Hometown Woman Chelsea Chen Returns Triumphantly to San Diego Organ Pavilion August 1

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I went to the Monday night concert at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion featurng Chelsea Chen, a young Asian-American woman who grew up ini La Jolla and made her first name for herself in San Diego County – though she currently lives with her husband in Zürich, Switzerland, and how she ended up there remains an intriguing mystery. As a local girl who made good Chen attracted a larger than usual audience, including a quite attractive tall, dark-haired man who recalled going to high school with her and is now old enough to be having two kids of his own, whose ages looked to be in the early double digits. (He’s also a candidate for one of the local school boards and said he recognized me from Democratic Party politics in San Diego.) Chelsea began the concert with Edwin H. Lemare’s transcription of the Grand March from Verdi’s opera Aïda, which is forever associated in my mind with a radio commercial for Golden Grain pasta ( heard as a child in which the conquering hero presents his girlfriend with a wagon-load full of Golden Grain pasta. She’s unhappy with this and sings,”Is this all you brought for me? Spaghetti from Italy? Anotner man’s chickadee I’ll be, you’ll see,” and he replies, “Then leave! I’ll simply live happily eating my Golden Grain. Simply boil and strain. Who can abstain? Golden Grain!” (I also can’t listen to the Waltz of the Flowers from Tchaikovssky’s The Nutcracker without thinking of a similarly silly parody record of it I heard as a child, which featured the deafness lines, “Dance, flowers, dance, dance while the music sings romance.”)

Chen’s performance seemed a bit slow and draggy, but as I later realized that’s probably due to the many notes she had to play to get all the orchestra lines in. Then Chelsea played the obligatory piece by Johann Sebastian Bach, the Prelude and Fugue in A minor, BWV 543,and like most of the people who play Bach at the Organ Pavilion she tore into the piece with a full level of emotion and power instead of just dutifully turning in the notes the way the “Historically Informed Performance” fascists have told modern musicians is the way Bach has to be played. Afterwards Chelsea played a piece of her own, a three-movement “Taiwanese Suite” (unwittingly appropriate on the eve of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s state visit to Taiwan, which had a lot of people in the Biden administration upset because the Chinese have made it clear they don’t approve of any gesture from the U.S. that Taiwan functions as an independent country). She wrote it for her very first concert at the Organ Pavilion and based it on three traditional Taiwanese melodies, “”Hills in the Springtime,” “Moonlight Blue” and “Mountain of Youth.” Chen’s suite was lovely, even though the whole-tone melodies are the sort of things film-score composers would use to indicate “China,” and it opened up the lighter half of her program.

Next Chen played a quick arrangement of themes from Andrew Lloyd Webber;s musical The Phantom of the Opera, beginning with the thundering main theme but soon going into more lyrical parts of the score like the duet “Think of Me” and the haunting solo for the Phantom, “Music of the Night.” She recalled that when she was nine her parents took her to see Phantom in Los Angeles and that briefly hed her to consider musical theatre as a career – only she couldn’t get cast in the school productions because she was too tall. (The common stereotype for female Asian musicians is the really short, sylph-like Chinese-doll princess; Chen is tall and a bit on the gawky side, but her musicianship is excellent.) Chen noted the irony of her playing on a pipe organ music that was originally written for synthesizer, though I’ve long argued that the pipe organ was essentially the synthesizer of its day: the giveaway is the number of organ stops that have the names of other instruments, like “trumpet” and “flute” as well as “strings.” She also said that, despite the importance of Phantom in her childhood, she never played any of it on organ until she was hired for a Hallowe’en concert and asked her good friend, Japanese-American composer Yui Kilamura, to come up with an arrangement for her use.

The finale of her first set was the theme music from the 1960’s animated TV series The Flintstones, in a set of variations composed and arranged by her Juilliard classmate Roderick Gorby inspired by a couple of jazz recordings of the piece by Jacob Collier and another jazz pianist. Gorby set to work creating a sort of jazz fantasia on the Flintstones theme (credited in her program to Hoyt Curtin, who also composed a quite different sort of score for the recent flm Zodiac, as well as William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, who co-produced the program, though the names of the composers listed on the imdb.com page for The Flintstones are “A. Smith” and “D. Caddell,” who seem to have written other songs for the series) that, though it was a written-out piece, sounded like the sort of thing an organist would have improvised on the Flintstones theme. For the second half Chen began with an appropriately stunning “Fanfare” b9 American composer John Cook (1918-1984) and then an organ piece called “Moto Ostinato” by Petr Eben. According to Chen, Eben was a Czech composer who spent time in a Nazi concentration camp and then had to deal with equally repressive authorities when his country becane part of the Communist bloc after World War II. Eben was apparently deeply religious and wanted to write church music – at a time when Czechoslovakia was under the officially atheist rule of Communists who weren’t at all happy about the persistence of religion. Chen said he particularly liked the piece because she got to jump back and forth from the different organ keyboards, which was really exciting to watch (though I could see it better on the big TV monitor than I could “live”).

Afterwards Chen played an arrangement of Ernesto Lecuona’s “Malagueña” by another old Juilliard classmate, Greg Zelek, and she said she was inspired by the piece because, like her, her brother had moved to Europe to be with his family – though not to Switzerland but to the Malaga region of Spain, which inspired the piece. I’ve heard more iaid-back versions of Lecuona’s lovely song (including a haunting jazz arrangenent by Neal Hefti with vocal by his wife, Frances Wayne, as well as an even more incredible jazz version by Anita O’Day, who ignored the official lyrics and just scatted her way through it), but it was lovely to encounter an old friend in this new context. Then she played a “Sicilienne” by – or at least attributed to – the Austro-Hungarian empress Maria Theresia von Paradis (1759-1824), though she said the piece had some Romantic-sounding chords that have led some musicologists to question whether Meria-Theresia could have written it. (Actually, she was born 11 years before Beethoven and died three years before he did, so it’s not all that surprising that the piece contains Romantic-sounding chords; though born in Germany, Beethoven lived most of his adult career on Austria and it’s quite possible Maria-Theresia was aware of and influenced by his music.)

For the final piece on her printed program Chelsea played the fourth “Jupiter” movement from Gustav Holst’s The Planets, a work I’ve loved since I first heard it on a Westminster LP by Sir Adrian Boult conducting the London Philharmonic, recorded by Pye (a major U.K. label that didn’t catch on in the U.S. because they didn’t have a permanent U.S. distributor) on their Nixa subsidiary, a name that for some reason my grandfather thought was hilarious. I have a boxed set on Warner Classics of three other Boult recordings of The Planets, all originally made for EMI, and what Chen played last night was the transcription of the “Jupiter” movement for organ by Peter Sykes. She mentioned that another organist, Caroline Robinson, is playing next week and her program includes a different transcription of “Jupiter” by one J. Scott. As with the Aïda march at the beginning of the program, Chen’s rendition sounded oddly slow until I looked more closely at the speed with which her hands were dashing across the organ’s four manuals, and I figured it would be impossible to play this piece on a single instrument and still get as much of the orchestral original as she did with a faster tempo. Chen played the “Jupiter” magnificently, and for her encore she played an arrangement of Koji Kondo’s theme for the Super Mario Brothers video game, which she’s used as an encore at the Organ Pavilion before. All it all, it was a stunning concert, up to the level of Isabelle Demers’ appearance the week before and, quite frankly, a lot more fun because it was a more mixed program instead of all hard-core classical the way Demers’ recital was.