Martn Green at the Organ Pavilion: A Lovely Summer Afternoon of Music

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 wrote this and the Water Music – so called because it was written by musicians on barges following King George I as he took a sail down the Thames – to make up with King George, with whom he had feuded before in Hanover, Germany. This was when the British government had decided that in order to avoid any unpleasant attempts by the surviving Stuarts to restore Catholicism as the state religion, they would import their next monarchs from a safely Protestsnt part of Germany. Only Handel had feuded with King George back home in Germany, and when he found out the king he had feuded with was going to be his new boss, he realized he nad to make a huge conciliatory gesture to protect his commercial position he’d built up in Britain. (It worked.)

Then Martin played the alleged Adagio in G minor, purportedly by Tomaso Albinoni (1671-1751) but actually a 1958 composition by conductor and Albinoni scholar Remo Giazotto (1910-1998). (The Wikipedia page on the “Albinoni” Adagio is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adagio_in_G_minor.) Martin gave an introduction to the piece which was mostly a print-the-legend account, though he at least acknowledged some doubt about its attribution. In fact Giazotto first released the piece in 1958 and claimed he had worked it up from a surviving piece of manuscript by Albinoni from a Baroque music library that had otherwise been destroyed by an air raid during World War II. The irony is it’s become considerably more popular than any surviving works by the real Albinoni! Martin played up the aspects of the work that especially suit the Balboa Park organ, notably the string section (Giazotto marked the piece as for strings with organ). Then followed Martin’s one concession to popular music: an adaptation of the Harold Arlen-Yip Harburg “Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz, played in a transcription based on a jazz piano version by George Shearing. Martin announced it as a tribute to Pride – San Diego’s Pride events were occurring last weekend and he had to deal with the competition from the usual disco-dance crap that gets played at Queer events – mainly because, though “Over the Rainbow” has nothing ostensibly to do with Queer people (I used the term inclusively because I can’t stand those preposterous initials that have become the standard designation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and other sexual and gender minorities), it’s come to be associated with Pride and with the struggles of Queer folk in general.

Then Martin went back to his core repertory with a “Pièce d’Orgue,” BWV 572. by the greatest of all organ composers, Johann Sebastian Bach. HJe gave it a spirited rendition that was a bit of a surprise from someone who gave the slowest version I’ve heard by far (over 13 minutes for a piece that’s usually dispatched in 10) of Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor. The next two pieces were both by composers a year or two older than me, who like me are still alive: “Outer Hebrides” by Paul Halley (b. 1952) and “Aria” by Charles Callahan (b. 1951). “Outer Hebrides” is a fantasia based on three Irish folk songs (and Martin said he knew only two of them in their original forms and asked if anyone in the audience could recognize the third) that is hardly a patch on Mendelssohn’s “Hebrides Overture” (Mendelssohn actually called it “Fingal’s Cave,” after an alleged Scottish epic poem attributed to “Ossian, the Son of Fingal” but actually written by James Macpherson in the 19th century) but has a certain lovely appeal, especially in the way Halley blended the folk themes. (Martin talked after the concert with a woman who asked where she could get the scores of “Outer Hebrides” and Callahan’s “Aria,” and he explained that the only source for “Outer Hebrides” was from Paul Halley himself, through a Web site called Pelagos Music run by him and his wife: https://www.pelagosmusic.com/Current/pages/Artists%20Pages/ArtistPH.html.) Martin closed his concert with a flashy piece from the French organ repertoire: the final “Allegro vivace” movement from the Organ Sonata No. 2 by Alexandre Guilmant (1817-1911), before he went into “The Star-Spangled Banner” – for which he did not invite audience members to sing along, though a few did anyway. Overall, it was a nice piece of music-making from a man my husband Charles and I used to hear a lot more from than we have lately, and he’s been very much missed. Martin has a pleasant on-stage personality that’s a far cry from the horrible antics of the Spanish clown that is San Diego’s current civic organist!