Isabelle Demers at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion, Balboa Park, August 12, 2019

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s organ concert at Balboa Park featured Isabelle Demers, a French-Canadian performer who now lives in the U.S. and teaches at Baylor University in Texas. Demers has been here several times before — the first time she was selling her CD The Old and the New, though last night she didn’t have a merch table — and though her performance may not have been quite as overwhelming as Thomas Ospital’s the week before, it was a wide-ranging concert that offered a lot of colors and unusual organ sounds. She began with one of a number of virtual collaborations between two Baroque masters, Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) and Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750): Bach’s adaptation for organ solo of a Vivaldi concerto for two violins and orchestra, RV 522, which in Bach’s version bears the identifying number BWV 593. (The initials stand for “Bach Werke Verlag,” the last word simply being the German for “publisher” or “publication.” Just about every German composer is being subjected to the _WV publication and numbering scheme — Stuart Skelton’s recent Wagner recital identifies the Wagner pieces with “WWV” numbers, a bit challenging since most of Wagner’s works were operas and Skelton was only singing excerpts from them.)

Bach and Vivaldi never met (in fact I don’t think either ever left their native country!) but Bach did organ adaptations of several Vivaldi pieces, and I can’t help but wonder if this Vivaldi concerto for two violins and orchestra inspired Bach to write his own concerto for two violins and orchestra (which I know mainly from a 1947 Jascha Heifetz orchestra in which, via overdubbing, Heifetz played both solo parts and Franz Waxman conducted, mainly because he was used to multi-track recording and overdubbing as a film score composer and conductor). Demers’ program was wide-ranging: she followed the Vivaldi/Bach virtual collaboration with two pieces by living composer Jason Roberts (b. 1980), who apparently does a lot of silent-film accompanying and may have written the two scherzi Demers performed, “Whimsical” and “Mischevous,” to incorporate into live performances of silent films. The next piece on her program was something with the impenetrable title “Gammal Fäbodpsalm” by Swedish composer Oskar Lindberg (1887-1955) — she said that was in honor of the Swedish organist Gunnar Idenstam, who’s playing the Monday night concert next week — and after that she played Charles Tournemire’s recorded improvisation on “Victimae Paschali,” which may not be quite as overwhelming as his “Te Deum” (also based on a recorded improvisation and transcribed, like “Victimae Paschali,” by Maurice Duruflé) but is still a remarkable piece that manages to be dissonant but still tonal (I like that in 20^th century “classical” music) and pretty much sail over the heads of all the composers, musicians and musicologists who debated during the mid-20^th century over whether extended tonality, polytonality or serialism was the true “music of the future.”

After the intermission she began with her own transcription of the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony — the one disappointment in her program; I remember a few years ago when Thomas Heywood played the same piece at a Monday night Organ Pavilion concert (and sold a CD from his merch table that contained the entire symphony in his own transcription for organ!), and though I haven’t played the CD in years I remember Heywood’s as an arrangement that was darker, more massive and closer to the spirit of Beethoven’s orchestral original.  Charles said he thought the problem was that Heywood was trying to duplicate the experience of hearing the symphony in its orchestral form while Demers was rethinking it as an organ piece, hence her lighter registrations and less massive sound. After that she played three pieces from a series of 12 études by Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-1888), a French composer born in Paris (from the name “Alkan” I’d always assumed he was a Belgian who emigrated to France, but he wasn’t) to a Jewish family named Morhange (he got “Alkan” from his father’s first name),and he ran smack into the anti-Semitism that pervaded France (and virtually all of Europe, actually) in the 19^th century, which were apparently written to give himself material with which to practice his foot-pedal technique, since they’re for feet only. (Fortunately, the Organ Pavilion is using video screens these days — the right-hand one shows the organist’s hands on the manuals and the left-hand one shows his or her feet on the pedals — and since we sit on the left side of the Pavilion we got to watch some entertaining close-ups of Demers’ footwork, as well as a nice-looking young man in the row in front of us who was wearing a red T-shirt and dark blue shorts — one wonders how he kept warm on what was a fairly nippy night — who was video-recording the concert with his smartphone and was panning between Demers at the console and the video of her feet.) 

She closed with her own arrangement of the “Three Movements from Petrouchka” Igor Stravinsky adapted from his orchestral ballet score for Artur Rubinstein to play as a solo piano piece, and this time Demers’ arrangement for organ was marvelous, full of odd colors and showing off what a truly weird piece of music this still is even though it’s over a century old by now. She also astonishingly mischaracterized the ending as happy — which had all of us in our group (Charles, myself, Robert Sokolowski and Dan Rogalski — shaking our heads in disbelief) astonished, since in the original ballet score the Moor, the puppet Petrouchka’s rival for the hand of the ballerina, kills him and the ballet ends with the puppeteer waving Petrouchka’s dead body (well, maybe she assumed it’s not “really” a tragic ending since the three principals are all supposed to be puppets and therefore not alive anyway). But what mattered is she played the hell out of this remarkable music and brought the piece alive with her intelligent choices of colors, registrations and tastefully applied percussion effects. The encore was George Thalben-Ball’s set of variations on Paganini’s 24^th Caprice for unaccompanied violin — anyone who composes variations on this theme is going to suffer the burden of unfair comparisons to Rachmaninoff’s orchestral set on the same music, but though it’s hardly in Rachmaninoff’s league it’s still a pleasant organ work, challenging enough to provide a fitting capstone to a concert that was quite lovely and blessedly free of crossover music. (I like crossover music at times but I’d rather hear the Spreckels organ strut its stuff in pure classical.)