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International Jazz Day in Abu Dhabi: Great Show, Even if the Singing Was a Bit Too Strident

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Friday, April 24), after the Death in Paradise episode, my husband Charles (who’d come home from work right as the Death in Paradise show was wrapping up) and I watched a program whose title had intrigued me since I saw it listed on the KPBS Web site: International Jazz Day . It was a show to commemorate International Jazz Day, which for the past 20 years has been celebrated on April 30 (though I’d never heard of it before), and it turned out to be an hour-long concert special from a Frank Gehry-designed auditorium in, of all places, Abu Dhabi. Given what little I’ve been able to find out about it online, I suspect the show, though it carried a 2026 copyright date, was actually filmed on April 30, 2025, partly because April 30, 2026 is a few days away from now and partly because Abu Dhabi, as a member state of the United Arab Emirates (so called because it’s a coalition of Persian Gul...
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Wagner's "Siegfried" as Staged by Dmitri Tcherniakov: A Bit Better Than His "Rheingold" or "Walküre"

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Sunday, April 19) my husband Charles and I made it through the third installment of Dmitri Tchneriakov’s misbegotten production of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen for the Berlin Oper Unter den Linden in 2022. The Berlin Oper Unter den Linden was officially the state opera company of East Germany during the partition from 1945 to 1990. Last night’s opera was Siegfried , designated by Wagner as the “Second Day” of the cycle, since he regarded the first of the four Ring operas, Das Rheingold, as merely a “Vorabend” (“prologue”). Tcherniakov was hired to direct and design the Ring by the company’s former music director, Daniel Barenboim, before he stepped down as conductor of the Ring in 2022 and retired altogether the next year. The directorship was taken over by Christian Thielemann, who assumed the post of music director for the entire company in 2023 on top of his directo...
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Wagner's "Die Walküre": Tcherniakov's Second Demolition Job on a Wagner Masterpiece

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Sunday, April 12) my husband Charles and I watched the second episode in that rather odd production of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen from the Berlin Staatsoper at Unter den Linden, Die Walküre . The production was staged in October 2022 and directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov, a Russian Regietheater guy who among other things has an utter hatred of the supernatural in opera, which makes him a strange person indeed to stage a work so heavily reliant on supernatural plot elements as Wagner’s Ring . Tcherniakov’s conceit was to set the entire Ring in a giant medical laboratory in 1970’s Germany, with the various characters either experimenters or subjects. For the first episode, Das Rheingold , this resulted in a lot of silly vistas of cells dividing, brains mutating, and the like projected on a giant video screen that hung over the action, while Alberich became a lab rat (which suggests ...
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Russian Designer/Director Dmitri Tcherniakov’s 2022 Demented Demolition of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold”

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Friday, April 10) my husband Charles and I watched a truly weird production on Blu-Ray of Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold , first episode in the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (“The Ring of the Nibelung”). I’d been sent a boxed set of Blu-Rays of the complete Ring by Fanfare magazine for review purposes, and I was a little (or more than a little) nervous when I noticed that the conductor was Christian Thielemann and the stage director and scenic designer was Dmitri Tcherniakov. Though Thielemann is the current musical director at the annual Wagner festival at Bayreuth, Germany, I had watched his performance at the Wagner 200th birthday tribute concert at Bayreuth on May 22, 2013 and been unimpressed. In my moviemagg review of it ( https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/06/wagner-200th-birthday-concert-bayreuth.html ), I’d written, “The odd thing is that Thielemann talks good perf...
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Lola Young's Voice-and-Piano Performance Highlights the 68th Annual Grammy Awards February 1

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Sunday, February 1) I watched the 68th annual Grammy Awards on CBS, hosted by Trevor Noah (the not-very-interesting Black South African Comedy Central brought to the U.S. as a replacement for Jon Stewart, who’s now returned). Noah began the show by announcing that this would be the last Grammy Awards show broadcast on CBS. He didn’t say what’s going to happen to it after that, though my fear is it’s going to end up on one of those abominable and expensive “streaming” services that have systematically destroyed all the media through which I prefer to experience entertainment. Noah also said it was the last time he would host it, which is fine by me. The show was the usual lumbering beast; it was slotted for three hours (5 to 8 p.m. Pacific Time so the East Coast media mavens can have it on so-called “prime time” in their part of the country, though at least starting it at 5 is better th...
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Ingmar Bergman's 1975 Film of Mozart's "The Magic Flute": A Brilliant Adaptation of a Great Opera

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Sunday, February 1) my husband Charles and I watched a Turner Classic Movies showing of one of the most delightful movies ever made: Ingmar Bergman’s 1975 film of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 1791 opera The Magic Flute. This was originally produced for Swedish television, though it was released theatrically elsewhere in the world. Charles and I both saw it in the late 1970’s in its initial U.S. theatre run. I’m not sure if this was the first time I saw it, but I remember a screening at San Francisco State University when both my then-girlfriend Cat and my first boyfriend Bruce were students there. I invited both of them to attend it with me and read them a synopsis of the plot, and Bruce started giggling every time the synopsis contained the word “gay.” Cat got irked with him and said, “The word ‘gay’ does not always mean ‘homosexual’!” Bergman cast his opera with then little-known singer...
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PBS Telecasts a 2012 Tribute Concert to Johnny Cash from Austin, Texas

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved The main event last night (Saturday,Jaunary 31) was the fascinating tribute concert to Johnny Cash, We Walk the Line: A Celebration of the Music of Johnny Cash , given in Austin, Texas at the same theatre where the Austin City Limits show takes place on April 20, 2012 as a commemoration of the 80th anniversary of Johnny Cash’s birth. (Johnny Cash was actually born on February 26, 1932 in Kingsland, Arkansas, but never mind.) I suspect that we were getting just a portion of the full program shot in Austin and released on DVD in 2012, partly because imdb.com give 107 minutes as the total running time (KPBS slotted it for two hours but burdened it with the interminable “pledge breaks” that afflict all too many of PBS’s music shows) and partly because the cast list on imdb.com included people like Amy Lee and the stunning Rhiannon Giddens who weren’t featured on the portion we got to see. Most of the ...
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