Posts

Spreckels Organ Society Showed Two Silent Comedy Classics August 31, but Clark Wilson's Opening Selections Were 1970's Pop-Rock Songs

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, August 31) my husband Charles (who had his birthday yesterday) and I went to the “Not-So-Silent Movie Night” at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park to hear organist Clark Wilson play a brief opening concert and then provide live musical accompaniments to two classics of silent-film comedy: Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant (1917) and Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. (1924). For some strange reason, instead of using his opening concert (a tradition in the Organ Pavilion to entertain the crowd before the sun sets enough to make outdoor projection of a film more practicable) to play music from the 1920’s or earlier when silent films were current, Wilson chose to make his opening piece a medley of pop-rock songs from the 1970’s. He opened with Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” (I missed that one, partly because I was expecting a 1920’s song and was racking my memories of actual 1920’s m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Engaging Monday Night Concert at the Organ Pavilion August 24 Featuring Civic Organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez and His Wife, Pianist Maria Teresa Sierra

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Two nights ago (Monday, August 24) my husband Charles and I went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park to attend the seventh of this year’s nine concerts in the 38th annual Summer Organ Festival every Monday from July 13 to September 7 at 7:30 p.m. The concert last night featured San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez and his wife, pianist Maria Teresa Sierra, who’d previously played a duet concert with him at one of the earlier Monday night concert seasons on August 27, 2018 (his first year as civic organist). Charles expressed concern that the organ would drown out the piano, and the concert’s tech people had fortunately thought of that because they miked the piano with three microphones to give Mrs. Ramírez a fighting chance against her husband at the Spreckels Organ console. The program was rather oddly structured and Raúl’s typical on-the-fly changes made it even odder. It was s...
Post a Comment
Read more

San Diego Civic Organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez and Conductor Alejandro Goméz-Guillen Present Third Annual Organ-and-Orchestra Concert at Spreckels Organ Pavilion August 17

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, August 17) my husband Charles and I went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for the latest in the Monday night “Summer Organ Festival” concert series, featuring San Diego civic organist Raúi Prieto Ramírez with a relatively small pickup orchestra playing concerted works for organ and orchestra. This is the third year in a row he’s done such a concert, and this time he opened with a work he’s played all three years: the Concerto in E-flat minor for Organ and Orchestra, Op. 55, by American composer and professor Horatio Parker (1863-1919). This year neither he nor his conductor, Alejandro Gómez-Guillén, prefaced it with an announcement (in fact there was blessedly little talking throughout the concert, which I very much enjoyed; during his own concerts, especially the regular ones on Sunday afternoons, Raúl talks way too much and too annoyingly) they’ve given in previ...
Post a Comment
Read more

David Higgs Presents a Stunning Program of Hard-Core Classical Music at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion August 10

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, August 10) my husband Charles and I went to the fifth concert in this year’s 38th annual Spreckels Organ Society Summer Organ Festival. The organist was David Higgs, who’s mostly an academic (he chairs the organ department at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York) rather than a church organist. He scheduled a program that was almost all hard-core classical; the one concession to “crossover” music was programming two chorale preludes by George Shearing (1919-2011), and even those were relatively serious. First, Shearing, a top-flight jazz pianist (and occasional accordionist) but one who didn’t know much about the organ, needed editorial help with these pieces, and he got it from Dale Wood (1934-2003), a church organist and composer from California who edited the Sacred Music Press for a brief period in the mid-1970’s. Second, he based them on early Southern American...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Best Concert Yet from This Year's Summer Organ Festival: Grant Smith and Sunkyung Noh Play "Organ Four-Hands, Four-Feet"

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, August 3) my husband Charles and I went to the fourth concert in this year’s Summer Organ Festival in the Organ Pavilion at Balboa Park. This one was advertised as “Organ Four-Hands and Four-Feet” and featured duo organists Grant Smith and Sunkyung Noh, a man and a woman who turned out to be married to each other. (I’ve already noticed that the great piano duos all seemed to have been people who had either a family or a romantic relationship with each other, including the Gay couple Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy.) Of the three concerts Charles and I have been to this year, this was actually the best. It opened with the last movement, “The Fairy Garden,” by Maurice Ravel from his suite Ma Mère l’Oye (“Mother Goose”). I was surprised that Grant Smith in his opening introduction said the piece was originally written for orchestra, because it wasn’t; it was originally part of a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Thomas Gaynor Delivers a Great Evening of Organ Music in Balboa Park July 27

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, July 27) my husband Charles and I went to the third concert in the Spreckels Organ Society’s 38th annual Summer Organ Festival. The organist was Thomas Gaynor, who was born in Wellington, New Zealand (neither his bio in the program nor the available online sources say exactly when) but relocated to the U.S. as a young adult and settled in Philadelphia. He is currently assistant organist and choir master at St. Mark’s Church on Locust Street and was assistant organist at the Wanamaker Grand Court Organ in the Macy’s (formerly Wanamaker’s) department store until its recent closure for renovations. (The Web site for the Wanamaker organ insists that it will be played again when the store is reopened, and there are currently concerts being live-streamed even though the venue is not open to the public.) Gaynor is also an adjunct instructor of organ at Westminster Choir College of Ride...
Post a Comment
Read more

Isabelle Demers Scores in Second Monday Night Organ Pavilion Concert at This Year's Summer Festival

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, July 20) my husband Charles and I went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for the second in the nine concerts (down from the previous years’ 12 to 13) of this year’s 38th annual International Summer Organ Festival. The organist was Isabelle Demers, who was born in Lachine, Québec, Canada. She’s gone back and forth between her native country and the U.S. and she’s played at the Spreckels at least twice before, during one of which concerts I bought her CD The New and the Old . Demers began her concert with Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C, BWV 547, and then performed an interesting curio: four of the 15 Two-Part Inventions as composed by Bach and re-composed by Max Reger (1873-1916). Oddly, she didn’t seem to be that enamored of these pieces; she joked about how Reger had transferred the left-hand parts of Bach’s originals for harpsichord to the foot pedals of the organ ...
Post a Comment
Read more