Organ Pavilion Concert for Ukraine Raises $8,400 for War Relief Despite Some Odd Creative Choices

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s event at the Balboa Park Organ Pavilion was billed as “A Musical Tribute to Peace, Dignity and Democracy,” but it was really a concert celebrating and commemorating the brave resistance of ordinary Ukrainians who are standing up to the Russian invaders that are shelling civilian targets throughout the country. I’m a bit suspicious about the way the American media have covered this war as a morality play with the Ukrainians as the good guys and the Russians as the bad guys, and I’ve been inclined to believe there may be justice on both sides. Certainly my long-time friend Cat said she thinks Ukraine at least partially provoked this by asking (and putting it into their constitution) to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which would put NATO right on Russia’s border. At the same time I find myself asking why the hell it’s Russia’s business that Ukraine joins NATO; I’m old enough to remember the American hissy-fits when Fidel Castro’s movement took over Cuba and all these people screamed, “The Russians are only 90 miles away from the Florida coast!” Well, it wasn’t any of our business who Cuba aligned with geopolitically and it’s not any of Russa’s business who Ukraine aligns with, either.

The concert began at 5:30 p.m. with the House of Scotland Pipe Band playing “Amazing Grace” in honor of the Ukrainian victims of Russia’s war, and then soprano Ana Delaya (I’m guessing at a lot of these names – there was no printed program and with Raúl’s thick Spanish accent it’s not all that easy to understand him) doing a Ukrainian song by a composer named Anapolsky called “Two Streams from the Black Mountain” about a woman simultaneously in love with two men. (My husband Charles is so determined a foe of multiple relationships that when he came home last night and I told him what the one Ukrainian song on the program had been about, he joked, “Go Putin!”) Then Raúl sent off Delaya and brought on two other female singers, soprano Lonnie Goodyear and mezzo-soprano Nicole Zdenka Carther (I’m even less sure of their names than I am of Delaya’s!). The soprano was wearing a yellow dress and the mezzo a blue dress – the colors of the Ukrainian flag – and the two of them sang the flower duet, “Sous le dôme epais,” from Leo Delibes’ opera Lakmé (which as I’ve joked before is actually Puccini’s Madama Butterfly – though Lakmé was premiered 20 years earlier – only instead of an American sailor it’s a British soldier, and instead of Japan it’s India), which was quite lovely even though I’m not sure why an excerpt from an opera about a Third World woman who’s seduced and abandoned by a First World warrior and is forced to commit suicide would be considered appropriate for a concert allegedly honoring peace, dignity and democracy.

Then the two singers did solo spots – the mezzo doing “Ombra mai fu” from Handel’s opera Serse and the soprano doing “O mio babbino caro” from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi. After that Raúl brought out baritone Michael Sokol for two songs that were played without pause: a song by Mahler at his sentimental worst called “O Careless World That You Have Lost Me” (I once called Mahler “the Barry Manilow of classical music” because he always feels so damned sorry for himself) and an excerpt from Leonard Bernstein’s deliberately irreverent Mass called “Oh Lord, I Will Go On.” After that I felt like digging out my CD set of Bernstein’s Mass (a Naxos record with JoAnn Falletta conducting) to hear how the piece works in context; without the original aspect challenging established belief systems (typical of the early 1970’s when Mass was written) it just sounded silly to hear the singer go from English to Latin to scat-sung gibberish. After that Sokol joined the two women for Mozart’s trio “Soave sia il vento” from Mozart’s Cosi fan Tutte – a truly weird opera in which Don Alfonso works out an elaborate scheme to challenge two young friends of his to test their girlfriends’ fidelity by wooing them in disguise and each attempting to seduce the other’s partner. Mozart wrote a beautiful trio of farewell as the young men are supposedly going off to war – only they’re not really going off to war: they’re preparing to disguise themselves as Albanians to see if each can break the resistance of the other’s partner.

Then Raúl played two pieces (three, really, though the last two are just the final two movements of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition), including the famous “Adagio” supposedly composed over 300 years ago by the Italian Baroque composer Tommaso Albinoni but really a forgery by a 1950’s Italian musicologist named Remo Grazotto. Grazotto not only composed the “Adagio” in imitation of Albinoni’s style (the formulae of Baroque music were so strict it’s relatively easy to compose presentable “Baroque” music – great Baroque music like that of Johann Sebastian Bach takes genius, but mediocre Baroque music takes only technical skill since the formulae have already done so much of the work for you), he came up with a haunting backstory; He said he’d found the “Adagio” manuscript in the 1950’s as part of a larger wreckage of a monastery that had been bombed during World War II; alas, the rest of the manuscript had been destroyed and only the “Adagio” remained – with the ironic result that it’s more played, recorded and famous than anything survives by the actual Albinoni. Having got to the concert about an hour early, I got to hear the sound checks and a bit of the rehearsals, including a version of the Mussorgsky Pictures excerpts with rock drummer Richard “T-Bone” Larsen improvising behind Raúl and adding to the excitement level of the music (especially the “Baba Yaga” movement, which in that context certainly started sounding like a musical depiction of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of an air raid), but when Raúl played the piece in the actual concert he did it alone and it was probably just as well. The classical portion of the concert ended with “The Great Gate at Kiev” – written as a depiction of a memorial exhibit of paintings and drawings by Mussorgsky’s friend, artist Victor Hartmann, who entered a contest to design a triumphal arch for Kiev (or “Kyiv,” as we are supposed to call it now), Hartmann’s design actually lost the contest and then no great gate was built after all because the money to fund it could not be raised (and if the great gate had actually existed it would almost certainly have been bombed out by the Russians now!).

Then it was time to bring out the rock band for the second half of the show, which featured potted songs by a set of artists that seem to be the only performers Raúl likes to play – Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, The Beatles (jointly and severally), Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd. I remember writing in these pages after Raúl’s previous versions during which he’s played a quite remarkable transcription of Freddie Mercury’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” that his next tribute concert to a rock band should be Queen, but no such luck. The rock portion opened with “Stairway to Heaven,” which I’ve heard Raúl perform with women singers three times now – after the first one I joked, “I’d never really wondered what Led Zeppelin would have sounded like with Stevie Nicks as their lead singer, but now I know”) – and then a song by Deep Purple called “Burn” credited to all five band members at the time: David Coverdale, Glenn Hughes, Jon Lord, Ritchie Blackmore and Ian Paice. Then the band did the three Beatles covers and one post-Beatles John Lennon cover, “Come Together,” “All You Need Is Love,” “Helter Skelter” (a piece of Paul McCartney’s – the other songs were Lennon’s either jointly or severally, and given that “Helter Skelter” was central to Charles Manson’s mythology that held, among other things, that the Beatles have written it to tell him to start a race war in the U.S. and murdering Sharon Tate and her friends was supposed to accomplish that, it seemed – like quite a lot of the material on last night’s program – an odd choice indeed for a concert promoting peace, dignity and democracy) and “Imagine.”

I've argued in these pages before that “Imagine” was the song that literally got John Lennon killed: he was murdered not by a “deranged fan” or someone who was convinced he was the real Lennon and the real Lennon was an imposter, but by a Fundamentalist Christian who had been a member of a prayer group that prayed, “Imagine, imagine John Lennon dead.” He had never forgiven Lennon for saying the Beatles were more popular than Jesus or for writing a song with the words, “Imagine no religion.” All that was reported in Newsweek magazine shortly after Lennon’s murder, but it’s been pretty much swept down the memory hole since. I’d recently read an online post slamming “Imagine” and arguing that Steely Dan’s song “Only a Fool Would Say That”, written by Donalt Fagen (from their first album, Can’t Buy a Thrill, back when Steely Dan was an actual six-piece band instead of just Donald Fagen, Walter Becker and studio musicians) was a deliberate ridicule of Lennon’s song (https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/song-steely-dan-wrote-mock-john-lennon/): “Our world become one / Of salads and sun / Only a fool would say that / A boy with a plan / A natural man / Wearing a white stetson hat.”

The author, Sam Kemp, makes clear he agrees with Steely Dan’s criticism of Lennon as an out-of-touch elitist and twists the knife in by writing this anecdote: “When Gal Gadot organized a Hollywood singalong of Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ in the first month of the COVID-19 pandemic, she was immediately criticized for misreading the room. Far from sparking a surge in benevolent acts of kindness, listeners found a disconnect between Gadot and the gang’s call for the jobless to ‘imagine no possessions’ and the fact that the various stars who contributed to the rendition were singing from multi-million dollar mansions.” I still like “Imagine” and in particular its plea for a better, more peaceful and loving world even though Lennon was in a way making himself a sitting duck for writing the song at a white piano in a lavishly furnished living room. In any case, it fit the stated purpose of last night’s concert a lot better than some of the other material, including the last four songs on the rock portion of the program: Black Sabbath’s “Children of the Grave,” Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” (which Raúl credited to Black Sabbath even though it was written by Ozzy for his first solo album, Blizzard of Ozz, after he was fired from the band) and Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them” and “Comfortably Numb.” It was odd, to say the least, that a concert billed as “a musical tribute to peace, dignity and democracy” ended with a hymn to drug-induced detachment, but there you had it. At least the concert raised $8,400 for Ukrainian war relief, so despite my kvetching it actually accomplished something positive.