’s second half. I love PDQ’s choral offerings (would do much to sing Madam Peep in “Oedipus Tex”), and this one is familiar to me from high school (didn’t sing it, as I wasn’t in the SATB choir the year they did it, but did hear it sung). It’s a hoot, full of hopelessly vile puns and bizarre instrumentation. The gentleman playing (if such a term may be used) the tromboon, the foghorn, and other such tortured instruments did so with perfect aplomb, considerable attention to pitch (probably more than PDQ himself ever gave), and a tuxedo with white sneakers.

If I’m not hopelessly busy next summer (and I don’t have to learn to drive again, so I might actually manage not to be), I’ll give the Summer Choir a whirl—it looks like a fun group.