Nicole Keller at the Organ Pavilion July 11: Quiet, Businesslike Performances of Mostly Unfamiliar Music

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.” Keller told us to listen for elements of Black music in this work, particularly gospel and jazz, but I heard very little of that. Instead I heard a quite Lisztian opening and a piece that didn’t touch on gospel or jazz until the lightly syncopated third movement – which is not to say this is bad music, merely that it’s little in it that gives away that the composer is Black. I’ve heard three of Florence Price’s symphonies – the First and Fourth on a Naxos CD and the Third on a BBC Music Magazine bonus disc – and she’s at least a bit more up-front about her Black origins in the symphonies than in the organ music: the scherzi of all her symphonies (at least the three I’ve heard, out of her four) are marked “Juba,” after the traditional African tribal dance.

On the basis of them I would rate Price at the level of Mendelssohn. Like Mendelssohn, she clearly knows the basic rules of how to write a symphony, how to introduce various themes and put them through their paces of development, and her music is pleasant overall but without the spark of genius I hear in Bach, Mozart, Beethoven or Wagner. To my mind, the greatest symphony ever composed by an African-American is Duke Ellington’s masterwork Black, Brown and Beige, a thoroughly misunderstood piece, partly because Ellington composed it for his ordinary band instead of a symphony orchestra and partly because he introduced it at a January 23, 1943 concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall otherwise mostly devoted to his usual repertoire. But it is a work of striking musical genius and blows every other attempt at a symphony by a Black composer off the stage. What’s also curious about Price is that though her dates, 1887-1953, mark her as a 20th century composer, there’s little about her music that couldn’t have been written in the 19th century; she seems to have been oblivious to the whole modern movement. Keller returned to Price’s music in the second part of her concert, where she played a set of four miniatures which she said represented Price’s work as a composer of jingles for radio stations, one of the many odd jobs she had to take to support herself and her two daughters after divorcing her abusive husband. The pieces were “Pleasant Thought,” “Hour of Peace,” “Cantilena” and “Festal March” – of which all but the last were quiet, gentle and soft. (They were really too soft for the Organ Pavilion, with the usual vicissitudes of aircraft flying overhead – Keller had the indignity of being buzzed by a helicopter during one of the soft pieces – as well as audience members blowing their noses and crinkling cellophane.)

Keller’s first set, after the Bach and Price works, included three short pieces by British-born jazz pianist George Shearing, which she introduced as based on hymn tunes and said they were iconically American (an odd thing to say about the first non-American jazz musician to become a major U.S. star; Django Reinhardt became a huge name in France but on his one American tour, with Duke Ellington in 1946, he bombed). The Shearing pieces were “I Love Thee, O Lord,” “So Fades the Lovely Blooming Flower,” and “There Is a Happy Land,” For her closer she joked that having played music for the Lord, she would now play something fir the Devil: William Albright’s “Totentanz” (literally “Dance of the Dead”), also known as “Jig for the Feet” since it is played mostly with the organ’s foot pedals. (The pedals on a piano merely change the colors of the notes; an organ comes equipped with a separate keyboard for the feet that plays actual notes, as well as the two, three or four keyboards, called “manuals,” for the hands.) After the intermission she opened the second set with a wild piece called “Fantasy Torah Song” by Craig Phillips (born 1961 and one of the two composers Keller performed who are still alive) based on an old Jewish song called Yisrael V’oralta.” Then she played the Price miniatures, and afterwards closed her program with two pieces from the late Calvin Hampton’s “Five Dances for Organ,” “The Primitives” and “At the Ballet” (which she explained represented the music of the ballet with the foot pedals while the hands reproduced the sounds of people actually dancing) and the still-living Anne Wilson’s (b. 1954) “Toccata.”

In his introduction the announcer quoted a review of Nicole Keller that called her “aggressive,” which quite frankly was not a title I would ascribe to her. If I had to come up with a single word to describe her playing, it would be “businesslike”; she dispatched her program with a quiet, methodical efficiency that, like Florence Price’s music, was quite good enough to make a desired effect but lacked the final spark of genius. Still, it was an excellent concert and I enjoyed it – I overheard a person at the concert complain that George Shearing was the only person on her program she’d actually heard of before (I presume she was leaving out Bach!), though I’d heard of Florence Price, William Albright and Calvin Hampton before (and Hampton, a hugely talented organist and composer, was one of the first major artists we lost to complications from AIDS in 1984). I wonder if I’d have responded differently to her program if she’d played more familiar music – though her Bach toccata rendition certainly proved she knows her way around the classics!