Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Right now I’m listening to a 1976 radio broadcast of Charles Gounod’s opera Roméo et Juliette , featuring a capable cast – Alain Vanzo as Roméo and Andrée Esposito as Juliette – with Antonio de Almeida conducting the orchestra and chorus of the Opéra de Nice. This was the opera my husband Charles and I went to see yesterday afternoon in the Met’s “Live in HD” satellite telecast at the AMC 20 theatre complex in Mission Valley. The theatre management let us in free because there had been some dropouts when they tested the image, courtesy of interference from some storms that had been racking New York City recently, but in the end there was only a brief bit of digital dithering in the image towards the end. In these pages before I’ve noted my frustration that the truly great composers who contemplated writing operas based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet never did so while the lesser talents actuall

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Wednesday, March 27) my husband Charles and I planned to attend an intriguing concert event at the Verbatim Books store on 30th Street and North Park Way. It was a co-production of the Hausmann String Quartet, a quite good local group consisting of violinists Isaac Allen and Bram Goldstein, violist Angela Choong and cellist Alex Greenbaum, and a local spoken-word ensemble called So Say We All. The program consisted of the string-quartet version of Franz Josef Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross , originally composed in 1786 for chamber orchestra at the behest of Don José Saenz de Santa Maria of Cádiz, Spain to perform at the dedication of a new church, the Oratorio de la Santa Cueva. Haydn later arranged the work for string quartet (1787), solo piano (1787) and vocal soloists and chorus plus orchestra (1801). Haydn explained the work’s unusual genesis in a preface to the

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved I was able to go to the St. Paul’s concert last night on March 23 from 5 to about 6:15 p.m. It was given by a rather free-floating local group called “Musica Vitale” and was billed as “Celebrating Women in the Arts” as part of Women’s History Month in March. The personnel of Musica Vitale as of the March 23 concert were pianist Nonna Alakhverdova, violinist Olena Galytska, soprano Lisa Parente (whom I’d already heard giving a stunning performance as the soprano soloist in Saint-Saëns’ Oratorio de Noël last December), mezzo-soprano Julia Rahm, tenor John Yokoyama (a hauntingly beautiful young man who was listed on the program as “a student at San Diego State University, double-majoring in computer science and vocal performance” – alas, he only appeared as part of a vocal ensemble in the concert’s last two selections), bass-baritone Michael Sokol and “hosts” Penelope Hawkins and William Propp. There

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved On New Year’s Eve night (Sunday, December 31) my husband Charles and I watched a couple of TV music specials, one on PBS from Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and one on CBS from various locations in Nashville. The PBS one, rather awkwardly titled Next at Kennedy Center: Cynthia Erivo and Friends: A New Year’s Eve Celebration , featured singer Cynthia Erivo. Her “friends” were Ben Platt from the Broadway cast of the musical Dear Evan Hansen and Joaquina Kalukango from the Broadway cast of the musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple . (The musical has since been filmed, though Erivo isn’t in the movie and neither is Kalukango. I wonder what Alice Walker, who’s still alive at 79, thinks of the stage show or the musical film; she so hated Steven Spielberg’s 1985 movie of The Color Purple she wrote a whole book about it, The Same River Twice .) Erivo began with a great song from

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved The Cynthia Erivo show on PBS ended just before 11 p.m., and then I put on the CBS New Year’s show, New Year’s Eve Live: Nashville’s Big Bash . My husband Charles and I joined the show while it was already half an hour old, and I’d hoped that it would present a wider range of modern country-music artists than it did. Actually the two hours we watched were focused almost entirely on two acts, woman singer Lainey Wilson and 1970’s-era Southern rock legends Lynyrd Skynyrd. The show – or at least the part of it we watched – opened with a Lainey Wilson song called (I’m only guessing here because few of the song titles were actually announced) “It’s Only Because I’ve Lived Through Hell.” Then Kane Brown came on to do “Bury Me in Georgia” (a song title I’m sure of because it was announced) before Wilson returned with

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, January 1) my husband Charles and I watched the 90 minutes PBS vouchsafes us of the annual New Year’s concert in Vienna given by the Vienna Philharmonic in the Musikvereinsaal. These concerts started in 1939 when the Vienna Philharmonic’s conductor Clemens Krauss decided the people of Vienna needed a “fun” musical event to make up for the heaviness of the news, particularly the annexation (Anschluss) of Austria by Nazi Germany the year before. So he played a concert of mostly waltzes, polkas and other dance music by the Strauss family: father Johann Strauss, Sr. and his sons Johann, Jr., Josef and Eduard Strauss. The concerts stopped in the later stages of World War II but were revived and have become an annual fixture (and a major cash cow for the Vienna Philharmonic, which every year relea