Yet Another Lovely Musical Afternoon from Martin Green at the Organ Pavilion

>by 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 Wars storm troopers actually be Christians? Probably not, since Jesus hadn’t existed “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” and even if He had it’s hard to believe they’d worship anything other than the Dark Side of the Force.) Martin actually began and ended with the short set of variations on “America the Beautiful” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” respectively (and Charles, being Charles, sang along with the latter – not “The Star-Spangled Banner” but the original words, “To Anacreon in Heaven,” with a voice that suggested he’d been overdoing it on Bacchus’s vines), bnt after “America, the Beautiful” he played a “Marche Triomphale” by the early 20th-century German composer Sigfried Karg-Elert (1877-1933, so he died just as Hitler came to power and therefore didn’t have to deal with the bombast the Third Reich expected from its favored composers). Martin said that Karg-Elert wrote about 700 scores for organ alone but only about six of them have actually survived in the standard repertoire (and unless you’re an organ buff Karg-Elert is one of those names you’re unlikely to have heard of at all).

Then Martin played the Morricone piece – ironically, he paid a long tribute to Morricone’s work and its sheer quantity, but he forgot to mention his name – and after that he played the second in a set of five chorale-preludes for organ by modern Dutch composer Margreeth Christina de Jong (b. 1961, which makes her a year older than Charles). Martin warned us that the piece was in 8/8 time and, though it was based on an old Gregorian chant melody, it was also heavily influenced by jazz. Since 8/8 is also the time signature for boogie-woogie, I was expecting some boogie rhythms in the bass line – and they duly emerged. Then Martin played a piece by a composer with an even more direct connection to the world of jazz: the “Pastorale” by French composer Darius Milhaud (1892-1974), who came to the U.S. during the Nazi occupation of France and settled in at Mills College in the East Bay Area of northern California. Martin mentioned that he taught piano at Mills College but not that Dave Brubeck was one of his students! Martin’s next piece was a spectacular Toccata in B minor by another French composer, Eugène Gigout (1844-1925), and then he repeated a work from the previous week’s program” the famous Adagio in G minor, ordinarily misattributed to the Italian Baroque composer Tomaso Albinoni (1671-1751) but actually composed in 1958 by Italian musicologist and Albinoni scholar and biographer Remo Giazotto (1910-1998). He claimed it was based on the fragment of a manuscript by Albinoni in or around 1702 which was otherwise destroyed when Allied bombers blew up the Saxon State Music Library as part of an air raid in 1945. As with the story William Barrington-Coupe concocted about the alleged recordings of his wife, Joyce Hatto, which he said she had made in a dramatic race against time before Hatto’s death from cancer, but were revealed to be clever fakes from other pianists’ recordings, the moving story Giazotto concocted to bolster up his fake “Albinoni” adagio undoubtedly contributed to the work’s popularity. In fact, it’s far more popular in terms of recordings, performances and uses in film scores than anything that survives of Albinoni’s own work! Martin was a little more honest about the piece’s dubious origins this week than he’d been the week before, and he’s right about one thing: it is a quite clever and beautiful piece despite its status as a fake.

Then Martin ripped through the Star Wars theme, and afterwards he played a piece by Felix Mendelssohn called “War March of the Priests” from the so-called “incidental music” (i.e., a film score before there were films; the only difference between “incidental music” and film music was that “incidental music” was intended to accompany a performance of a live play) to Jean Racine’s Athalie. The story of a Biblical queen who ruled for seven years and,like Herod later, tried to exterminate anyone who might challenge her authority, Athalie was one of two assignments from the Prussian king Mendelssohn actually completed, along with his beloved score for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The music for Athalie wasn’t actually published until two years after Mendelssohn’s tragically early death, and the list of unrealized projects the king of Prussia wanted Mendelssohn to work on includes Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and the complete Oresteia of Aeschylus. According to a note from Bradford Robinson on the Breitkopf and Härtel Web site (https://repertoire-explorer.musikmph.de/wp-content/uploads/vorworte_prefaces/372.html), “Mendelssohn balked at the king's proposal that he write music for the whole of Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy, arguing that no living composer was capable of handling such a task.” (The moment I read that, I instantly thought, “Wagner could have.”) Predictably, Charles loved the irony of the title “War March of the Priests,” especially since the music is far more martial than priestly. Martin’s program was surprisingly short – he ended at 2:52 p.m., with eight minutes left on his allotted hour, and I was a bit surprised and disappointed he didn’t reach into his repertoire for an encore, but it was still another lovely Sunday afternoon of music for Charles and I to enjoy.