Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, December 23) my husband Charles and I watched an odd but interesting rerun on KPBS: “Spirit of the Season,” the 2021 In Performance at the White House Christmas special from Joe Biden’s first year as President. I could tell it was 2021 because Dr. Jill Biden kept introducing it as “from our first year in the White House” and because the COVID-19 pandemic was still going on, as evidenced not only by Dr. Biden’s repeated references to front-line health workers but because of the black face masks being worn by some of the players in the on-site orchestra (the string and percussion players, who could be masked because they didn’t have to blow air through their instruments to get them to sound like wind and brass players do). It was an intriguingly planned show in that each performance took place in a different room of the White House, and it was nice to see Christmas trees in the v...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday afternoon (Sunday, December 22) my husband Charles and I took the #10 and #3 buses to St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral for a traditional Christmas “Lessons and Carols” service, preceded by a performance of Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols – a 20-minute piece Britten composed to mostly Middle English texts during World War II, in which Britten had registered as a conscientious objector. Britten wrote it for a chorus of trebles – boy singers whose voices haven’t changed yet – and a harp, though in St. Paul’s performance the trebles were replaced by teenage and adult women. (Britten wrote a lot for trebles, and there have been the predictable allegations made against Gay men who work with boys that he was after more than their voices.) Britten set the texts pretty much as is instead of editing them into modern-day English – though one of my favorite things about Britten is his skill at ...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Tuesday, December 17) I watched a couple of quite interesting Christmas-themed shows on KPBS, including the annual Joy with the Tabernacle Choir (in previous years it’s been called Christmas with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir but they seem to be de-emphasizing the religious aspects this year even though the show was produced by the media arm of Brigham Young University) and a rather odd local video of a play called 1222 Oceanfront: A Black Family Christmas. Joy with the Tabernacle Choir was a quite good and pleasant program for its first all-music half but got dull and dreary later on. It began with a choral version of a song identified in the chyron (thank goodness for chyrons!) as “Sing We Now of Christmas” but which I’d heard before on the Kingston Trio’s Christmas album The Last Month of the Year as “Sing We Noël.” The chorus continued with a more obscure song called “Noël Noël” a...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, December 16) I ended up watching both hours of an extended TV special called Little Big Town’s Christmas at the Opry , meaning the new “Opryland” complex in Nashville, Tennessee that replaced the ancient Ryman Auditorium (actually a converted barn, like most theatres that presented country music in its early days) in which the Grand Ole Opry got its start. (The show’s name came from a bizarre joke made by a radio announcer who got impatient when the Metropolitan Opera broadcast that was supposed to be on before his show ran overtime, and when the opera finally ended he drawled an announcement: “You’ve been listening to grand opera from New York, but now here’s some of our Grand Ole Opry !”). The show’s headliners were Little Big Town, a singing quartet founded when two of the members, Karen Fairchild and Kimberly Schlapman, met at a Christian university called Samford in Homewo...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, December 16) my husband Charles had an early enough work call that he returned home in time to watch with me a quite fascinating hour-long PBS American Masters documentary on Brenda Lee. She was born Brenda Mae Tarpley on December 11, 1944 in Atlanta (in the charity ward of Grady Hospital, which will give you an idea of how much – or little – money her parents, Ruben Tarpley and Annie Yarbrough Grayce had to raise her). When she was eight her dad, a construction worker, died in an industrial accident. Brenda had begun singing in her local church at age three (so she, like Elvis Presley and Dolly Parton, started out in church; it wasn’t just the great Black singers that did!) By age 10 she was already busking on the street and had become the family’s principal breadwinner. Having a similar sort of voice to Judy Garland’s – she was a girl but she sounded like an adult woman – sh...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Sunday, December 15), my husband Charles and I watched An Evening with Dua Lipa, a music special on CBS featuring Albanian-British baby diva Dua Lipa performing with a symphony orchestra called the “Heritage Orchestra” (probably a pickup band assembled from the quite stellar coterie of classically trained musicians in London) on some of her greatest hits. This marked an interesting contrast to the PBS special we’d just seen with the Violent Femmes performing with the Milwaukee Symphony because Dua Lipa’s music benefited a lot more from the use of orchestral instruments than the Violent Femmes’ did. Before last night’s show, I’d pretty much relegated Dua Lipa to the rather anonymous pool of female pop singers with small, lithe bodies and small, tight voices that are clogging up the music charts these days. I was also confused by her name because it took me literally years to realize th...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last Saturday, December 14 my husband Charles and I went to Balboa Park for what was billed as a “Holiday Magic” concert at the Organ Pavilion, featuring San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez, soprano Alisa Jordheim (who’s quite good, well above the level of most wanna-be opera singers who perform in venues like this), the San Diego Opera Chorus conducted by Bruce Stasnya, and Marco Clavel and Carlos Herrera from the Marie Hitchcock Puppet Theatre. The last two I could definitely have done without; they displayed two rather formless puppets and told some of the worst so-called “jokes” of all time! I can only hope that the scripts they perform at the Marie Hitchcock Puppet Theatre are better than their material last night! Though the concert’s advertised start time was 5:30 p.m., the puppet masters and their insufferable material actually began at 5, much to my dissatisfaction. I’d gone to th...