Music Magg

Stunning Musical Performances Overwhelm the Silent Films He was Accompanying by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved My husband Charles and I just returned from the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in San Diego’s Balboa Park, where for the last two days a quite spectacular theatre organist named Mark Herman has been performing. On Saturday, October 30 he closed out this year’s Monday night organ festival concert – though this one was moved to Saturday, October 30 so it would take place before Hallowe’en instead of afterwards – which was the venue’s traditional “Movie Night,” an annual event in which they show either a silent feature or (as this year) a program of silent shorts, with the organist supplying live musical accompaniment. This, mind you, is how silent films were shown “in the day”: the very largest theatres had full orchestras, the next rung down had organs, the theatres below them had string trios (piano, violin and cello) and the c...

Great Playing but Some Pretty Bland Music by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night’s Monday night concert at the Organ Pavilion featured Michael Hey (and of course we couldn’t resist the temptation to make bad jokes about his name – including what you would say when you called him, “Hey, Hey!”), organist at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. It’s a prestigious job but also a rough one, as he described it, since among other duties he has to be in the church at the console at 7 a.m. for the daily morning Mass. He was one of those players who decided to tear up his printed program and play his pieces in a different order than listed – though there was only one complete substitution: instead of French composer Eugène Gigout’s “Grand choeur dialogue” he played his own transcription of the “Lyric for Strings” by Black organist-composer George Walker (1922-2018). It’s not clear why he didn’t play a Walker piece actually compos...

Lousy Weather but Great Music by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night’s organ concert at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park featured Ahreum Han, who was described as coming from Korea via Atlanta, Iowa and Texas (which certainly sounds like the wrong way around – did she fly over the Atlantic instead of the Pacific?). Though the edited version of her biography in the Organ Pavilion’s program didn’t make it clear whether she was Korean or Korean-American, the full version on her Web site, http://www.ahreumhan.com/biography/ , made her background apparent: “Han was born in Seoul, Korea. Her family immigrated to Atlanta, Georgia when she was sixteen. She graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in organ performance from Westminster Choir College, a Diploma from prestigious Curtis Institute of Music, Master’s degree from Yale School of Music and Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Doctor of Musical Arts degree from University of Iowa. Her t...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved I’ve spent this morning and early afternoon listening to an oddball work by Gustav Mahler, Das klagende Lied , whose first draft was composed in 1880-81 (while Richard Wagner, whose footprints are all over this score, was still alive – I’ve never been a fan of Mahler and have often joked that if Wagner had lived long enough to hear Mahler’s music he would have regarded him as confirmation of everything nasty Wagner ever had to say about Jewish composers) but which wasn’t premiered until 1901 in a version that simply removed “Waldmarchen,” the first part of the story. The overall title means “Song of Lamentation” (by interesting coincidence the first work of another prominent Jewish composer-conductor, Leonard Bernstein, for singer and orchestra was called “Lamentation,” and was later incorporated as the last movement of Bernstein’s first symphony, “Jeremiah”) and the work is based on two German fa...