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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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The Kate: The Wood Brothers (Connecticut Public Television, American Public Television, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Friday, January 30), after a dull and disappointing episode of the Caribbean-set policier Death in Paradise , my husband Charles and I watched an engaging set on the TV show The Kate featuring a three-person band called the Wood Brothers. The Kate is shot at the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Center in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, Hepburn’s home town, and the Wood Brothers had an interesting backstory. Guitarist and lead singer Oliver Wood and bassist and harmonica player Chris Wood grew up together in Boulder, Colorado; their father, a molecular biologist by day and an amateur musician by night, was active in the 1960’s folk-music scene and music was very much a part of the family’s life. But when they grew up and moved out they separated and didn’t see each other for 15 years. Chris became a jazz bassist and co-founder of the band Medeski, Martin, and Wood, while Oliver hooked up with whi...
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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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