Cherry Rhodes Gives Uneven Concert at Organ Pavilion July 18

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 he usually gets from the “Historically Informed Performance” crowd, who seem to be bound and determined to draini Bach and other Baroque composers’ music of anything with true weight and drive so they can work hard to perform it as badly as it was in Bach’s time. The second piece on her program was a lovely “Reverie” by African-American male composer William Grant Still (1895-1978), and though it wasn’t a great piece of music it was quiet, graceful and a suitable palate cleanser after the Sturm und Drang of Rhodes’ performance of Bach.

Unfortunately,the third piece was a “Ballade Chromatique,” Op. 23, no. 2 by French organist and composer Jean Guillou (1930-2019), supposedly the West Coast premiere of a work Guillou wrote especially for Rhodes. When it started, it sounded to me like what a piece by avant-garde jazz piano player Cecil Taylor would have sounded like if he’d written for organ, and as it progressed (like a disease) it resolved itself into a bunch of blips, bleeps and burbies that made the poor Spreckels Organ sound like an electronic instrument even though it isn’t. It reminded me of the joke our old friend Ken Herman used to tell about modern music, especially modern music he didn’t like: that the composers would tell their friends, “Stop me before I write anything that sounds like a melody.” One of our old friends was so appalled by the Guillou he left during the intermission and so he missed the second half, which had some nicely appealing moments but wasn’t that much better. It began with a piece by Clarence Moder (1904-1971) called “Afternoon of a Toad,” and while the title might lead you to expect either a paraphrase or a comic turn on Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” (parodied by Frank Zappa as “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Sexually Aroused Gas Mask”), it was in fact more blips and burbles. At least it wasn’t as relentlessly ugly as the Guillou, and it had some nice witty bits which reminded me of John Alden Carpenter’s 1914 orchestral suite “Adventures in a Perambulator.” (In case you were wondering, a ”perambulator” is a baby carriage, and Carpenter’s work is a series of charming little sketches depicting the mind of a baby as they get pushed aroond all day in the titular vehicle.)

Then Rhodes played something relatively normal: Louis Vierne’s “Clair de Lune,” which we’ve heard before at the Organ Pavilion and, though it’s hardy a match for Debussy’s famous piano piece of the sane name, Vierne’s is lovely and worked weill in the context. Then she played her final piece of the concert, the Fantasy and Fugue in D by Max Reger (1873-1916), about whom there are a lot of bizarre stories. Former San Diego civic organist Robert Plimpton used to joke before he played anything by Reger that his scores were so dense that with other people’s music you looked at the black spots on the page to see which notes you were supposed to play; with Reger you looked at the white spots o Reger’s n the page to see which notes you weren’t supposed to play. My own joke about Reger was, “If there were such a thing as ‘heavy-metal classical,’ Reger would be it.” And my favorite anecdote from Reger himself was when he responded to a particularly negative review of one of his concerts by writing a letter to the editor saying, “I am sitting in the smallest room in my house, with your review in front of me. Soon it will be behind me.” If you’re getting the impression from these anecdotes that Reger wasn’t exactly a warm and fuzzy kind of guy, you’re right. Like Mendelssohn and Brahms, when Reger sat down to write music for organ he seemed to be trying to answer the question, ”What would Bach be writing if he were alive today?” And his answer seemed to be, “A lot of dissonant tone clusters with some brief moments of repose in between them.” Reger’s piece was a bit closer to normal music than Guillou’s – almost anything short of John Cage would have been – but it’s still a formidable piece of music and hardly entertaining; I like Reger, biut a little of him definitely goes a long way..

Cherry Rhodes didn’t help her cause much by maintaining a total silence between herself and her audience; she’s one of those performers whose attitude towards the audience is, “You want to know what I’m playing? Read the freaking program.” Charles couldn’t get over how much Rhodes’ silence contrasts with San Diego’s current civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, who goes on and on and on and on, chattering away between numbers in a vein he obviously thinks is witty and charming, which it isn’t. When he played a public audition for the gig I was so badly put off by the chattering, spoken in a broken English that just makes it all the more exasperating, I dubbed him “the Spanish clown” ahd I was absolutely shocked that he got the gig ahead of three other contenders, at least one of whom I thought was quite sup-erior both as a musician and as a personality. When the park was closed at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Raúl continued to give concerts virtually, recording the actual organ performance at the Pavilion but doing his interminable lectures from his home. I admire Rhodes’ taciturnity but think she carried it way too far – and, like so much else about her performance, I both loved and hated the little game she played on the audience at the end, which was to come out as if she were going to play an encore but only hit a few of the sound-effects keys on what organists call “the toybox”: a fire-engine siren, a ratchet, a few bells. The fact that Cherry Rhodes is so good a musician when playing traditional organ repertoire only made this concert that much more frustrating!