Music Magg

>b y Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Isabelle Demers is a French-Canadian ( Québecois ) organist who’s played at the Organ Pavilion at least once before her marvelous concert last night, July 25, as part of the Spreckels Organ Society’s annual Monday night summer international concert series. Last night she opened her performance with a piece by Johann Sebastian Bach – to whom she paid tribute as a pioneer of recycling, since this piece betan as a keyboard work for harpsichord, then became a movement of his cantata “Wir müssen durch viel Trübsal in das Reich Gottes eingehen” (“We must, through much tribulation, enter into the kingdom of God”), and was finally transcribed for organ by Marcel Dupré. It never ceases to amaze me that organists continually transcribe Bach’s music for other instruments when he left so much splendid music actually written for organ, but Bach himself moved his stuff around from one instrument or set of i...

>b y Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved My husband Martin warned Charles and I just got back from the Sunday afternoon concert at the Organ Pavilion with Martin Green of St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral as the organist as he was last week. He played a nice little program featuring a couple of pieces from movies, including “Gabriel’s Oboe” from Ennio Morricone’s score for the film The MIssion and the ubiquitous main theme from the original 1977 Star Wars – or, as it’s rather prissily called these days, Star Wars, Episode 4: A New Hope . Martin said he had programmed that in honor of this weekend’s Comic-Con, which wraps up today, much the way he programmed Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow” last weekend in honor of the Pride events. He also said there were people at the morning service at St. Paul’s today who were already “cosplaying” for Comic-Con, since they came dressed as Star Wars storm troopers and the like. (Would the Star War...

sShe's a Good Musician, But Mujch of Her Repertoire Didn't Show Her Off at Her Best. >by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night’s entry in the summer organ concert series at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park was the weakest of the season. The featured organist was Cherry Rhodes, who according to our friend Robert Sokolowski must have used a considerably older photo of herself than what she looks like now. (With my deteriorating eyesight she was nothing more than a blur to me, and the next time I go there with my husband Charles I’m going to insist that we sit closer.) Cherry Rhodes began her first set with a performance of a work by Johann Sebastian Bach: the Prelude and Fugue in E minor, BWV 548, and though she didn’t say a word about it during the concert she threw herself into the plece and gave a galvanic, emotional reading. I love hearing Bach played with real power instead of the superficial treatment...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday my husband Charles and I went to the Sunday afternoon organ concert in Balboa Park, mainly because Martin Green, music director at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral at Sixth and Laurel and a “regular” at the organ concerts they used to hold every Tuesday at 12:30 p.m. until COVID-19 hit. Though they did a partial reinstatement of the concerts on Thursday in the early evening – only to have to cancel them again, at least temporarily, while the church’s chancel is remodeled – I hadn’t heard him perform in over two years. Martin played a pretty meat-and-potatoes program consisting of a set of elaborate variations on “America, the Beautiful” to open the program and the inevitable “The Star-Spangled Banner,” t/n “To Anacreon in Heaven.” In between he opened with two movements from George Frederick Halden’s Music for the Royal Foreworis , the Overture and “Le Réjouissance” (“The Rejoicing”). Hnndel...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night at 7:30 p.m. I went to the third installment of the eleven-week Spreckels Summer Festival at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, featuring a quite remarkable performance by Nicole Keller. Nicole Keller is an African-American woman organist who accordingly picked a program that, after a brief genuflection to Bach (she performed the Toccata in F, BWV 540), focused mostly on composers who were Black, female or both. Keller played a lot of music by Florence Price, the fascinating Black woman who became the first African-American woman who had a symphony premiered by a major U.S. orchestra (the Chicago Symphony under Dr. Frederick Stock). Keller played groups by Price in both halves of her program: in the first set she performed Price’s Suite No. 1 for organ (a bit of a misnomer since, according to Keller, Price never wrote a Suite No. 2) in three movements, “Fanfare,” “Air,” and “Toccata.” Kel...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night’s concert at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park featured Jelani Eddington, star of the theatre organ world (and the only male soloist besides San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez, to be featured on this year’s Summer Organ Festival series; the others are all female to celebrate this year’s theme of “Women in Music”), playing one of those programs in which the printed listing included most of what he actually played, but not in the same order. His program also didn’t list the names of the composers (except for a medley he did of George Gershwin songs) or their birth and death dates. (Only one of his pieces – a symphonic suite from John Williams’ score for the movie once known merely as Star Wars but now rather ponderously called Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope – was from a still-living composer.) Eddington opened his concert with the “National Emblem March,” compose...