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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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"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...
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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...
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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...
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