Music Magg

> by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday I got sidetracked on a few things I wanted to write about, including Raúl Prieto Ramírez’s Sunday organ concert March 26, in which he paid tribute to Johann Sebastian Bach, doing an all-Bach program except for the obligatory performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” heard in an unusually florid version with a lot of added ornamentation. (Ironically, John Stafford Smith, the composer of “The Star-Spangled Banner” – originally a British college drinking song called “To Anacreon in Heaven” – was baptized March 30, 1750, just six months before Bach’s death on September 27, 1759,) Bach’s official birthdate depends on which calendar you use; it was March 21 in the Julian calendar and March 31 in the Gregorian, and maybe Raúl split the difference adn chose March 26 as the tribute date. (It was on a Sunday, the usual day of the week for the Balboa Park organ concerts, and it was midway bet

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (March 21) at about 9:50 my husband Charles and I watched a YouTube post ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkKNWrmAoSc ) of a quite intriguing instant documentary produced by CBS News on the life of Louis Armstrong, Louis Armstrong: 1900-1971 , shown on July 9, 1971 – just three days after Armstrong’s death. It opened with a scene of one of Louis Armstrong’s last live appearances – him singing “Hello, Dolly!” (the 1964 Broadway show tune Armstrong recorded and had the biggest hit of his career on; amazingly, it was the biggest hit by anybody in 1964; the Beatles placed numbers two through six) in one of his last live shows on July 3, 1970. (Armstrong spent most of the last year of his life in various hospital beds, though he rallied long enough to record one more album, Louis Armstring and His Friends , on which he recorded the civil-rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” and John Lennon’s “G

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday (March 22) at noon my husband Charles and I were in theatre 14 of the AMC Mission Valley 20 movie complex watching the Metropolitan Opera’s “Live in HD” presentation of Wagner’s opera Lohengrin . The live performance actually took place Saturday, March 18 but because it was a Wagner opera, and therefore longer than most other people’s, the performance started at noon Eastern time – which would have been 9 a.m. Pacific time. The Met offered two “encore presentations” yesterday at noon and 6:30 p.m., and we chose the one at noon. Lohengrin takes about 3 ½ hours of actual opera, though with the intermissions and general padding we didn’t leave the tyeatre u ntil 5 p.m.. Lohengrin was presented in a new production by French director François Girard, which made me hesitate momentarily because I’d seen his horrible production of Wagner’s last opera, Parsifal (a prequel of sorts to Lohengrin