Spreckels Organ Society Monday Night Opening Concert, June 27, 2022

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

Last night my husband Charles and I met at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for the opening concert in the 34th annual (not counting 2020, where because of the COVID-19 pandemic there was no such series – indeed, I vividly remember riding on a bus past Balboa Park in the early days of the lockdown and everything was sealed off with crime-scene tape) Summer Organ Festival every Monday night at 7:30 p.m. through September 5. The theme of this year’s series is “Women in Music,” apparently a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment two years late. All the organists featured in the series are women except for San Diego’s resident civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, and Jelani Eddington, who’s doing next week’s concert right on the Fourth of July. What’s more, at least last night’s opening concert featured two women performers, violinist Hanah Stuart and cellist Jian Wang, who joined Raúl for the second half of the concert and played two works by female composers: a piano nocturne in G minor and the opening movement of a string trio, Op. 11, by Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, Felix Mendelssohn’s just-as-talented sister (the two were quite close and he was devastated by her early death, just six months before his); and a complete piano trio, Op. 150, by the American composer Amy Beach (1867-1944).

It’s indicative of the sexism of the times that many of Fanny’s works were published under Felix’s name – musicologists are still trying to sort out what works attributed to Felix were actually by Fanny, or by both of them in collaboration – and some of Amy Beach’s music was published in her lifetime but only credited to “Mrs. H. H. A. Beach.” It wasn’t until decades after her death that musical historians were able to go through her papers and learn her first name. Raúl opened the concert with a solo set devoted exclusively to male composers – the usual suspects: Johann Sebastian Bach, Johann Strauss, Jr., Franz Liszt and Modest Mussorgsky. Raúl also had scheduled a piece by Frederic Chopin, the Nocturne in E-flat, Op. 9,m no. 2 (one of my favorite Chopin pieces), but because one of the later organists in the series had wanted to play Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz – one of Raúl’s specialties – he decided to delete it from his programand substitute another Liszt work, his tone poem Prometheus, instead. And because Prometheus is much longer than the Mephisto Waltz (about 17 minutes), the Chopin had to go.

What remained is some of the best playing I’ve ever heard Raúl do: the Bach – actually Marcel Dupré’s transcription of the opening Sinfonia from the cantata “Wir danken dir, Gott, wir danken dir” (“We thank you,God, we thank you”) – was performed with real power and fervor. While one might question why organists feel they have to play Bach transcriptions when Bach left so much incredible music for organ, Raúl threw himself into the piece with imagination and emotional commitment, a far cry from the horrible “historically informed performance” fascism that has taken over Bach playing in recent years. Of the two pieces by Johann Strauss II (the famous one, the guy who wrote “Blue Danube”) Raúl played next, the first one, the relatively familiar “Pizzicato Polka,” was Raúl’s one misfire of the evening – it was way too slow – but he made up for it with the furious energy with which he attacked the “Furioso Polka” he played next. (Both pieces were transcribed for organ by Raúl himself, as were all the other pieces, originally for piano or orchestra, he played later.) Next up was Liszt’s tone poem Prometheus, and Raúl delighted in telling the legend of Prometheus in all its gory detail before he played the piece. Raúl has a real affinity for Liszt – he savors the surface bombast but also digs into the rean substance behind it – and I’m not at all surprised that his rendition of the Fantasy and Fugue on the chorale “Ad nos, ad salutarem undam” from Meyerbeer’s opera Le Prophète was one of the pieces he chose to record on one of his two commercial CD’s. Between that, the Mephisto Waltz and Prometheus, Raúl has a real spiritual bond with Liszt and it comes through whenever he plays him.

Raúl’s last piece in the first set was the final two movements – “The Hut of Baba Yaga” and “The Great Gate at Kiev” – from Mussorgsky’s suite Pictures at an Exhibition (composed as a tribute to Mussorgsky’s friend, painter, designer and architect Victor Hartmann – though Raúl got the details wrong: the exhibition of Hartmann’s work wasn’t held during his lifetime, but was a memorial show and Mussorgsky lent the exhibition some of his own copies of Hartmann’s works). Of course Raúl mentioned Russia’s ongoing attack on Ukraine – he has apparently featured the Ukrainian national anthem in all his Sunday concerts and he was wearing a blue jacket over a yellow shirt, the Ukrainian flag’s colors – and the performance brought back memories of my first encounter with this music. It was a 78 RPM set of Vladimir Horowitz’s 1949 recording, and it contained reproductions of at least some of Hartmann’s drawings that had inspired the piece. (Hartmann entered a design contest for a great gate to be built in Kiev – or, as we now call it, “Kyiv” – but he lost the contest and the winning design was never built because the financing fell through. Just as well, probably, since if the Great Gate had existed Russian bombing raids would probably have destroyed it by now!) I remember playing the “Baba Yaga” side of this set over and over again, and Raúl’s performance brought back memories of the Horowitz record I learned this music from and was exciting and energetic – and a tribute to Mussorgsky’s genius that he was able to build the opening “Promenade” theme, heard several times during the piece to indicate the museum-goer walking from one work to another, into a great final climax to represent the grandeur of the never-built Great Gate.

The second half of the concert took a while to get started – the announcement on stage was there would be a 15-minute intermission but it turned out to be considerably longer than that, more like half an hour – but once it began it proved well worth the wait. Raúl opened with his own transcription of Fanny Mendelssohn’s Nocturne in G minor, originally for piano, and then brought on Stuart and Wang for the trio selections. The Fanny Mendelssohn nocturne had, I thought, an oddly Wagnerian quality – the way the notes and motifs were stacked on each other seemed to evoke the Wagner style even though Wagner came considerably later (and Felix Mendelssohn was one of the two composers, along with Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wagner singled out for abuse in his infamous essay “Judaism in Music”), and the first movement of Fanny’s piano trio (for some reason a “piano trio” in classical music means a work for piano, violin and cello, not one for three pianos) was almost Brahmsian in its quiet dignity and scope. Of course I went looking for a YouTube post of the complete work, in its original form with piano instead of organ, and found it on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGrYdsDD0UQ; it’s a great and woefully underrated work, and I give Raúl a lot of credit for reproducing its piano tremolos and trills expertly on the organ.

The full-length trio by Amy Beach that closed the program (there was no encore, which was a bit disappointing) was one of her last works, composed in 1938 and published in 1939. What’s fascinating about it is it totally ignores the music of the previous half-century. Beach was one of the first composers who was trained in the United States instead of going to Europe, and there’s a somber cast to this music which usually means something autumnal. Especially in a late work like this (even though Beach had six more years to live when she wrote it), one gets the sense that the composer knew she was about to die and was writing, as Walter Legge put it, with “a strangely luminous quality, as if the creative mind had already seen the world beyond death and were conscious of things infinitely greater than the emotional experiences of this world.” Though it sounds much more like a work from the 1890’s than the late 1930’s, it has a beautiful, haunting quality to which the musicians last night did full justice. It’s not the sort of flashy work that shows Raúl off at his best, but he played beautifully and so did the two string players. In order to diffuse the sound of the organ so the strings would have a fighting chance (even though they were both amplified), the Spreckels technicians had built a baffle screen in front of them, and Raúl said that if you wanted to see the players, you should move to the center or the left of the Organ Pavilion. (Almost no one did.) The result was a lovely musical evening, and if the point was that there’s a lot of great music out there that’s been unjustly ignored simply because it was written by people without penises, it was made beautifully and eloquently.