Duo MusArt at the Organ Pavilion, August 22, 2022 (O.K. Concert Featuring San Diego's Civic Organist and His Pianist Wife)

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

Last night’s ninth in this year’s series of 11 Monday night concerts at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion featured an ensemble called “Duo MusArt,” which is simply San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez (whose stage personality annoys me no end) and his wife, pianist María Teresa Sierra. The fact that Raúl, who comes off in person like a total screaming queen, is actually married to a woman is perhaps the most surprising thing about this duo. They first played together at the Organ Pavilion in 2018, the first summer season since Raúl was hired as civic organist, and they’ve troed to do it several times since without success. They scheduled it for 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic hit (I’ll never forget the opening months of the lockdown, in which all of Balboa Park was literally sealed off with crime-scene tape. They tried again in 2021 during the late season (September and October instead of July and August), and this time they were done in by the rain: it started falling down and the prevailing winds blew it towards the Pavilion, not away from it as usual, so not only could they not risk having a rented piano get wet and be rendered unusable forever, they couldn’t do an organ concert either because the rain was being blown in the direction of the console. (I remember that day very well: Charles and I had the Spreckels Organ Society Web page and followed the evolving news, which was that first Raúl was going to play a concert of his own, and then he had to cancel even that and call off the event entirely.)

Looking at the program Raúl and María played last night, what strikes me most about it is that it was virtually all bits and pieces of longer works. Only the final piece they played – George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, with María playing the solo piano part and Raúl his own transcription of the jazz=band or orchestral accompaniment – was performed complete. Everything else was bits and pieces, including the opening movement of Beethoven’s “Emperor” piano concerto (again with María playing the solo part and Raúl a transcription of the orchestra; no transcriber was credited but I suspect Raúl did this one, too). They began each set of the concert with two out of six duets Charles-Marie Widor composed originally for piano and harmonium (an instrument that depending on its level of complexity can look like anything from a small accordion to a miniature organ; it works like an organ, with a bellows to blow air past reeds to create the sound,and comes in either hand-pumped or foot-pumped models: the hand-pumped version has to be played with one arm working the bellows while the other hand presses the keys, while the foot-pumped version has two pedals, like the swell pedals on an organ or the pedals on a player piano, so the player can blow air through the instrument with their feet and use both hands on the keys).

Raúl said he’d had to transcribe the harmonium parts for organ, though aside from a few big blasts he indulged in, the organ and piano were surprisingly well-blended tonally (kudos to the Spreckels Organ Society’s sound designers!)and the organ blessedly did not drown out the piano. Originally Raúl listed pieces fove and six, “Sérénade” and “Variations,” to start the concert and pieces one and two, “Scherzando” and “Allegro cantabile,” to begin set two, but he decided to switch them and play one and two at the start of teh concert and leave five and six to the second half. It was readily apparent who Raúl did that: the “Scherrzando” which kicked off the concert started the proceedings with a real bang, while the quieter, more lyrical “Sérénade” worked better as a palate cleanser after the extended intermission. The two also performed three of the seven movements of a “Duo Suite” for organ and piano by Denis Bédard (b. 1950, which makes him three years older than me and already into his 70’s!) which he composed in 1999. And they played one movement of the six duets Camille Saint-Saëns wrote for piano and harmonium (Raúl said that this was the first piece Saint-Saëns ever got published,and he spent the advance he got not on getting laid –– which is where I thought this story was going, though since Saint-Saëns was Gay it would have been a male prostitute – but to buy a telescope so he could look at the stars), and the two of them sat together on María’s rented grand piano for a single movement (again!) of a Mozart sonata, KV 521, for “piano four-hands.”

I’ve always been amused by that term because it conjures up a super-villain like Dr. Octopus in Spider-Man using more than the customary number of appendages to play a piano, but it simply means two people playing the same piano at once. (A “piano duet” is two pianos, each played by a separate person.) Raúl trotted out one of the unfunny “jokes” he’s so fond of making – he said that he and María use piano four-hands performances to decide who gets to cook dinner that night, and whoever plays the worse had to prepare their meal. I’d call last night’s performance a draw, and I mean that as a compliment: Raúl and María were in perfect synch and the piece was one of the highlights of their program. The big works that closed each set – the Beethoven “Emperor” first movement which ended set one and the Rhapsody in Blue which closed the concert (there was no encore) – were both well played but suffered from the inherent limitations of the form. There’s no way you can get the sheer number of colors an orchestra can provide on a single instrument, even as elaborate a one as a pipe organ.

Anyone who knows the “Emperor” Concerto or the Rhapsody in Blue in their original forms (especially the Rhapsody in its original “original form” for Paul Whiteman’s dance band in 1924) would have missed the dazzling colors and sheer weight of sound only an orchestra can provide. There’s also the problem that Raúl is not that imaginative a transcriber; in earlier concerts we heard two different transcriptions of the “Jupiter, the Brunger of Jollity” movement from Gustav Holst’s The Planets (on August 1 Chelsea Chen played Peter Sykes’ version and the next week Caroline Robinson played J. Scott’s), and though both those versions were different (Sykes kept more of the orchestral colors, while Scott tried to make the piece sound like it had been written for solo organ), both Sykes and Scott showed a degree of real imagination Raúl’s journeyman transcriptions do not. And I say this with a bit of surprise because one of Raúl’s most impressive showpieces is his dazzling transcription of Freddie Mercury’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” in which he’s able on a single organ to duplicate most of the layers of that incredibly overdubbed, speed-altered and otherwise “tweaked” rock record. (I remember that when Queen released a live album that contained “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the Rolling Stone reviewer said he’d been curious as to just how they could do that song on stage. As things turned out, they didn’t even try; instead they just lip-synched to the record.)

The Rhapsody in Blue turned out even worse than the Beethoven “Emperor” concerto because the organ simply can’t bend and shape notes the way an orchestral player or players can; the piece is full of jazz licks that demand to be played with the kinds of melodic and rhythmic tweaking that come naturally to jazz musicians. A lot of orchestral versions of the Rhapsody come to grief because classically trained players have neither the musical instinct nor the professional background to play that way. As Raymond Tuttle wrote in the November-December 2021 Fanfare, in a recent review of an indispensable compilation of historic Gershwin recordings on Pristine Audio – including some Gershwin participated in himself – “Nowadays, Rhapsody in Blue is classical music. It did not start out like that, so how did it get that way? … We need to be reminded, from time to time, that Gershwin wrote it for Paul Whiteman, and premiered it with Whiteman and his orchestra, in an arrangement by Ferde Grofé, in 1924. There were 23 musicians, and some of what Gershwin played at the premiere was improvised. Samuel Chotzinoff famously commented that the Rhapsody ‘made an honest woman out of jazz.’ In 1924, no one seemed to be suggesting that it was anything other than jazz, albeit well-dressed jazz.” One of the ways I judge a performance of the Rhapsody in Blue is how long it is; the ideal is between 13 and 15 minutes (classical musicians tend to stretch it out more and I’ve heard 18-minute versions that totally miss the point of what Gershwin wrote), and blessedly Raúl and María got through it in 14:08. It didn’t sound particularly jazzy, but it didn’t sound as dull as some overly self-consciously “classicized” versions I’ve heardm either: Raúl and María played it with appropriate verve and made the piece sound fun. All in all, it was a good concert despite Raúl’s overbearing personality – whenever the two of them are together it’s almost literally impossible for her to get a word in edgewise – and I’d love to hear her on her own in a solo piano recital out from under his macho dominance!