Alison Luedecke and Amy Mein at the Balboa Park Organ Pavilion, May 29, 2022

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

Yesterday afternoon I raced out of home to attend the Balboa Park organ concert which was, as usual, taking place on Sunday at 2 p.m. Fortunately San Diego’s current civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, was not there – he’s a competent musician and sometimes a great one (like when he plays the wirks of Franz Liszt, which offer him enough bombast to suit h is personality but also enough substance to make the listening experience appealing; or his quite remarkable version of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”), but I just can’t stand his personality. Instead the organist was Alikson Luedecke, a local player who tends to get a bit pedantic on stage – in addition to playing at a Roman Catholic church she also had a gig as a music teacher, and it sometimes shows – but fortunately she avoided that trapo yesterday. Instead she played a straightforward Memorial Day program that featured the inevitable patriotic songs along with some quite inventive fantasies on them, including two versions of “America, the Beautiful” (a loud and aggressively virtuosic one by Ron Koury early on in the pgoram and a quiet, reflective setting by the late Calvin Hampton to close).

The Koury ended surprisingly abruptly because Luedecke had forgot to bring out the last two pages of the score, so she interrupted the concert to go backstage,retrieve them and finish the piece Luedecke brought along a goest artist, soprano Amy Mein, to sing the patriotic songs including a performance of the national anthem of Ukraine “in memory of an ongoing injustice,” as Luedecke put it in her program, along with “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” as arranged by Christopher Partini. Luedecke invited the audience to sing along, and announced she would play the first two verses – but almost on one knew the second verse. She hen performed a double fugue on the same melody by American composer John Knowles Paine (January 9, 1839 – April 25, 1906), who recycled the familiar tune (which in Britain is their national anthem, “God Save the Queen,” and it was reappropriated in a bit of pretty cheesy musical theft by the Colonists who were fighting the War of Independence against Britain – though my husband Charles pointed out that the melody was originally composed by followers of Bonny Prince Charlie and the Stuart restoration, and that not only has the melody been featured in a lot of countries’ patriotic songs, but at least one nation besides the United Kingdom – Luxembourg – uses it as their national anthem) in the manner of Johann Sebastian Bach. (Quite a number of later composers, including Mendelssohn, Brahms and Reger, seemed in their organ works to be asking themselves the question, “What would Bach be writing if he were alive today?”)

After another straightforward vocal arrangement of a patriotic song – in this case Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” by Stefan Olesten – Luedecke played a fantasia on the 1865 anthem of liberation from slavery, “Oh, Freedom,” by African-American composer Adolphus Hailstork (with such a mouthful of a name I correctly guessed he was Black, though I didn’t realize he’s still alive; he was born April 17, 1941 so he’s just turned 81) that was the most haunting and lovely piece on the program. Luedecke then played Sir Edward Elgar’s “Solemn Prelude for the Fallen,” his memorial piece for all the soldiers killed in World War I. Luedecke then led off the inevitable medley of military service anthems, which she began with a vocal arrangement of “America, the Beautiful”: by Janet Linker and then threw us a curveball: instead oif playing the official Navy song, “Anchors Aweigh,” which everybody knows, she played the official Navy hymn, “Eternal Father,” which almost no one knows. (You didn’t know the U.S. Navy has both an official song and an official hymn? Neither did I.) I liked the fact that when they got to the Army song, Amy Mein sang the original words, “The caissons go rolling along,” instead of the current official rewrite, “The Army goes rolling along.” A caisson was a sort of miniature wagon used to carry cannonballs to the artillery in the front line; the U.S. Army hasn’t used them in decades but I still like the fact that, at least in its original version, the Army’s song mentions them.

Then she played an arrangement by Noel Goermanne of “God of Our Fathers” and the lovely, lyrical Calvin Hampton setting of “America, the Beautiful” before ending the concert with the traditional closer, “The Star-Spangled Banner” (first called “To Anacreon in Heaven,” and if my husband Charles had been there he would no doubt have sung the original words), which Luedecke opened with a flowery introduction by Mary Beth Bennett. All in all, the concert was beautiful and effective, though stronger in the purely instrumental works than in the vocals; there was nothing wrong with Amy Mein’s voice per se, but her P.A. was underpowered and Luedecke kept drowning her out.