Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved I turned on the TV last night for one of CBS’s Grammy specials, this one called  Let’s Go Crazy: The Grammy Salute to Prince.  The National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), the organization that puts on the Grammy Awards, has done a number of these retrospective specials before — notably on The Beatles and Stevie Wonder — and they timed this one to air on April 21 because that was the fourth anniversary of Prince’s death. I went through a Prince phase in the mid-1980’s — I was as impressed by the  Purple Rain  soundtrack as anyone else and I bought some of the Prince albums on either side of it chronologically. When I finally caught up with the movie it was ostensibly a soundtrack for, via a VHS tape in the 1990’s, I was considerably less impressed; aside from the moving scenes between Prince and his father, played by the tragically under-used Black actor Clare...

Two-Hour Multi-Network Global Citizen telethon repurposes classic songs for insights into today’s health emergency. by MARK GABRISH CONLAN Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved Yesterday, April 18, 2020, a number of major networks collaborated on a two-hour semi-telethon called “One World Together at Home” co-hosted by Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert that, interestingly, was not designed to raise money for SARS-CoV-2 and its victims but to build awareness and hopefully shake loose some donations for groups that are helping mobilize the response. (According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the virus causing the current pandemic is called “SARS-CoV-2,” indicating it’s not an entirely new organism but a relative of the original SARS-CoV that caused a medical scare in 2003, and COVID-19 is the name of the disease it causes.) It was sponsored by a number of organizations, including one called Global C...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night at 8 p.m. Charles and I watched the other Soli Dei Gloria DVD I had ordered a while back from arkivmusic.com as part of a close-out sale including a  lot  of interesting items, like an eight-DVD boxed set of Walter Felsenstein’s productions at the Deutsche Oper in what was then East Berlin (all in German even though only one of the operas, Beethoven’s  Fidelio , was actually in German). This was a 2010 performance of Beethoven’s  Missa Solemnis  at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon — and it helped that it was in a real concert hall, not a cramped old church in The Netherlands like the Soli Dei Gloria (the name means “Only for the Glory of God”) production of Haydn’s  The Creation  we watched on Good Friday. The blurbs on the DVD box include a comment from critic Ian Swafford that the  Missa Solemnis , “which Beethoven considered the crown of his m...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved On Good Friday evening I looked for an appropriate video to show and found it in a box of clearance items I had bought a while back from ArkivMusic.com, including two DVD’s from a troupe called “Soli Dei Gloria” performing massive religious works. The one we watched last night was a 2010 performance of Haydn’s  The Creation  — though actually they performed it in the German version,  Die Schöpfung  (it seems a little less “immediate” that way — the original publication gave the text in both German and English and, though the first performance was given in Vienna in 1800 and was therefore presumably in German, Haydn’s inspiration was the oratorios of Handel, which were composed for a British audience and were therefore in English) — in a performance led by American-born conductor John Nelson in the Grote Kerk of Naarden, The Netherlands. The orchestra was the Netherlands Radio ...