Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved This afternoon (Sunday, May 10) I went alone to the regular Sunday afternoon organ concert at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. I wanted to get back in touch with the Spreckels Organ Society (I re-upped the membership for my husband Charles and I) and also I figured that, even though the organist was the regular one, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, whose appalling stage antics I can’t stand, he was having a guest artist, singer Sarah-Nicole Carter, and usually the presence of another person on the program puts Raúl on his best behavior. It was actually quite a nice concert featuring Raúl playing three pieces solo following his obligatory opening sing-along of John Stafford Smith’s “To Anacreon in Heaven,” a.k.a. “The Star-Spangled Banner.” (It was originally an Oxford University drinking song and Charles, perhaps inspired by the anecdote I told him about how the Anglophile H. P. Lovecraft, one of the few New...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, May 4) my husband Charles and I watched Wagner’s Götterdämmerung , fourth installment in the tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen (“The Ring of the Nibelung”), in a frustrating staging by the Berlin Oper Under den Linden (the last part of the name refers to its location, and during the split of Germany between 1947 and 1990 it was in East Berlin) conducted by Christian Thielemann (after the original conductor, Daniel Barenboim, withdrew for health reasons – he is in his 80’s, after all!) and directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov. Dmitri Tcherniakov is a youngish (born 1970, which would make him 55) Russian stage director with a terrible reputation for making hash out of great operas. Among his problems as an opera director are an aversion to supernatural plot elements (which makes me wonder whose idea it was to have him direct Wagner’s Ring , which is full of supernatural plot element...