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Sopranos Daitong Li and Ingrid Stromberg Give Free Recital September 13 at St. Paul's Cathedral

Concert Was Lovely Except for Barbara Strozzi’s Interminable Cantata by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved LYesterday afternoon (Saturday, September 13) I went to St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral for a free vocal concert featuring sopranos Daitong Li and Ingrid Stromberg, which was scheduled for the church’s “Great Hall” (actually a second-story room off the main chapel) and was supposed to run from 4 to 5 p.m. It actually started around 4:10 and ended at 5:15, though there was a mid-concert intermission (unusual in these presentations). Li and Stromberg met in 2024 when they were both studying voice at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). They both have professional careers outside music, Li as a data scientist in financial services and Stromberg as a campus planner. Li grew up playing the erhu, a two-stringed version of a violin which George Gershwin rather cattily remarked always sounded out of tune. Their accompanist w...
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The 2025 MTV Video Music Awards: Too Much Production, Too Many Medleys

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Sunday, September 7) I watched the live telecast of the 2025 MTV Video Music Awards. They didn’t announce it as the “ … Annual” but the awards show began in 1984, which would have made last night’s the 42nd (assuming the shows continued every year). It was the typical lumbering beast of a modern awards show, in which the performances by various nominated artists were more important than the rather perfunctory presentations of the actual awards. My B.S. Detector went off big-time when I heard the announcer hyping the contents of the upcoming show and say they were honoring the “genius” of rapper Busta Rhymes. I’m sorry, but I can’t stand rap and I think it’s a contradiction in terms to call any rapper a “genius.” As I’ve said before, rock ‘n’ roll evolved in its first 20 years from the simplicity of early Elvis and the Black artists he was imitating to the sophistication of works like Th...
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Raúl Prieto Ramírez and "Organism" Join Forces for a Beatles Tribute Concert September 1 to Wrap Up the 2025 Summer Organ Festival

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, September 1) my husband Charles and I went to the last concert in this year’s Summer Organ Festival Monday nights at 7:30 p.m. at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. As usual these days, the season closed with a rock tribute, and this year they chose The Beatles in honor of the 60th anniversary of the Fab Four’s one San Diego concert in the long-gone Balboa Stadium on the San Diego High School campus on August 28, 1965. (A smaller, more practicable Balboa Stadium has since replaced it.) There’s an interesting online article by Chuck Gunderson at https://sandiegohistory.org/journal/v55-1/pdf/v55-1gunderson.pdf about The Beatles’ San Diego concert, which among other things explains why the San Diego show was the only Beatles’ concert during their 1965 U.S. tour that did not sell out. It was a last-minute add-on to their schedule and also there was a feud between San Diego’s two bi...
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Ass Pocket Whiskey Fellas Play Last Concert of the "Twilight in the Park" Season August 28

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved On Thursday, August 28 I went to the last “Twilight in the Park” concert of the 2025 series to see and hear a band called the Ass Pocket Whiskey Fellas. At least that’s their name for themselves; for some reason the organizers of Twilight in the Park thought that was obscene and demanded that the band rename itself Back Pocket Whiskey Fellas, even though drummer Ric Lee’s bass drum contained not only the band’s true name but a logo featuring a drawing of a woman’s tightly clad blue-jeaned ass with a whiskey flask stuck in her back pocket. The band members themselves stumbled over the name at times, as if they had a hard time remembering the censored version they were supposed to use instead of their real one. I hadn’t been sure I wanted to go – the last time I’d seen them I’d been put off by the sexism of their logo, and also there was another event last night (a reception at the OBR gallery, or w...
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Matthew Phillips Gives Energetic Performance to Surprisingly Small Crowd at "Twilight in the Park" August 27

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Wednesday, August 27) I went to the next-to-last “Twilight in the Park” concert at Balboa Park’s Spreckels Organ Pavilion featuring aspiring local rock star Matthew Phillips, who sings, plays guitar (mostly electric, though on one song he picked up an acoustic), and leads a power trio of bassist Reece Warren and drummer Corey Newton. Matthew Phillips had played “Twilight in the Park” on August 29, 2024, too – in fact, that year he closed the season – and in 2024 he drew a quite large crowd that seemed to inspire him. Phillips, taking advantage of the improvements in technology that allow musicians playing electric instruments to roam freely and not be tethered by cords connecting their instruments to their amplifiers, strode through the audience like a conquering hero while still playing and singing away. Alas, this year he had a much smaller audience (I was amazed at how many more peop...
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Coronado Concert Band at "Twilight in the Park" August 26: The Band Was Better Than Their Material

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday evening (Tuesday, August 26) I went to the Organ Pavilion again for the third-from-last 2025 “Twilight in the Park” concert, featuring the Coronado Concert Band. I mentioned this to my husband Charles when he returned from work and said, “The musicians were better than the material,” which pretty well sums it up. This was one group that presented a pre-printed program on green paper (though I didn’t get a copy, I saw other people in the audience with them). The concert was titled “From Hollywood to Broadway” – reversing the usual order of those communities – and it consisted mostly of suites from film scores. Four of the selections – The Wizard of Oz (the 1939 film, mostly Harold Arlen’s songs rather than Herbert Stothart’s background score), Titanic (heard here as part of a James Horner medley called “Hollywood Blockbusters”), Star Wars, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi , and Mission: Impos...
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Russ Peck Accompanies Three Silent Laurel and Hardy Shorts at Organ Pavilion's "Not -So-Silent Movie Night" August 25

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, August 25) my husband Charles and I went with several friends to the “Not-So-Silent Movie Night” as part of the annual Monday nights’ summer organ festival at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. We got there early enough to hear the organist, Russ Peck, rehearse his program of short selections before the movies (there were three, more on that later). I was amused that the first thing he played, both in rehearsal and in the actual concert (the normal routine is the organist plays a short pre-film recital of theatre-organ pieces, including arrangements of pop songs, while waiting for the sky to get dark enough to render the movie visible), was “Toot, Toot, Tootsie.” The irony was that it was this song, probably more than any other, that killed the silent movie as an art form. In the 1927 film The Jazz Singer , Al Jolson sang the song “Dirty Hands, Dirty Face” (one of his many batho...
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