Caroline Robinson Delivers Fascinating Program at Organ Pavilion August 8

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

Last night my husband Charles and I went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for the seventh concert in this year’s International Organ Festival Monday nights at 7:30. The featured organist was Caroline Robinson of the Cathedral of St. Philip in Atlanta, Georgia, and she played an impressive program of mostly unfamiliar music – though at least two pieces on her program were also played by other organists in this year’s series. Robinson began with an exuberant early 20th-century work called “Variations de Concert” by Joseph Bonnet (1884-1944), a typical piece of French organ literature from the turn of the last century. It was Bonnet’s Opus 1 (meaning either the first piece he composed or the first he published), and it has the excitement of exploring musical possibilities that one would expect from an Op. 1. Next she played two works in quick succession, a “Gospel Prelude” on the hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” by neo-ragtime composer William Bolcom (b. 1938 and the only composer on Robinson’s program who is still alive) and the scherzo from Louis Vierne’s (1870-1937) Organ Symphony No. 2. The Bolcom piece was hauntingly beautiful and she happened to play it right at the moment of twilight, when the setting sun lit the front of the Organ Pavilion a beautiful autumnal orange that perfectly fit the mood of the music. The Vierne was a movement from one of the so-called “organ symphonies” French organ composers began writing in the late 19th century after French organ builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll started building huge, elaborate organs with the full range of sounds of a symphony orchestra – and composers started writing works for these massive organs that exploited their full palette of colors and called them “symphonies” instead of “sonatas” even though they were performed by just one player.

Robinson closed her first set with three of the “Five Pieces for Organ” by Calvin Hampton (1938-1984), which she explained came about when Hampton was asked to write a big choral work for the dedication of the new organ at Park Avenue Church in New York City. He asked if he could do the piece for solo organ instead – it was, after all, intended to dedicate an organ – and he was inspired to follow the format of five short movements by Igor Stravinsky’s similar pieces for piano duet. Hampton died at age 45 of complications from AIDS, a tragic loss to the world of music, and the demise of the Musical Heritage Society, the mail-order label for which he made most of his own recordings, has left virtually his entire legacy out of print. Hampton’s music had been featured earlier in this year’s Summer Organ Concert series by Nicole Keller, who played two of the movements from Hampton’s suite, “The Primitives” and “At the Ballet”; Robinson played those two and followed them with the suite’s last movement, “”Everyone Dance.” According to Robinson, a third musician who played in this year’s series, Cherry Rhodes, gave the West Coast premiere of Hampton’s suite and asked him to let her make some changes in the music. Robinson told a tale of Hampton and Rhodes on the phone with each other, singing alternative phrasings for the final movement, and she said Hampton ultimately endorsed Rhodes’ changes to the end of the piece and incorporated them into the published score. (Alas, though Cherry Rhodes performed at the Organ Pavilion July 18, she did not play any of Hampton’s music.) Robinson said that Hampton wanted this music to express the sounds of New York City, and she got more than she bargained for; while she was playing “The Primitives” someone riding a motorcycle decided to buzz the Pavilion and rev up their engine to make as much noise as possible. It’s a tribute to how well Hampton evoked the sounds of urban traffic in his music that the sounds the obnoxious motorcyclist made actually fit into Hampton’s soundscape.

During the intermission Charles and I started feeling raindrops – though the weather was hot overall there had been warnings from TV weathercasters that some fugitive rain clouds might blow in from heaven knows where – and though most of the concertgoers remained in their seats in front of the organ, Charles suggested we move and seek shelter under the colonnades to the side of the Organ Pavilion. Though we’ve been going to the Organ Pavilion for decades, we’d never gone under the stairs before – and the music sounded oddly muffled there. Also, the noise of aircraft passing overhead was more obnoxious than usual because we didn’t have the bulk of the Organ Pavilion itself blocking out the sound. We remained under the awning for the first three selections of Robinson’s second set – Johann Sebastian Bach’s (1685-1750) Prelude and Fugue in D, BWV 532 (a real pity because Robinson added xylophone and other items from the organ’s so-called “toy box” – it would have made the “Historically Informed Performance” fascists who have taken over Bach’s music crap in their pants, but I loved it and only wish we could have heard it better!), an “Arietta” by Thomas Kerr (1913-1988) based on the Black Christmas spiritual “Rise Up, Shepherds, and Follow,” and a March in C by French composer Alfred Lefébure-Wely (1817-1869) which Robinson said she thought sounded like music for a silent-film comedy even though it well predates the existence of film. (One can readily imagine this music being used to accompany a silent comedy, with Charlie Chaplin as the hapless protagonist and his early leading lady, Edna Purviance, as the woman he’s uncertainly and bashfully cruising.)

Fortunately Charles and I got back to our seats for the final two numbers on Robinson’s program (she did not play an encore), an Andantino in D-flat by Edwin H. Lemare (a star American organist from the turn of the last century) whose melody was appropriated by Ben Black and Charles N. Daniels in 1921 while Lemare was still alive (he died in 1934) for a pop song called “Moonlight and Roses,” and a transcription by J. Scott of the fourth movement, “Jupiter: The Bringer of Jollity,” from Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite The Planets. We had just heard this music at the Organ Pavilion one week before when Chelsea Chen had performed it in a very different transcription by Peter Sykes, and judging from both performances Sykes tried to reproduce more of Holst’s orchestral sonorities in his version while Scott attempted to make the piece sound like it was written for organ in the first place. Robinson made a major boo-boo when she announced that The Planets had been written in 1932 (Holst, a British composer despite his German-sounding name, wrote it between 1914 and 1917, while Britain and Germany were fighting against each other in World War I, which may account for the martial intensity of much of the music, especially the opening movement, “Mars, the Bringer of War,” which strongly influenced John Williams when he composed the battle music for the first Star Wars movie). Later she told a story that when the piece had its premiere at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 1918 (which would hardly have been possible if Holst hadn’t written it yet and wouldn’t for another 14 years!), the cleaning women put down their brushes and mops and started dancing to the music. Overall, Robinson’s performance was one of the better ones this year; she proved herself a mistress of the orchestral colors possible on the Spreckels Organ and she played a wide variety of music, commanding a welcome range of compositional styles, though I thought she did best in the Calvin Hampton pieces (what a pity she didn’t play the full suite!) and the “Jupiter” movement of Holst’s The Planets.