Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday afternoon (Saturday, April 27) I went to a quite remarkable concert at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral in Bankers’ Hill featuring the San Diego Master Chorale in a performance of the Requiem by Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986) along with a first set of selections from various works for chorus and organ by British composer Gerald Finzi (1901-1956), Mark Butler (b. 1965), Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) and Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), as well as a shorter work by Duruflé, “Ubi Caritas,” sung a capella by the Master Chorale and its youth group, Honor Choir 2024. The Master Chorale was conducted by its music director, John K. Russell, and except for “Ubi Caritas” and another a capella piece, Butler’s “Dona Nobis Pacem,” the concert featured organ accompaniment by the church’s musical director, Martin Green. I had a bit of anxiety ov...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved On Wednesday, April 24 my husband Charles and I went to see the rerun of last Saturday’s final performance of the Metropolitan Opera’s current production of Puccini’s La Rondine (“The Swallow,” as in the bird) on their “Live in HD” series. La Rondine is something of a stepchild in Puccini’s catalog; he composed it in 1913 or thereabouts (which slots it in between the stunning La Fanciulla del West and Il Trittico, the trilogy of three one-act operas he composed for the Met, which premiered it in 1918) under a commission from the Carltheater in Vienna, Austria. I’d known that for years and had always assumed the piece contained spoken dialogue and was in German, and it wasn’t until the San Francisco Opera did it in the 1970’s (not as part of their main international season but in a lower-cost, both production budget and ticket price, series) that I realized it was a through-sung opera with recit...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Saturday, April 20) I went to an intriguing but ultimately disappointing concert at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral called Carmina Burana : From the Middle Ages to the Great Depression. Carmina Burana started out in 1230 A.D. as a manuscript found in 1803 in the monastery of Benediktbeuren in Bavaria, southern Germany. It consists of 248 poems, often satires of the ruling Roman Catholic dogmas as well as odes to love, drinking and the vagaries of fortune. In the mid-1930’s Carl Orff, a German composer who’d “made his bones” by winning a contest sponsored by the Nazi government to come up with a replacement for Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music to William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream , discovered the Beuren manuscript and decided to use it as the basis for a big (55-minute) piece for vocal soloists (soprano, tenor and bass-baritone), chorus and orchestra. Although the Beure...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved On Friday, April 19 CBS-TV re-ran The 100th: Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden – The Greatest Arena Run of All Time , the Billy Joel concert special filmed on March 28, 2024 representing his 100th performance at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Joel had performed at least one concert per month there since 2010 and he’d become such a “regular” that the arena’s technical crew quickly set up the venue for a music concert just as easily as they could for a sports event. The show was originally aired on Sunday, April 14 but, on my husband Charles’s advice, I bypassed it and instead watched the Lifetime movies Killer Fortune Teller and Trapped by My Sugar Daddy . It was rebroadcast on Friday for a rather strange reason: viewers in the Eastern and Central time zones had to watch the concert half an hour later than it was scheduled because the Masters golf tournament lasted a half-hour longer tha...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, April 15) I went to the San Diego Public Library for an unusual, to say the least, event called Sounds and Swells, which combined live string quartet music by the Hausmann Quartet (whom my husband Charles and I had seen earlier just before Easter performing Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross at Verbatim Books with interspersed readings by local writers) with surfing films. The Hausmann Quartet’s Web site explained the program thusly: “Join us for the return of Sounds and Swells ! As part of this season’s San Diego Central Library Cinema & Sounds series, this collaboration between the Hausmann Quartet and Art of Elan at the Library’s Neil Morgan Auditorium features live music by Claude Debussy, Terry Riley, Franz Joseph Haydn, Felix Mendelssohn and Franz Schubert accompanying local surfing footage from McCracken Films and Joey Taylor Photography. This conce...