Peter Schickele has made a career performing bad music.  I don't mean bad as in 'I don't like it'; I mean that even his fans will admit that it's really awful music.  It is also uproariously funny however, and that is its saving grace.  Schickele 'discovered' the works of P.D.Q. Bach, last and least of musical great Johann Sebastian Bach's children, in 1965 and has been performing these odd and unusual compositions ever since and leaving his audiences in stitches.  A concert he gave in 2006 in Houston was recorded and has now been released on DVD:  P.D.Q. Bach in Houston:  We Have a Problem.  Filled with some of PDQ's best, or should I say worst, musical numbers it's a very entertaining and funny concert.  Though the introduction and music itself is filled with parodies of musical scholarship and classical music it is easy to enjoy even if, like me, you know absolutely nothing about such things.

After some opening gags including Peter Schickele repelling down to the stage, the musical portion of the show begins with one of PDQ's most famous compositions, the Schleptet in E Flat Major.  This is broken into five movements or "shots" as the often inebriated junior Bach liked to refer to them.  The second of these is the Meneuetto con Brio ma Senza Trio, a minuet with a lot of cheese but without a middle section.

From here he moves on to an operetta, Iphigenia in Brooklyn.  While most scholars believe that the woman from Greek mythology never made it to Brooklyn, this didn't stop PDQ from placing her there at least for a while.  This was a great piece and seeing it preformed is even better than listening to it on CD.  The singer, a bargain counter tenor, had a hard time keeping a straight face through most of the performance.

One of Professor Schickele's own works shows up next, the "Unbegun" Symphony.  There's only a third and fourth movement.  Like PDQ, Schickele has taken up plagiarizing and there isn't one theme in this piece that's original.  It's hard not to laugh when hearing the 1812 Overture mixed with You Are My Sunshine and the Blue Danube segueing into Camptown Races.  Even my children found it hilarious in parts.

New Horizons in Musical Appreciation also known as the Beethoven Sportscast is another funny and inspired bit.  This piece imagines what it would be like if classical music was a competitive sport.  With Schickele providing the color commentary an orchestra performs Beethoven's Fifth in competition with the conductor.  There are several great moments, and I especially enjoyed Schickele's opening comments.  "They can't seem to get it off the ground, the piece just keeps stopping."

The Fuga Meshuga is a quick parody of a fugue with the musicians standing while they are playing the theme.

The concert wraps up with The Seasonings, an operetta full of bad puns and hilarious music about, you guessed it, spices.  With lines like "If you've got the money honey, I've got the thyme" and "To curry favor, favor curry" this is anything but serious.  This also has appearances by some of the more odd instruments that PDQ wrote for including the tromboon, the windbreaker and slide windbreaker, and a fog horn.

This is a wonderfully irreverent concert that was enjoyed by my whole family.  I honestly wasn't sure what my teen and pre-teen sons would think about it, but they got most of the jokes and laughed along with everyone else.  I'm sure if I knew more about music, I would find this even more hilarious.  By the way, stay through the credits for a joke or two.

Audio:

Though I really enjoyed the concert, I was pretty disappointed in both the audio and video quality.  This show comes with both a stereo and a DD 5.1 audio mix.  I didn't care for the 5.1 track at all.  They added a lot of echo to the audio, to try to reproduce sitting in a large hall, but it just sounded obnoxious.  The rears were devoted to the audience sounds and these channels were mixed way too loud.  The applause was always louder than the loudest parts of the music and very overwhelming.

The stereo track was better, but still had a lot of problems.  Most of these were due to the fact that this was a live concert and not recorded under the best circumstances.  The stage was mic'ed rather poorly which caused a few problems.  The footsteps as the musicians enter the stage are rather loud and boomy, and it was distracting.  There is also some distortion, which was surprising.  The music was generally clear, though it did crack in some loud parts, but the color commentating during the Beethoven Sportscast was really affected by distortion.  The audio was a little weak on bass and didn't sound as crisp and forceful as you would want a classical music concert to sound.

Video:

The 1.78:1 widescreen image was also less than stellar.  A lot of that had to do with the way the stage was lit and the video shot and not the transfer itself, but the picture still looked rather poor.  There image was way too bright with all of the highlights washed out and many details lost.  The conductor's sheet music for example looked totally white most of the time.  The middle of the stage itself was just a bright glare in the long shots too.  That was bad enough, but there was also a fair amount of grain in the dark areas, the lines were indistinct, and the small objects lacked definition.  Digitally there were problems too with a lot of aliasing and a bit of digital noise.  Not the best disc I've ever seen.

Extras:

This disc also includes a few bonus items.  Viewers can choose to watch the 'Unbegun' Symphony with the musical themes identified by on screen notes, there is a six-minute interview with Peter Schickele, and biographies of the good professor and PDQ Bach himself.  The best extra was a ten minute section of the concert that didn't make it into the final film:  Roundes:  Odden and Ended.  This is three musical rounds that PDQ wrote and Schickele performs them with two companions.

Final Thoughts:

I've seen Peter Schickele in concert three times and this disc does a good job of capturing the spirit and fun of one of his live performances.  It contains some of his funniest bits and the whole show just works really well.  I was disappointed that the audio and video quality weren't better, but this is still a disc worth picking up.  Recommended.