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I was lucky enough to get tickets for Horie Yui’s Xmas Live and managed to organise my yearly trip home to allow me to come back in time for it. There were two reasons for wanting to come back early. One, Yui doesn’t do solo live events often and two, I’ve never spent a Christmas in Japan. Having experienced the latter now, I can’t say I care for it much. But Yui’s Live event turned out better than I had anticipated.

True, having been to her previous solo lives, I wasn’t expecting aural excellence on par with Nana or even Yukarin. Out of your top selling seiyuu, Hocchan is a particularly weak live performer. Her acting is far better than her singing. However, having recently seen the Love Aice5 Tour Final there was some reason to hope for improvement.

１「恋の天使舞い降りて」
２「マッシュルームマーチ」
３「Time machine」
４「ショートショートケーキ」
５「かみさまおねがい」
６「桜」
７「Days」
８「クリスマスメドレー 」(きよしこの夜)
９「Happy snow」
10「Say cheese！」
11「Love Power」
12「Merry Merrily」
13「恋する天気図」
14「try again」
15「ヒカリ」
16「Angel恋をした」
17「スクランブル」
18「ラブリ♡エブリデイ」
19「Lady GO！」
20「笑顔の連鎖」

Encore
21「ずっと」
22「Love Destiny」
23「Happy happy*rice shower」

The set list for the night was a pretty good mix of new and old with Yui singing 3 new songs from her upcoming album as well as some old favourites. During the MC, she mentioned she wanted to perform “Christmassy” songs but she found that there weren’t all that many amongst her own songs. So there’s a bit of Yamato Nadeshiko here and Aice5 there and she tried to pick songs that conveyed a feeling of happiness and togetherness. There were even some carols, 「きよしこの夜」 is “Silent Night” in Japanese.

Performance wise, I have to say that Hocchan was terrible at the start, which didn’t give me encouragement to hope for better towards the end. But by the 3rd song in it seemed that she had warmed up and was actually hitting notes on cue. That actually put me in a good mood for the rest of the concert, coupled with some great oldies like Sakura, it brought a smile to my face as things got swinging.

Interspersed during were some “interesting” bits of drama and prerecorded video instead of regular MC sections, which if you ask me were a clever way of playing to her strengths in acting while giving her singing voice a break. It also gave good opportunity for costume changes.

However, as it turned out, there was little reason for me to worry as Hocchan’s stamina held up to the very end. She even managed to pull off 「try again」which impressed me since she notably failed to hit the notes during last year’s fanclub event. Though I think she’s still not quite Yukarin level yet, Yui is at least approaching that, perhaps in part due to the “training” with Aice5. There were definitely some really nice performances last night, especially one of the new ballads. So I’m actually looking forward to picking up her new album 「Darling」 come January 30. There’s also a good chance that this event might be released on DVD too since there were enough cameras and they were shooting in widescreen.

Going along with the theme for the night (the drama about the snowman wanting to meet up with his girlfriend and Yui dressing up as Santa Claus), there were ending credits rolled instead of the usual encore calling. However Yui came out afterwards anyway and had her free MC for the night. She spilled some interesting things like the fact that she’s spending this Christmas with Kanda Akemi as she has done so for the last two years. And also how she had a challenging time relearning the Aice5 songs for solo performance as she learned not to sing the other parts.

Speaking of Kanda Akemi, she was actually in the crowd, apparently wearing a mask and sitting somewhere behind this guy.

Overall, I ended up enjoying it a lot more than I expected and I’m rather looking forward to the fanclub event in February. And, if Hocchan can keep this up, hopefully more live events next year.

This entry was posted by sent on Wednesday, December 26th, 2007 at 00:43 and is filed under イベント, 堀江由衣. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.