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I Just Got Back from a Very Lovely Mother's Day Concert at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park!

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved This afternoon (Sunday, May 10) I went alone to the regular Sunday afternoon organ concert at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. I wanted to get back in touch with the Spreckels Organ Society (I re-upped the membership for my husband Charles and I) and also I figured that, even though the organist was the regular one, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, whose appalling stage antics I can’t stand, he was having a guest artist, singer Sarah-Nicole Carter, and usually the presence of another person on the program puts Raúl on his best behavior. It was actually quite a nice concert featuring Raúl playing three pieces solo following his obligatory opening sing-along of John Stafford Smith’s “To Anacreon in Heaven,” a.k.a. “The Star-Spangled Banner.” (It was originally an Oxford University drinking song and Charles, perhaps inspired by the anecdote I told him about how the Anglophile H. P. Lovecraft, one of the few New...
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Tchneriakov's "Götterdämmerung": His Fourth and Final Desecration of Wagner's "Ring"

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, May 4) my husband Charles and I watched Wagner’s Götterdämmerung , fourth installment in the tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen (“The Ring of the Nibelung”), in a frustrating staging by the Berlin Oper Under den Linden (the last part of the name refers to its location, and during the split of Germany between 1947 and 1990 it was in East Berlin) conducted by Christian Thielemann (after the original conductor, Daniel Barenboim, withdrew for health reasons – he is in his 80’s, after all!) and directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov. Dmitri Tcherniakov is a youngish (born 1970, which would make him 55) Russian stage director with a terrible reputation for making hash out of great operas. Among his problems as an opera director are an aversion to supernatural plot elements (which makes me wonder whose idea it was to have him direct Wagner’s Ring , which is full of supernatural plot element...
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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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