TL;DR Beethoven won because the vocalists performing Coldplay songs were awful.

Pam and I went to a concert entitled “Beethoven versus Coldplay”. They advertised that they’d play Beethoven and Coldplay and then they’d compare the two. It struck us as an odd combination but we like both Beethoven and Coldplay so we went.

The show started with the Grand Rapids Symphony playing Beethoven’s Egmont Overture. The piece was better than I remembered and I started to enjoy myself.

Then the MC announced that he and his buddies would perform some stuff that he’d written. I was concerned. We’d paid to hear stuff by Beethoven and Coldplay, not Beethoven and Coldplay and some losers we’d never heard of.

The vocalists were awful enough that I couldn’t really judge the actual music. And since it was neither Beethoven and Coldplay, I just ignored it as best as I could.

There was then an intermission where we could talk about how awful the singing was.

After the intermission, the MC explained that GRS would play Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony and the MC and his buddies would insert their interpretation of Coldplay tunes.

Like the Egmont, Beethoven’s 3rd was better than I remembered. The first Coldplay tune that they played was “Yellow” which I wasn’t familiar with. It sounded awful but I couldn’t tell if that was because “Yellow” was awful or because the vocalists were awful.

GRS played more of Beethoven’s 3rd and then the vocalists played Coldplay’s “The Scientist”. I really like that song. The vocalists were so bad that I had to go by the words to recognize it because there was no trace of the melody. I thought “You duckers, You nasty miserable duckers.” Making it worse was that they made no attempt to recreate Coldplay’s music. They only lifted the lyrics and they didn’t do that right.

This pretty much described the rest of the performance: some of Beethoven’s 3rd followed by a butcher job on another beloved Coldplay tune.

All the while I was thinking “One of my favorite Coldplay tunes is ‘Fix You’, These bastards are gonna pull the same stinking stuff on that song too.”

They did. Absolute duckers.

At least we got to play the Coldplay tunes in the car on the drive back.