Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Wednesday, January 1) at 8 my husband Charles and I watched the annual Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concert, which began in 1939 when conductor Clemens Krauss decided the Austrians needed a feel-good event to get over their takeover by the Nazis. So he started this tradition which mostly featured the music of the Strauss family: father Johann I, sons Johann II, Josef and Eduard; and Johann Strauss III, who was not Johann II’s son but Eduard’s! The event has become an annual tradition and a major cash cow for the Vienna Philharmonic. It’s televised by the state-owned Austrian broadcasting company ORF (short for Österreicher Rundfunk ), which sends videos around the world to various countries that consist of the complete concert plus an ample supply of B-roll which can be edited by TV networks and stations any way they like. The American rights are held by PBS, which almost always shows...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Tuesday, December 31, 2024) PBS showed two episodes of the occasional TV series Next at the Kennedy Center, various performances filmed at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. One was actually a rerun of the December 31, 2023 show featuring Cynthia Erivo with various guest performers ( https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/01/next-at-kennedy-center-cynthia-erivo.html ); I gave that show an oddly lukewarm review at the time, focusing mainly on how much better the original versions of many of the songs were than the ones Erivo and her “friends” (Ben Platt and an amazing Black Hawai’ian named Joaquina Kalukango) gave us on that show, but I liked it a lot better last night than I did in 2023. The new show featured singer Sara Bareilles, whom I remember getting a free sampler CD promoting her first album. I played through it and decided it was nice but not so ...