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David Marsh Plays Charming "Great American Songbook" Program at Organ Pavilion June 21

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved This afternoon (Sunday, June 21) at their regular 2 p.m. Sunday concert the Spreckels Organ Society featured a guest organist, David Marsh, who’s also a piano player and bills himself as a jazz musician as well as a theatre organist. His program promised “Popular Music from the Great American Songbook,” which made me think he was going to play exclusively songs from the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s. He did some of that material but he also played newer songs; he opened with “That’s Entertainment!,” composed by Arthur Schwartz with lyrics by Howard Dietz for interpolation into the 1953 musical film The Band Wagon . (The movie was nominally based on a 1930 revue by Schwartz and Dietz, but the 1953 film added a backstage-musical plot and had little in common with the stage version except a few of the songs and the male lead, Fred Astaire.) Then he played more recent songs from Disney films: Alan Menken...
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Four Young Musicians Showcased at the Organ Pavilion June 14 Show the Future of the Organ Is In Good Hands

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday (Sunday, June 14) I wanted to go to the San Diego Organ Pavilion to hear the weekly Sunday afternoon concert, which as things turned out was unexpectedly interesting. First, the main organist was Alison Luedecke instead of Raúl Prieto Ramírez (a capable musician but one with an incredibly annoying stage presence). Second, it was one of the concerts designed to showcase up-and-coming organists still in their teens or even younger: nine-year-old Misaki Enomoto, 15-year-old Elle Lester, 15-year-old Elijah “Eli” Prada, and 16-year-old Aska Enomoto. All the young players are students of local organ teacher Leslie Wolf Robb, who was there to introduce them. Misaki Enomoto played two brief pieces, “Toccatina” by David Schack (b. 1947) and “The Chase” by John G. Barr (1938-2024). The others each played one piece by Johann Sebastian Bach and one piece by a more recent composer. Elle Lester’s Bach ...
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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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