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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...
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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 ...
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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...
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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 ...
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"Woody Guthrie at 100!": PBS's Truncated Showing of a 100th Birthday Concert Celebrating America's Great Topical Folksinger

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Saturday, July 18) KPBS aired a tribute show to singer Woody Guthrie called Woody Guthrie at 100! , filmed at a concert at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts on October 14, 2012 (though Guthrie’s actual birthdate was July 14, 1912). This was before the Kennedy Center was traduced and forced, at least for a while, to bear the name of another President, a man Woody Guthrie would have hated – especially since Guthrie’s path actually crossed that of Donald Trump’s notoriously racist father, Fred Trump. In the early 1950’s Guthrie moved into a building owned by Fred Trump, only to learn that Trump’s company had a systematic and out-front policy of not renting to Black people. As a matter of principle, Guthrie not only moved out of Trump’s building but wrote an extra verse to his song “I Ain’t Got No Home” explicitly denouncing Fred Trump’s racism. The concert provide...
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Patty Griffin Delivers Impassioned Performances of Her Americana Songs on a 2007 "Live at the Artists' Den" Show She Considered Good Enough to Release

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved After watching the film noir Moonrise on Turner Classic Movies on Friday, June 26, I waited almost an hour during which my husband Charles came home from work and I put on a PBS music show called Live from the Artists’ Den featuring singer-songwriter Patty Griffin. The show was copyrighted 2007 even though the series didn’t start airing on PBS stations until the following year. Griffin liked the show enough that she released it as a live CD in 2008, and it was quite impressive even though I tend to get Patty Griffin confused with the more country-style artist Kathy Griffin. Patty Griffin is a highly talented singer-songwriter who’s flirted with a wide range of styles, from traditional gospel to “Americana” to the kind of women’s folk music exemplified in the 1970’s by the late Laura Nyro and the still-living Carole King. Since Live from the Artists’ Den, unlike Live at the Belly Up or The Kate...
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David Marsh Plays Charming "Great American Songbook" Program at Organ Pavilion June 21

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved This afternoon (Sunday, June 21) at their regular 2 p.m. Sunday concert the Spreckels Organ Society featured a guest organist, David Marsh, who’s also a piano player and bills himself as a jazz musician as well as a theatre organist. His program promised “Popular Music from the Great American Songbook,” which made me think he was going to play exclusively songs from the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s. He did some of that material but he also played newer songs; he opened with “That’s Entertainment!,” composed by Arthur Schwartz with lyrics by Howard Dietz for interpolation into the 1953 musical film The Band Wagon . (The movie was nominally based on a 1930 revue by Schwartz and Dietz, but the 1953 film added a backstage-musical plot and had little in common with the stage version except a few of the songs and the male lead, Fred Astaire.) Then he played more recent songs from Disney films: Alan Menken...
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