Posts

"Joy with the Tabernacle Choir" Offers a Nice Program of Christmas Music – And Two God-Awful Sketches

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Tuesday, December 17) I watched a couple of quite interesting Christmas-themed shows on KPBS, including the annual Joy with the Tabernacle Choir (in previous years it’s been called Christmas with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir but they seem to be de-emphasizing the religious aspects this year even though the show was produced by the media arm of Brigham Young University) and a rather odd local video of a play called 1222 Oceanfront: A Black Family Christmas. Joy with the Tabernacle Choir was a quite good and pleasant program for its first all-music half but got dull and dreary later on. It began with a choral version of a song identified in the chyron (thank goodness for chyrons!) as “Sing We Now of Christmas” but which I’d heard before on the Kingston Trio’s Christmas album The Last Month of the Year as “Sing We Noël.” The chorus continued with a more obscure song called “Noël Noël” a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Little Big Town Headlines "Christmas at the Opry" from Nashville December 16

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, December 16) I ended up watching both hours of an extended TV special called Little Big Town’s Christmas at the Opry , meaning the new “Opryland” complex in Nashville, Tennessee that replaced the ancient Ryman Auditorium (actually a converted barn, like most theatres that presented country music in its early days) in which the Grand Ole Opry got its start. (The show’s name came from a bizarre joke made by a radio announcer who got impatient when the Metropolitan Opera broadcast that was supposed to be on before his show ran overtime, and when the opera finally ended he drawled an announcement: “You’ve been listening to grand opera from New York, but now here’s some of our Grand Ole Opry !”). The show’s headliners were Little Big Town, a singing quartet founded when two of the members, Karen Fairchild and Kimberly Schlapman, met at a Christian university called Samford in Homewo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Brenda Lee: More Than the Little Girl Who Rocked Around the Christmas Tree and Said "I'm Sorry"

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, December 16) my husband Charles had an early enough work call that he returned home in time to watch with me a quite fascinating hour-long PBS American Masters documentary on Brenda Lee. She was born Brenda Mae Tarpley on December 11, 1944 in Atlanta (in the charity ward of Grady Hospital, which will give you an idea of how much – or little – money her parents, Ruben Tarpley and Annie Yarbrough Grayce had to raise her). When she was eight her dad, a construction worker, died in an industrial accident. Brenda had begun singing in her local church at age three (so she, like Elvis Presley and Dolly Parton, started out in church; it wasn’t just the great Black singers that did!) By age 10 she was already busking on the street and had become the family’s principal breadwinner. Having a similar sort of voice to Judy Garland’s – she was a girl but she sounded like an adult woman – sh...
Post a Comment
Read more

"An Evening with Dua Lipa" Gives Me More Respect for Her Than I'd Had Before

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Sunday, December 15), my husband Charles and I watched An Evening with Dua Lipa, a music special on CBS featuring Albanian-British baby diva Dua Lipa performing with a symphony orchestra called the “Heritage Orchestra” (probably a pickup band assembled from the quite stellar coterie of classically trained musicians in London) on some of her greatest hits. This marked an interesting contrast to the PBS special we’d just seen with the Violent Femmes performing with the Milwaukee Symphony because Dua Lipa’s music benefited a lot more from the use of orchestral instruments than the Violent Femmes’ did. Before last night’s show, I’d pretty much relegated Dua Lipa to the rather anonymous pool of female pop singers with small, lithe bodies and small, tight voices that are clogging up the music charts these days. I was also confused by her name because it took me literally years to realize th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Soprano Alisa Jordheim Shines at Organ Pavilion's "Holiday Magic" Concert December 14

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last Saturday, December 14 my husband Charles and I went to Balboa Park for what was billed as a “Holiday Magic” concert at the Organ Pavilion, featuring San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez, soprano Alisa Jordheim (who’s quite good, well above the level of most wanna-be opera singers who perform in venues like this), the San Diego Opera Chorus conducted by Bruce Stasnya, and Marco Clavel and Carlos Herrera from the Marie Hitchcock Puppet Theatre. The last two I could definitely have done without; they displayed two rather formless puppets and told some of the worst so-called “jokes” of all time! I can only hope that the scripts they perform at the Marie Hitchcock Puppet Theatre are better than their material last night! Though the concert’s advertised start time was 5:30 p.m., the puppet masters and their insufferable material actually began at 5, much to my dissatisfaction. I’d gone to th...
Post a Comment
Read more

More Than Just An Empowerment Program: Voices of Our City Choir Puts On a Great Show Downtown November 3

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday (Sunday, November 3) my husband Charles and I went to a free concert in downtown San Diego at an open-air location on 13th and Broadway featuring the Voices of Our City Choir. Originally called the San Diego Homeless Choir, Voices of Our City Choir was founded in 2017 and is an independent nonprofit corporation headed by Steph Johnson, a tough, energetic woman who MC’d yesterday’s show. Voices of Our City Choir seeks to recruit homeless people as a way of helping them out of homelessness. Its Web site, https://www.voicesofourcity.org , describes its mission as follows: “Voices of Our City Choir began out on the street: communing and connecting around music. Six years later, dignity remains the entry into, and experience within, our Choir. In 2022, we expanded our services and introduced new offerings. Voices’s outreach team built relationships with neighbors living outdoors, extending per...
Post a Comment
Read more

Jaqueline FitzGibbon, Michael Gorman Team Up for Stimulating Oboe-and-Piano Miniatures at St. Paul's Cathedral November 2

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved Yesterday afternoon (Saturday, November 2) I went to a live concert at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral featuring Jacqueline FitzGibbon on oboe and both alto and soprano recorders and Michael Gorman on piano. The program consisted of 15 “miniature” pieces by a wide range of composers, including Béla Bartók, Henry Cowell, Leos Janáček, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Darius Milhaud, Maurice Ravel, Ennio Morricone, Ernesto Júlio de Nazareth, and Astor Piazzola. There were also pieces by lesser-known names like James Oswald (1710-1769), Madeleine Dring (1923-1977), Alan Richardson (1904-1978), and the one still-living composer represented, Sofiane Pamart (b. 1990). Sofiane Pamart is a young man living in France, and he’s perhaps best known for his dramatic appearance in the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics, in which he was on a barge floating down the Seine River playing a...
Post a Comment
Read more