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Atlanta Symphony Memorializes Martin Luther King with a January 20, 2025 Concert

Young Black Orchestral Composers Featured in a Telecast That’s Not the Same-Old Same-Old by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved After The Lemon Grove Incident on Monday, January 19, KPBS showed a year-old concert from Atlanta, Georgia held at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had actually been pastor. Of course the current campus of Ebenezer Baptist is far newer, more modern, and more elaborate than the one at which Dr. King ministered! The concert was co-sponsored by Ebenezer Baptist and the Atlanta Symphony and took place on January 20, 2025 – ironically the day at which slimeball racist Donald J. Trump returned to the Presidency as well as the official date of the 2025 King Day holiday. The concert was led by a highly energetic Black conductor, Jonathan Taylor Rush, and began with an O.K. performance of the so-called “Negro National Anthem,” J. Rosamond Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” It’s ...
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Gay Conductor Livens Up Vienna Philharmonic’s 2026 New Year’s Concert

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Thursday, January 1) my husband Charles and I watched the annual PBS telecast of the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s concert – or at least the second half thereof, the only part PBS ever shows us. It was conducted by Yannet Nézet-Séguin, a Canadian conductor who in line with the common practice of today (former Fanfare contributor Roger Dettmer lamented in the 1980’s that “death has depleted the ranks of great conductors without life having replaced them in kind”) holds three, count ‘em, three major musical directorships: the Metropolitan Opera, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Orchestre Métropolitain in Montréal, Canada. (Dave Hurwitz has complained many times that the ranks of the world’s great conductors are being stretched so thin these days, with too few maestros chasing too many jobs.) He’s also 50 years old and is married to a man, Métropolitain Orchestra violinist Pierre ...
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Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker (English National Ballet, Cornerstone Studios, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved On Tuesday, December 16 PBS showed a performance of Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker staged by the English National Ballet in 2024 that was at once fascinating and frustrating. It took me a while to find out information on this program because the PBS Web site is now more aimed at facilitating viewers who want to “stream” the program itself than in publishing information about it, including credits for the cast and crew. I managed to pull together a cast and crew list by transcribing it from the closing credits of the stream, and I also found an online site that gave the history of the English National Ballet’s involvement with The Nutcracker. The Nutcracker is by far the most popular ballet ever created, and ballet companies all around the world regularly put it on during the December holiday season. They use it as a cash cow and virtually all ballet companies depend on a holiday production o...
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Hope of the Season: Christmas with the Tabernacle Choir (BYU Broadcasting, GBH, Intellectual Reserve, PBS, aired December 15, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, December 15) I put on a couple of TV shows on PBS and my husband Charles and I watched them together, though he had to bail on one of them a half-hour before the end because he got an emergency phone call from his church pastor. (Actually, it wasn’t that big an emergency; she just wanted to vent.) The first was formally titled Hope of the Season: Christmas with the Tabernacle Choir . The choir in question was formerly known as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and so were its Christmas specials, which frequently featured major guest stars like opera singer Kiri Te Kanawa. In 2024 they abbreviated the name of their show to Joy with the Tabernacle Choir , and they followed the same practice this year even though the Mormon connections were pretty evident: the show’s production was credited to the media department of Brigham Young University and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Da...
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I Want My '80's! (Springfield Brothers, Imaggination, Inc., 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved After the 1961 Hammer movie Cash on Demand was over on Turner Classic Movies Saturday, December 13 I switched over to KPBS for a pledge-break special called I Want My ’80’s! which I figured my husband Charles would be interested in because he’s a much bigger fan of 1980’s pop music than I am. (That’s the nine-year generation gap between us again; I was born in 1953, he in 1962, and therefore I have living memories of the 1960’s and its music that Charles doesn’t. Once we were talking about Janis Joplin, of whom I have living memories even though I never got to see her live. Charles said, “To me, Janis Joplin has always been dead.”) I Want My ’80’s! turned out to be a concert presentation in which Rick Springfield was the headliner and Wang Chung and John Waite were basically his opening acts. Springfield got six songs during the show, which ran for an hour and a half though only about 45 to 50 m...
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PBS's "A Salute to Vienna" November 15: Fun, but Way Too Much Whipped Cream

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Saturday, November 15) I watched a rather odd show on KPBS called A Salute to Vienna , which is apparently a revue-type show that has been touring the world for 25 years even though I’d never heard of it before. I’d seen the promos for it on KPBS previously and it seemed mildly interesting, and since there was nothing else on I wanted to watch (Lifetime is showing Terry McMillan-produced romantic dramas and Turner Classic Movies was running an absolute masterpiece, Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 film noir High and Low – recently remade by Spike Lee – but my husband Charles was scheduled for a 1 to 10 p.m. shift, he’d be getting home in the middle of it, so instead of watching it last night I chose to order the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray so he and I can watch it together) I decided to take my chances with it. It became clear early on that this show’s “salute to Vienna” wouldn’t be about the tr...
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John Lennon’s and Yoko Ono’s “Power to the People”

The Legendary August 30, 1972 One-to-One Concerts Finally Get Their Just Due on CD – Sort Of by MARK GABRISH CONLAN • © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan “The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are filled with students rebelling and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our country. Russia is threatening us with her might and the Republic is in danger. Yes, danger from within and without. We need law and order. Yes without law and order our nation cannot survive. Elect us and we shall restore law and order." – Adolf Hitler, Hamburg, Germany, 1932; quoted by Yoko Ono, One-to-One Concerts, New York City, August 30, 1972 On August 30, 1972, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and the New York-based Left-wing political band Elephant’s Memory gave two concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York City. These were the only full-scale concerts Lennon ever gave between the breakup of The Beatles in April 1970 and his murder in December 1980. Ironically, Lennon had actually b...
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