Taylor Swift turned 33 on Tuesday, Dec. 13. (A belated happy birthday, Taylor!)
What would be the best way to celebrate? She’s already everywhere on the radio. On the internet, too. And her tour doesn’t get here until the end of June.
Social media to the rescue. The post said “Candlelight: A Tribute to Taylor Swift.” And the photo? It was out of this world. There was a group of musicians sitting on a small stage. Surrounding them was a sea of candles. Hundreds of them. Thousands, actually. And there were two shows on Taylor’s birthday. Perfect!
Mind you, Taylor wouldn’t actually be there. But her music would be. That was good enough for me.
I thought it was a musical homage on the occasion of her birthday. But it turned out that this wasn’t a one-off deal. “Candlelight” – the dream child of a New York-based entertainment company called Fever – will be presenting Taylor Swift tributes for the next few months. Queen tributes, too. And a whole slew of other pop-related tributes. They’re called Candlelight concerts. And they feature the music of a litany of pop hitmakers; Adele, Coldplay, Beyonce. There are shows with music from anime films, too. And from sci-fi and fantasy film scores. There’s even a show called “From Bach to the Beatles.”
The basic idea is the same from performance to performance. You take a string quartet, add some arrangements of popular music and then swaddle it all in thousands of candles. Nearly 4,000 in the case of Taylor’s performance. They’re not real candles, mind you. They’re battery-operated. And rechargeable. But the effect is the same as the real deal – breathtaking.
Fever began its Candlelight performances in 2019 in New York, Madrid and Paris. Back then, the music was nearly all classical. But as the concerts’ popularity grew, so did the musical repertory. Today, Fever has performances in more than 100 cities worldwide. And as with Cincinnati, nearly all of them feature popular music.
Locally, Fever has been presenting performances at three locations: Rhinegeist Brewery, the Bell Event Centre and the Transept, the repurposed 1867 church in Over-the-Rhine, where Taylor Swift’s birthday concert took place.
We’re upstairs in what’s known as the Assembly Room – the main part of the old church. There are 150 or so seats on the main floor with room for another 50 people to stand – and occasionally dance – in the “balcony.” Tonight, there will be two shows. And both are at capacity.
The musicians, known as StringSource, are all Cincinnati-based. All four studied at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music. And while they have a variety of other gigs, from weddings and parties to substituting with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, they regard this as a particularly good one. Good audiences, good venues and good pay. The Holy Trinity for freelance musicians.
The hourlong concert features a playlist of Taylor Swift hits, from “I Knew You Were Trouble” and “Cardigan” to “You Belong With Me.”
At the outset, the audience is subdued. Maybe it’s the serenity of the candlelight. But as the evening progresses, they start to sing along. And dance. And soon, they are whooping it up as if Taylor herself were on the stage.
Predictably, the audience is heavily female. But there are a few men. And though none I spoke with would admit to being “Swifties,” most are fans.
Most of the women, though, regard themselves as devotees. They range in age from 9 to teetering on the far side of middle age.
Ashley Snyder and Logan Holman came with a pair of girlfriends. No husbands or significant others?
“Absolutely not,” said Holman. “They weren’t invited. This is girls only.”
“My husband has zero interest in Taylor,” added Snyder. She and her husband went to a Candlelight tribute to Queen a while back and loved it.
“So when I saw that they were doing a Taylor show on her birthday, we were like, we have to go.” They’ve already got six front-row seats for one of Swift’s Paycor Stadium concerts this summer. “But we didn’t want to wait ‘til then.”
Ticket prices for the Candlelight performances vary, depending on venue and time. They can set you back as much as $55. But if you look around, you can find tickets for as little as $15 for some shows. You can find ticket and gift card information at feverup.com/en/cincinnati/candlelight.
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