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Eight-Person "Vox Humana" a cappella Group Performs Extraordinary Concert at St. Paul's April 5

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Saturday, April 5) I attended a quite remarkable concert by an eight-person youth vocal group called Vox Humana at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral. The personnel are Lauren Carter and Stephanie Smith, sopranos; Chloe O’Mara and Antonia Fuenzalida, altos; John Yokoyama and Kit Jack Chan, tenors; and Allen Pace and Uriah Brown, basses. They performed a wide variety of material within the eight songs they sang (seven in the printed program and an unannounced encore, Billy Joel’s breakup ballad “And So It Goes,” from his 1989 album Storm Front , though he actually wrote it six years earlier). They opened with an original setting of the traditional religious verse “O Nata Lux” by John Yokoyama, who said he’d been inspired to compose it by singing the earlier setting of the same Latin text by Thomas Tallis (c. 1505-1585) in a church group. The members of Vox Humana met each other, not surprisi...
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Benise's "25 Years of Passion!" TV Special as Overwhelming – In All the Wrong Reasons – As Its Title

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved By the time I got home from the stunning Vox Humana concert at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral on April 5, 2025, it was already 8:35 p.m., too late to watch the Lifetime movie Give Me Back My Daughter , and for some reason Turner Classic Movies isn’t doing the dedicated “ Noir Alley” and “Silent Sunday Showcase” time slots usually hosted by Eddie Muller and Jacqueline Stewart, respectively, this month. So I looked online for something else to watch and found it in a PBS special called Benise: 25 Years of Passion! This is apparently the eighth PBS special for Benise, though I’d never heard of him before and judging from the widely disparate settings for the various songs (including Cuban music performed on a giant set representing “Club Havana” and Asian music from an equally monstrous set in China), this appeared to be a Greatest Hits compilation from all Benise’s seven previous PBS shows. So who ...
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67th Annual Grammy Awards: Chappell Roan and Raye Stand Out in Nearly Four-Hour Awards Show/Telethon

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Sunday, February 2) the 67th annual Grammy Awards took place in Hollywood at an arena named after a cryptocurrency (barf!). It was hosted by Trevor Noah, who began the event by saying that in light of the recent big fires in Los Angeles it had been touch and go for a few days whether the Grammy Awards would even happen at all. In the event, the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), hosts of the Grammy Awards, decided to turn it into a combination awards show and telethon, with one of those disgusting QR codes at the bottom of the screen (those horrible things that look like very bad miniature black-and-white reproductions of paintings by Mondrian) which you could photograph with your smartphone to open a Web site through which you could make a donation. Noah also tried to guilt-trip members of today’s super-rich (you know, the ones who brought you Donald Trump 2.0...
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Good but Routine New Year's Concert from the Vienna Philharmonic (Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, ORF, Sony, PBS, aired January 1, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Wednesday, January 1) at 8 my husband Charles and I watched the annual Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concert, which began in 1939 when conductor Clemens Krauss decided the Austrians needed a feel-good event to get over their takeover by the Nazis. So he started this tradition which mostly featured the music of the Strauss family: father Johann I, sons Johann II, Josef and Eduard; and Johann Strauss III, who was not Johann II’s son but Eduard’s! The event has become an annual tradition and a major cash cow for the Vienna Philharmonic. It’s televised by the state-owned Austrian broadcasting company ORF (short for Österreicher Rundfunk ), which sends videos around the world to various countries that consist of the complete concert plus an ample supply of B-roll which can be edited by TV networks and stations any way they like. The American rights are held by PBS, which almost always shows...
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Sara Barielles Delivers Exciting, Heartfelt Performance on PBS's "Next at the Kennedy Center" Show

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Tuesday, December 31, 2024) PBS showed two episodes of the occasional TV series Next at the Kennedy Center, various performances filmed at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. One was actually a rerun of the December 31, 2023 show featuring Cynthia Erivo with various guest performers ( https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/01/next-at-kennedy-center-cynthia-erivo.html ); I gave that show an oddly lukewarm review at the time, focusing mainly on how much better the original versions of many of the songs were than the ones Erivo and her “friends” (Ben Platt and an amazing Black Hawai’ian named Joaquina Kalukango) gave us on that show, but I liked it a lot better last night than I did in 2023. The new show featured singer Sara Bareilles, whom I remember getting a free sampler CD promoting her first album. I played through it and decided it was nice but not so ...
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"In Performance at the White House: Spirit of the Season": A 2021 Relic from a Bygone Era

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, December 23) my husband Charles and I watched an odd but interesting rerun on KPBS: “Spirit of the Season,” the 2021 In Performance at the White House Christmas special from Joe Biden’s first year as President. I could tell it was 2021 because Dr. Jill Biden kept introducing it as “from our first year in the White House” and because the COVID-19 pandemic was still going on, as evidenced not only by Dr. Biden’s repeated references to front-line health workers but because of the black face masks being worn by some of the players in the on-site orchestra (the string and percussion players, who could be masked because they didn’t have to blow air through their instruments to get them to sound like wind and brass players do). It was an intriguingly planned show in that each performance took place in a different room of the White House, and it was nice to see Christmas trees in the v...
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St. Paul's Cathedral Offers "Lessons and Carols" Christmas Service December 22

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday afternoon (Sunday, December 22) my husband Charles and I took the #10 and #3 buses to St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral for a traditional Christmas “Lessons and Carols” service, preceded by a performance of Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols – a 20-minute piece Britten composed to mostly Middle English texts during World War II, in which Britten had registered as a conscientious objector. Britten wrote it for a chorus of trebles – boy singers whose voices haven’t changed yet – and a harp, though in St. Paul’s performance the trebles were replaced by teenage and adult women. (Britten wrote a lot for trebles, and there have been the predictable allegations made against Gay men who work with boys that he was after more than their voices.) Britten set the texts pretty much as is instead of editing them into modern-day English – though one of my favorite things about Britten is his skill at ...
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