Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, May 29) I turned to CNN hoping that they would have some actual news coverage, but instead they were 45 minutes into a surprisingly interesting two-hour documentary on the history of the Bee Gees. Garry and I picked this up in 1974, as the Bee Gees were about to be dropped by Atlantic Records because they hadn’t had a hit since “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” in 1971. Desperate for a way to revitalize their career, brothers Barry, Maurice and Robin Gibb (the name “Bee Gees” simply is short for “Brothers Gibb,” though there were a lot of fanciful explanations for the name, including that it was slang for marijuana cigarettes in their native Australia) hit on Black rhythm-and-blues as a way to make their music more modern and more salable. They seized on the dance-funk style that was the hot new “thing” in the African-American community in the early 1970’s and made a quite cred...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last Sunday, May 28 my husband Charles and I went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for a really fun concert featuring guest organist Adam Ferrara and the Long Beach Youth Chorus. Adam Ferrara turned out to be a blessed relief from San Diego’s current civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, whose stage presence is so offensive I’ve dubbed him “The Spanish Clown.” Ferrara is a medium-tall young man who came out dressed in a red shirt and a black-and-white tie, and aside from being drop-dead gorgeous he’s a fine musician with a quiet, un-flamboyant stage manner. He began with a piece billed as the “Organ Concerto II in A minor,” ostensibly by Johann Sebastian Bach but actually written by Antonio Vivaldi as a concerto for two violins and orchestra and transcribed by Bach for organ. I’ll never forget my joy when one day during the early 1980’s I was in the late, lamented Classic Encounters r...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night – Saturday, May 20 – I went to St. Paul’s Cathedral Church to hear a beautiful and spectacular vocal recital by soprano Michelle Pérez and pianist John Solari performing a wide variety of songs. Two weeks before (May 6) at the same venue I’d heard a complete performance by tenor Carlos Barraza Treviño and pianist Mackenzie Lyn Marr of Franz Schubert’s song cycle Die Schöne Müllerin (“The Miller’s Beautiful Daughter”), a rare opportunity to hear all 20 songs in the cycle “live” and in one go. Pérez and Solari began their recital with three songs by Claude Debussy from his six-song cycle “Ariettes Oubliées” (“Forgotten Songs”) to texts by Paul Verlaine, and the juxtaposition of the two brought me in mind of the late comedienne Anna Russell’s joke that German Lieder are mediocre poetry set to great music, while French chansons are “great poetry set to rather wispy music.” Pérez and Solari ...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday (Sunday, May 14) I had an interesting afternoon during which I first went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for a Mother’s Day concert featuring civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez and Ukrainian soprano Anna Belaya (and yes, the spelling of her first name with two “n”’s is correct, according to her Web page) in a surprisingly lovely program of mostly quiet, pastoral music. It began with Anna singing and Raúl playing the Ukrainian National Anthem, a gesture he’s been doing at most (though not all) of his Sunday afternoon concerts since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Then, after the usual speechifying by Raúl and organ Curator Dale Sorenson, Raúl went into his program with the last movement, “Golliwog’s Cakewalk,” from Debussy’s Children’s Corner suite for piano. It was written at a time when African-American musicians were starting to tour Europe basically as novelt...