Ahreum Han at the Organ Pavilion October 4

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 teachers includes Ken Cowan, Alan Morrison, Thomas Murray, and Brett Wolgast.” (The others on that list are not familiar to me, but we’ve seen Ken Cowan perform at one of the previous Monday night festivals and I have his CD The Art of the Symphonic Organist, Volume 1 – Volume 2 was by a different performer, Stephen Tharp – lying around here somewhere.) Alas, the dark clouds that had loomed large in the sky on our way there opened up just as we got to the Organ Pavilion; we had already seen quite a few lightning flashes and heard some thunderclaps (and since light travels faster than sound, there’s always an audible gap between the lightning and the thunder – and the length of time between the flash and the sound is a fairly reliable gauge of how far away the lightning storm is). It started to rain just as we arrived at the Pavilion and started setting up, and the Spreckels Organ Society officials went into their usual Plan B when a concert is rained on: they filled the stage with folding chairs and allowed people to sit on the stage.

I’m not sure how I would have liked Ahreum Han if we’d heard her under normal circumstances, with the usual distance between stage and audience diffusing the sound, but sitting up close and personal with the organ (indeed, right under it!) gave her playing a thrilling immediacy that added to her power. She is an excellent musician and she picked an exciting program that avoided the usual organ chestnuts (except for Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C, BWV 564, which I know mainly from Marcel Dupré’s early-1950’s recording for Mercury: it was made in France and Dupré definitely put a French “spin” on Bach. She began with a fanfare by British composer John Cook (1918-1984) based on verses one through three of Psalm 81 – which she printed as six lines in the program and made it seem like the piece was a suite, not the single movement it turned out to be. It’s one of those pieces by British church composers of the 20th century that seems to stand apart from all the tonality vs. serialism that rocked the world of original classical music in the 20th century, and while it’s hardly on the level of Healey Willan or Vernon Howells, it was an appealing piece and Han played it, as she did her whole program, in a forceful way that emphasized power and strength. The Bach was second on her program, and then she played a couple of oddball pieces by Sigfrid Karg-Elert, a quirky German organist and composer (1877-1933) who’s always perplexed me. From the grandiosity of his name (even though he, or his parents, left out both “e”’s from the usual spelling of “Siegfried”) one would expect a barnstorming composer whose works would wave the proverbial fist at Heaven. Instead his works tended to be quiet and lyrical, and the first piece of his Han played last night, “Valse Mignonne” (Op. 142, no. 2) – which apparently Karg-Elert himself said was “not in my usual style” – sounded like the sort of music movie companies sent out to provide live accompaniment for silent films in the 1920’s. Han’s second Karg-Elert piece, “Rondo alla Campanella,” Op. 156, sounded ballsier but still surprisingly lyrical for a German composer specializing in organ music at the turn of the last century. (If you want the sort of music you’d expect from someone named “Sigfrid Karg-Elert,” bypass him and go to Max Reger instead.)

Han’s final piece before a very brief intermission – she was clearly rushing through her program and the only reason she took a break was so the people in charge of the organ could wipe the moisture from the air off the keys – was the overture to Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, including the final can-can that’s the main strain everyone knows from this piece. (Sometimes you get the same reaction from audiences with this piece that you do to Rossini’s William Tell Overture: they fidget nervously through the piece because the one familiar theme everyone knows doesn’t appear until the very end.) This is the one piece for which Han advertises a CD on her Web site – though it’s not clear if she played on the entire CD or just contributed the overture – and she tore it through it with the spirit of fun Offenbach’s music needs to work. Han had advertised her program as “Three Jazz Organ Preludes, Jacques Offenbach and More,” and the three jazz – or sort-of jazz – works she played took up most of the second set. First was a piece called “Mouvement” by French composer Jean Bervieller (1904-1976), a typical 20h century crossover work that incorporates some of the harmonic and rhythmic devices of jazz into an overall “classical” framework. Next was “Sweet Sixteenths (A Concert Rag for Organ),” by William Albright (1944-1998), one of the three people (along with Joshua Rifkin and William Bolcom) who were instrumental in the revival of interest in classic ragtime in general, and Scott Joplin in particular, in the early 1970’s. (Rifkin recorded three albums called Piano Rags of Scott Joplin which revolutionized ragtime playing by taking the Joplin rags at or below his metronome markings, showing off the lyrical and poetic qualities of music previous pianists had used as an excuse to clang and bang, and one day the son of movie director George Roy Hill was playing Rifkin’s first Joplin album at home when dad came home and asked him what it was. Hill, Jr. told him and then asked, “Dad, why did you want to know?” “Because I’m working on a new movie called The Sting, and I think this music would be right for it,” said Hill, Sr.) Albright wrote quite a few rags of his own (as did Bolcom) and this was one of them, though the designation “for organ” surprised me because it sounded like a piece Albright would have written for piano and then transcribed.

The next piece was a three-movement suite by the only living composer Han played, Johannes Matthias Michel (b. 1962), which was billed as adaptations of three traditional German hymn tunes but also with jazz influences. Han announced the three movements as stylistically related to major jazz figures: Duke Ellington for the opener, “Swing Five,” based on “Erhalt uns, Herr, bei deinem Wort” (“Keep us, Lord, faithful to your word”); Antonio Carlos Jobim for the second movement, “Bossa Nova,” based on “Wunderbarer König” (“Wonderful King”); and Leonard Bernstein in general and West Side Story in particular for the third, “Afro-Cuban,” based on “In dir est Freude” (“In you is joy”). I heard little of Ellington in the first piece or Jobim in the second (about the only reference to jazz in the first movement was a stride bass line Han played on the organ pedals), but the Bernstein influence in the last movement was readily apparentL the main theme sounded an awful lot like the song “America” from West Side Story. The first half of the concert had at least been relatively dry – there were lightning flashes and thunderclaps (including ones at the ends of the Bach and Karg-Elert pieces that made it sound like the Man Upstairs was joining in the applause!), but by the time Han played the second set it was raining torrentially, and so she left off one of the two pieces she’d programmed by Louis Vierne (“Naiades,” Op. 55, no. 4 – she joked about not wanting to play a piece about water nymphs in such wet weather) and went straight ahead to a far more familiar Vierne piece, “Carillons de Westminster,” written when the French organist heard the bells of Westminster Cathedral while on tour in London and decided to write a series of variations on them. Han didn’t play an encore and got off the stage as soon as possible – for which I didn’t blame her – but what she did play was stunning. Physically, she reminded me a bit of the Korean actress Awkwafina – a bit stockier but with a similar moon face – and she was dressed in a normal black top and a fascinating white dress emblazoned with gold-colored patterns that at various times looked like jewelry, exercise equipment or antique vehicles. I’m not sure how Han’s playing would have come across on a normal night with the audience a substantial distance from the organ – I’m sure I would have been impressed with her musicianship, but I'm not sure I would have felt it so, uh, viscerally – but sitting up close the sheer power of her playing came through literally loud and clear, and it was definitely an Organ Pavilion night to remember for both musical and extra-musical reasons.