Yes!

I had choir rehearsal last night. It was our first time back since the holidays and our participation in Beethoven's 9th. Our first concert this year is going to be with the Pasadena Symphony again, this time on a staged reading of Edvard Grieg's musical adaptation of Ibsen's Peer Gynt.

Now you all know at least part of the music from Peer Gynt, whether you realize it or not. There's an orchestral section that's one of those pieces you always used to hear in movie previews, right up there with the opening of Carmina Burana (Do titles of music pieces get quotes or italics? (moment of research) Italics, I guess.) Of course now the only movie preview I can remember it being featured in is Needful Things and that was a ways back. It's the creepy music that just gets faster and more frenetic as it goes along. You'd know it if you heard it.

Except in the musical that piece has words. Now I sing in a choir and all, but I know precious little about choral music as a whole, so I almost never have heard a piece we do before we sing it. So finding out this piece has words was like finding out the lyrics to the original Star Trek theme. It's just something that wouldn't show up on your radar until you were right on top of it. Not only does it have lyrics, but get this:

In that section of music the chorus plays a mob of angry trolls.

Faaaantastic. Apparently at this point in the plot the lout Peer Gynt runs afoul of the Troll Kingdom. Last night we're looking at the music and our choral part consists almost solely of the line "Kill him! The Christian dog has seduced the fairest daughter of our Troll King! KILL HIM!" "This is hysterical," I thought. "People are going to be paying a lot of money to see this. How could this project become any more personally amusing to me?"

Then our conductor told us that Peer Gynt was being played by Michael York.

Yeah, I KNOW!

Anyway, I thought I should share. I'm so excited I can't see straight. You can read about the concert and the piece here.