Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved On New Year’s Eve night (Sunday, December 31) my husband Charles and I watched a couple of TV music specials, one on PBS from Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and one on CBS from various locations in Nashville. The PBS one, rather awkwardly titled Next at Kennedy Center: Cynthia Erivo and Friends: A New Year’s Eve Celebration , featured singer Cynthia Erivo. Her “friends” were Ben Platt from the Broadway cast of the musical Dear Evan Hansen and Joaquina Kalukango from the Broadway cast of the musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple . (The musical has since been filmed, though Erivo isn’t in the movie and neither is Kalukango. I wonder what Alice Walker, who’s still alive at 79, thinks of the stage show or the musical film; she so hated Steven Spielberg’s 1985 movie of The Color Purple she wrote a whole book about it, The Same River Twice .) Erivo began with a great song from

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved The Cynthia Erivo show on PBS ended just before 11 p.m., and then I put on the CBS New Year’s show, New Year’s Eve Live: Nashville’s Big Bash . My husband Charles and I joined the show while it was already half an hour old, and I’d hoped that it would present a wider range of modern country-music artists than it did. Actually the two hours we watched were focused almost entirely on two acts, woman singer Lainey Wilson and 1970’s-era Southern rock legends Lynyrd Skynyrd. The show – or at least the part of it we watched – opened with a Lainey Wilson song called (I’m only guessing here because few of the song titles were actually announced) “It’s Only Because I’ve Lived Through Hell.” Then Kane Brown came on to do “Bury Me in Georgia” (a song title I’m sure of because it was announced) before Wilson returned with

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, January 1) my husband Charles and I watched the 90 minutes PBS vouchsafes us of the annual New Year’s concert in Vienna given by the Vienna Philharmonic in the Musikvereinsaal. These concerts started in 1939 when the Vienna Philharmonic’s conductor Clemens Krauss decided the people of Vienna needed a “fun” musical event to make up for the heaviness of the news, particularly the annexation (Anschluss) of Austria by Nazi Germany the year before. So he played a concert of mostly waltzes, polkas and other dance music by the Strauss family: father Johann Strauss, Sr. and his sons Johann, Jr., Josef and Eduard Strauss. The concerts stopped in the later stages of World War II but were revived and have become an annual fixture (and a major cash cow for the Vienna Philharmonic, which every year relea