Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday afternoon I raced out of home to attend the Balboa Park organ concert which was, as usual, taking place on Sunday at 2 p.m. Fortunately San Diego’s current civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, was not there – he’s a competent musician and sometimes a great one (like when he plays the wirks of Franz Liszt, which offer him enough bombast to suit h is personality but also enough substance to make the listening experience appealing; or his quite remarkable version of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”), but I just can’t stand his personality. Instead the organist was Alikson Luedecke, a local player who tends to get a bit pedantic on stage – in addition to playing at a Roman Catholic church she also had a gig as a music teacher, and it sometimes shows – but fortunately she avoided that trapo yesterday. Instead she played a straightforward Memorial Day program that featured the inevitable patriotic so...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night I watched the 33rd annual Memorial Day concert on KPBS, and with the pandemic more or less over (at least people are pretending tt’s over even though the SARS-CoV-2 virus is continually evolving new “varnants” and “sub-variants” and the case rate, at least as measured by PCR tests of viral sequences, is going up again), this year’s event was once again held in public on the Capitol mall. The “concert” was the usual mix of musical selections and extended tributes to various members of the U.S. armed services, portrayed by actors even though the original people, if still alive, were there – and if they weren’t, they had surviving descendants or other family members representing them. The most moving story told during the program was the lives of Mark and Carol Graham and their three children, sons Jeffrey and Kevin and daughter Melanie. With the show’s regular co-host, Joe Mantegna, playing...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Eventually my husband Charles and I watched the rather awkwardly titled episode “Keeping Company with Sondheim” on the PBS series Great Performances . Their record with Stephen Sondheim has been mixed – first-rate versions of his later musicals Sunday in the Park with George (to my mind’ Sondheim’s masterpiece) and Into the Woods along with a sad, inadequate version of Follies from a 1985 New York Philharmonic concert production. The Follies show was 90 minutes long and half of it was behind-the-scenes interviews and rehearsal footage, and 45 minutes of a very abbreviated version of the concert. This show centered around the revival of Company , Sondheim’s 1970 show set in the New York City of the time and dealing with a 35-year-old man named Bobby who, alone of his friends, has never had a serious relationship with a woman and certainly has never been married. The show takes place on the night ...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night I ran a big pledge-break special on KPBS featuring the 2006 edition of the Rolling Stones: core members Mick Jagger (vocals, and guitar on one song), Keith Richards and Ron Wood (guitars) and Charlie Watts (driums) nad a bunch of hired hands,including a full horn section and three backup singers, one of whom, Lisa Fischer, gets to sing the second vocal part on the Stones’ cover of “Night Time Is the Right Time” and totally explodes Jagger’s pretensions of being a soul singer. (Ray Charles, who had the original hit on this song even though his wasn’t the first version – Roosevelt Sykes had recorded it as early as 1937 and there are also previous versions by Big Bill Broonzy and Nappy Brown – could have more than held his own against Fischer. Mich Jagger, not so much.) The concert was held outdoors at Copacabaña Beach ini Rio de Janeiro, Brazil as part of a 90-show tour the Rolling Stones d...