Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved After that I kept on KPBS and watched the first of a new run of episodes of the local TV show Live at the Belly Up, after the live-music venue in Solana Beach that celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. The band was Aviator Stash, a local group of people who went to Carlsbad High School together but didn’t actually start playing with each other until they formed the band in 2017 when they were already in their 20’s. Aviator Stash consists of Greg Kellogg (lead vocals), Sal Russo (lead guitar), Drew Lang (keyboards), bassist Eric Schneider (identified only as “Diz” on the Web site) and drummer Tyler Pinto. According to the band’s own Web site, “Aviator Stash is a genre-hopping powerhouse of indie-rock energy and party culture vibes. When listening to their music, you can find many influences ranging from funk, 2000's-era rock, and various electronic styles. The band gained local attention w

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday (Tuesday, June 25) I went to the “Twilight in the Park” concert at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park featuring the Kearny Mesa Concert Band. Though they’re a pretty typical concert band – what makes a “band” different from an “orchestra” in this context is that a concert band has only brass, woodwind and percussion instruments, no strings – I give them and their music director, Richard Almanza, credit for picking a surprisingly unhackneyed program. Most concert bands play pretty much the same stuff – marches by John Philip Sousa (who spent most of his career, once he was discharged from the U.S. Marine Corps, leading a concert band of his own, and a quite famous one at that!) and others in a similarly stentorian style, pop songs from the “Great American Songbook” and medleys of soundtrack music from a famous film. The Kearny Mesa Concert Band began their Balboa Park concert with a piece w

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, June 24) my husband Charles and I went to an unusual concert at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park featuring a French-Canadian group called the Jazz InSpirations Ensemble (that’s how it’s spelled on the Spreckels Organ Society’s Web site). I had assumed this would be a concert with the Spreckels Organ’s music director, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, horning his way onto the organ console and inserting himself into a jazz group that normally plays either without an organ at all or with the combination of a Hammond B-3 electric organ and Leslie speakers Jimmy Smith made the standard setup for jazz and rock organists everywhere. Wrong on both counts: not only is the band led by an organist, Jean-Willy Kurz, their regular instrumentation calls for a pipe organ – which means they can only play in venues that have one already. The other members of the band are André Moisan on clarinet,

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday (June 17) was the start of the Balboa Park Summer Organ Festival, which runs every Monday night at 7:30 p.m. until September 2 and ends with a rock tribute to The Doors. When Carol Williams was civic organist she did tributes to The Doors, who at least had an organ player as an integral part of their sound, along with David Bowie. Under the current civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, they’ve done tributes to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, to my mind much less interesting groups. Last night’s concert presented Raúl with Jeff Thayer, concertmaster (i.e., first violinist) of the San Diego Symphony, in a program of works for violin and organ, mostly transcribed by Raúl from violin-and-piano originals. At least the presence of another musician on stage led Raúl to avoid (mostly) his seemingly endless monologues on stage – though he seized on the opportunity to go crazy about the second piece he

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Saturday, June 15) I went to a concert at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral billed as the “‘Rising Star’ Recital,” featuring three aspiring singers: soprani Lauren Carter and Elizabeth Gaitan and tenor Gonzalo Ochoa. The two women have been accepted for courses in advanced vocal study at a conservatory in Graz, Austria – I’d never heard Graz associated with classical music before and the only context I’d heard of the city is as the birthplace of Arnold Schwarzenegger – Carter in Lieder and Gaitan in opera. The concert was originally scheduled for the church’s upstairs room, the so-called “Great Hall” (a bit of a misnomer because it’s actually considerably smaller than the main chapel), but at the last minute the concert was moved to the main chapel. I thought that was a mistake because the echoey acoustics of the big room were just all wrong for what should have been an intimate recital w

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved R. STRAUSS: Cäcilie. Ruhe, meine Seele! Ständchen (orch. Mottl). Heimliche Aufforderung (orch. Heger). Intermezzo: Symphonic Interlude No. 2. Befreit. Morgen . WAGNER: Lohengrin: In fernem Land. Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: Prelude. Prize Song. Tannhäuser: Inbrunst im Herzen. Daniel Behle (ten); Thomas Rösner (cond); Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic O. PROSPERO PROSP0072 (55:57). This is a truly remarkable CD. Daniel Behle is a 49-year-old tenor with a wide range of repertoire, including the Evangelist in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion , a cut-down version of Telemann’s Brockes-Passion , tenor roles in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Cosi fan Tutte and The Magic Flute , song cycles by Schumann and Brahms, the role of Loge in a concert performance of Wagner’s Das Rheingold and a collection of Lieder with piano by Richard Strauss. Behle is basically a lyric tenor, but he’s chosen his selections conscie