Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved On Sunday, Novembe 13, my husband Charles and I got back from an organ concert in Balboa Park that was supposed to feature the dancers from the San Diego Civic Youth Ballet performing extracts from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker (or should I write his name “Chaikovskii” the way the folks at the San Francisco State library did in the late 1970’s?). I was quite disappointed that San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez did not get to accompany the dancers from the console at the Organ Pavilion.; Instead they danced to a pre-recorded version of the orchestral score. I’m presuming this was so the young dancers would hear the music in the same tempi they’ve rehearsed to and wouldn’t get thrown by slight differences from a live accompaniment. Also coordinating the dancers with live organ would probably have taken extra rehearsal time, and no doubt neither the young dancers nor the Sprecles Organ peop...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday my husband Charles and I completed my trifecta of free classical music concerts int he area – or should I say a “”quadrifecta,” since we actually went to two events yesterday afternoon. The first was the usual Sunday afternoon organ concert at 2 p.m. with civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez playing a program honoring the sacrifices of American and other servicemembers in the various wars in the world.He explained this because even though Veterans’ Day is next Friday, November 11, and it’s being celebrated the following Monday, November 14. This is in line with the decision of the U.S. government during the Nixon years to shift all holiday celebrations except Thanksgiving and Christmas to Mondays regardless of what date the holiday actually falls on so they’ll all create three-day weekends. Ordinarily Raúl explained that he would have given the Veterans’ Day concert next Sunday, November 1...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Charles and I then walked across Balboa Park to Fifth and Laurel, then ate dinner at the Mexican restaurant on Fifth and Nutmeg just across the street from St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral, where we were going to attend the Sunday afternoon Evensong service and the following performance of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem. The Evensong service came with a full program that also included the text of the Requiem, and there were spaces in it for audience participation through standing during parts of the service (which I was O.K. with) and joining in singing of the hymns (which I was not, mainly because I hadn’t brought my reading glasses and my rapidly deteriorating eyes would have been useless in trying to parse out the words from the printed texts, which included the music as well). I had thought Evensong was the kind of service where you didn’t have to do anything except sit (or stand) there and bask in the ...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved The November 5 concert at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral featured an ensemble I’d heard before – in fact’ as I’ve been writing this I’ve been listening to a CD I burned from their appearance 3 ½ years ago (June 2, 2018, to be exact) – the Trio Arpavioluda. The Trio Arpavioluta consists of three women: Cathay Blickenstaff on flute, Pälvikki Nykten on violin and viola, and Laura Vaughan on harp. Since the classical music repertory isn’t exactly bursting with music composed especially for that combination of instruments – according to Blickenstaff, who in addition to her flute duties serves as the group’s spokeswoman, the only pieces actually written for flute, violin and harp are a 1905 “Terzettino” by French composer Théodore Dubois (1837-1924) and a 1915 trio sonata by a far better-known French composer, Claude Debussy (1862-1918) – they’ve had to fill out their repertoire with a lot of transcripti...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved I was looking for a relatively light movie that my husband Charles and I could watch to get our minds off the dreadful political news surrounding the 2022 midterm elections and preferably one with a Hallowe’en theme. I found it in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the 1975 film of Richard O’Brien’s musical The Rocky Horror Show, a Queer-themed spoof of Frankenstein that premiered in London in 1973 and then played Broadway before 20th Century-Fox bought the movie rights. They assigned it to director Jim Sharman and told him to recruit a cast of major American rock-music stars for the roles, but Sharman insisted that at least for the (more or less) British principals he wanted to use the players from the British stage version: Tim Curry as mad scientist Dr. Frank N. Furter (well, it’s a better name for a Frankenstein spoof than “Frankenweenie”!, Richard O’Brien himself as his servant Riff Raff (who a...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday at 11 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a quite interesting YouTube video from a man named Elam Rotem who runs a Web site called Early Music Sources. He sounds hike one of those guys I usually can’t stand – one of those “historically informed performance” fanatics who insist on doing research to go back to the way pre-Romantic music was presumably played when it was written by making mountains out of historical molehills – but this video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFPW9ENtNKA , proved unexpectedly interesting because its subject was historical recordings. Beginning in the late 19th century and through the 20th,we had major composers actually making recordings of their own music, and he played a snippet of a brief piano recording by Edvard Grieg of one of his minor piano pieces, then compared it to a modern recording of the same piece. He also played a recording of the opening of...

br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night at 9 my husband Charles and I watched a “Snappy Video” Blu-Ray disc containing a compilation of “Soundies,” the three-minute music videos shot between 1941 and 1947 to be played on a “Panoram.” The Panoram was a sort if self-contained movie projector and screen, and if you put a dime into it (twice the going rate for an audio-only jukebox in the early- to mid-1940’s) you saw and heard a shirt filmclip of a big band, a country outfit, a vocal group or some other sort of audio-visual entertainment. The Snappy Video compilation featured 20 short films, though three weren’t Soundies; one was a band short with Ted Lewis and His Orchestra playing a 10-minute program. I suspect the folks at Universal (the opening logo said “Castle Films,” which in addition to being a logo used for educational films shown in schools was also an imprint Universal used to sell three-minute bits of their featu...