Wanted to talk for a minute about this show. I've always been curious what it was about, so I took a deep dive today. Here is the show announcement itself, found on DCP (you would not BELIEVE how hard it is to find old show announcements - corps media staff, stop deleting old news posts!!!):

"The Santa Clara Vanguard is proud to present their 2011 program 'The Devil's Staircase.'

Inspired by Gyorgy Ligeti's Etude #13 and an electrifying performance by pianist Greg Anderson, the musical selections will include works by Samuel Barber, Avner Dorman, Gyorgy Ligeti and other composers announced at a later date.

The music will be arranged by Key Poulan and Paul Rennick, with drill and staging designed by Peter Weber and color guard designs led by Greg Lagola. As the program develops, specific musical selections will be announced once the necessary licensing has been secured and the selections are finalized."

I always thought that this show was more narratively driven, perhaps based on a book a la Bluecoats 2011 or Boston 2014, but for it to be based on a specific performance of a Ligeti piano etude...? I had to look this up for myself, and as it turns out, you can actually find the specific performance they reference on Youtube, uploaded in 2006:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZTaiDHqs5s

In the beginning of the video, he says "Imagine you're in hell and you want out," and if you know the show itself, you know that Brandt Crocker says this exact line over the PA system before the first hit, which I thought was interesting. However, I keep wondering: why base an entire summer's program over one YouTube video?

Greg Anderson himself is more widely known in his piano duo "Anderson and Roe," and his stated goal as a classical pianist is to "make classical piano music a relevant and powerful force in society," which would make the presentation of the video make more sense. And indeed, he saw some success: the video is currently at ~659,400 views, and for a video uploaded in 2006, that's quite a lot (for context, a review of his work from 2011 praised him for getting "320,000 hits, and even more on his website." For the early days of YouTube, to get about half of the video's total views in 5 years is impressive for the time).

So maybe this is why SCV wanted to base their 2011 program on a single YouTube video's presentation: it went viral in the classical world (for 2010 standards, anyways), and while we in 2021 might be removed from the culture of classical music at the time, in the context of the times it might have made sense.

The show itself is actually a lot of fun - I think they try to make a narrative out of the concept of Ligeti's "Devil's Staircase" and Anderson's line, based on a few things: the performer at the very beginning running into "hell," lots of subtly hellish iconography, documenting the performer's struggle to escape, etc. It's intriguing to see how the expand upon simple concepts to make a simple, understandable narrative (though I am left wondering: why plain yellow flags for the first half of the show? Even for the time period, they don't really make sense to me). Key Poulan is the PERFECT arranger for this kind of show: his music is a little nebulous and dark. It's also notable that this is Paul Rennick's first year with SCV.

If you didn't experience it live (like me), what do you think of it? For those of you that experienced it in person, what was it like? How did it live up to 2010's "Bartok," and did 2012's "Music of the Starry Night" improve from there? Did it make sense for the times? And generally, for everyone, what are your thoughts on this show?