Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved On Thursday, December 28 at 8:45 p.m. I ran an interesting documentary from the BBC in 1985 called British Rock: The First Wave ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htnD55VAbH4 ), about the so-called “British Invasion” that dominated first Britain’s and then the world’s popular music from 1962 to 1966. It was co-directed by Patrick Montgomery and Pamela Page, and narrated by Michael York. Of course it began with the Beatles – with a British TV clip of them performing “She Loves You” – though it deserves credit for acknowledging the importance of London-based as well as Liverpool-based groups. It’s basically a “print the legend” version of the history of rock ‘n’ roll in both Britain and the U.S., though I give Montgomery and Page a lot of credit for presenting the actual music, if not in note-complete performances of whole songs, at least in snippets long enough to give a good account of the overall

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved On Saturday, December 9. at 7 p.m. I went to the concert at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral featuring ensembles collectively known as “Musica Vitale” (Google translates “vitale” as “life-giving”). The concert was billed as “ Oratorio de Noël by Camille Saint-Saëns and other works for the season,” though the “other works” were a pretty eclectic bunch. Musica Vitale consists of a women’s chorus (Lisa Parente, Jenn French, Rachel Fields, Nicole Baller, Lizzie Gaitan, Penelope Hawkins, Julia Rose Rahm, Sarah-Nicole Carter and Steph Ishihara); a men’s chorus (Daniel Moyer, Samuel Buse, Brad Fox, Richard Dawes, John Yokoyama, Eric Carter, Michael Sokol, Ron Hilley, Tomas Lokensgard and Andrew Nam); a small string group, the Ghukasyan Ourchestra (Dámaris Brambila, Erik Ghukasyan and Ottmar Mastachi, first violins; Yanelí Millán, Karla Alcocer, Gibran Aguilar and Bettina Preciado, second violins; Ronaldo