Raúl Prieto Ramírez's Special Veterans' Day Organ Concert in Balboa Park – Five Days Early
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Yesterday my husband Charles and I completed my trifecta of free classical music concerts int he area – or should I say a “”quadrifecta,” since we actually went to two events yesterday afternoon. The first was the usual Sunday afternoon organ concert at 2 p.m. with civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez playing a program honoring the sacrifices of American and other servicemembers in the various wars in the world.He explained this because even though Veterans’ Day is next Friday, November 11, and it’s being celebrated the following Monday, November 14. This is in line with the decision of the U.S. government during the Nixon years to shift all holiday celebrations except Thanksgiving and Christmas to Mondays regardless of what date the holiday actually falls on so they’ll all create three-day weekends. Ordinarily Raúl explained that he would have given the Veterans’ Day concert next Sunday, November 13, but he’d already arranged with the San Diego Youth Ballet to perform Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker (or however much will fit in an hour-long time slot) on November 13 sohe decided to do the servicemembers’ tribute concert one week early. He opened with his own transcription of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man (quite well done, too, with plenty of opportunities for the big, flashy playing he likes to do).
Then he did a medley of marches by John Philip Sousa, beginning witn the familiar “Semper Fidelis” and ending with the hyper-familiar “Stars and Stripes Forever” (though frankly I’ve heard better organ transcriptions of that than the one he did; Raúl prided himself on getting in all the band colors into his arrangement, but some of the inner voices sounded muffled to me). The most moving Sousa piece was the one he played in the middle, “In Memoriam,” a funeral march for the assassinated President John Garfield that was surprisingly moving and showed Sousa’s acquaintance with the most advanced musical language of the time. Then he shoved into his program a medley of the five official songs of the various branches of the U.S. military. (Apparently there actually is a song for the Space Force, the one past and likely future President Donald Trump created out of whole cloth by executive order, but Raúl didn’t play it.) Raúl led off with “The Caisson Song,” the official theme song of the Army (though the current version no longer mentions caissons – which were trailers to carry artillery shells into the battlefield), then the Marine hymn, then “Anchors Aweigh” (which, predictably for a Navy town like San Diego, got the biggest audience reaction), then the “Wild Blue Yonder” song of the Air Force (the last military branch actually created by Congressional action, in 1955), and finally “Semper Paratus,” the official anthem of the Coast Guard. Raúl wrapped up his medley with a short fantasia cobbled together from the melodies of all of them.
Afterwards Raúl played the last movement, “In Paradisum,” of the Requiem by Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924), originally composed in 1998 for chamber orchestra and choir and reworked in 1900 for full orchestra. The passage Raúl played was originally for boy choristers and orchestra – apparently the Roman Catholic Church at the end of the 19th century didn’t allow women to sing in church, so Fauré had to write the high choral parts for boys – and Raúl announced that he was going to play the boys’ part on the pedals, which surprised me because I thought organ pedals played bass notes exclusively. The result was quite lovely and a welcome preview of the event Charles and I were going to later in the evening, which was an Evensong service at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral followed by a complete performance of theFauré Requiem. After that Raúl did one of his typical hapless attempts at pre-rock American popular music, wrong-headed versions of Glenn Miller’s hits “Moonlight Serenade” and “In the Mood.” Raúl identified both pieces as from the 1940’s (Miller first recorded both of them in 1939), and for some reason he decided to use the organ’s stroke cabal (a pathetically inadequate attempt to simulate a jazz drummer’s ride cymbal) throughout “Moonlight Serenade” but not during “In the Mood.” (A jazz drummer would have played “Moonlight Serenade” with brushes and “In the Mood” with sticks.) Every time Raúl tries to play pre-rock American pop he reveals how little feeling he has for the idiom – and there’s no particular reason why he should; he’s not American and he’s young enough to have grown up when rock had become the lingua franca of the world’s popular music. I enjoy his rock concerts (even though my taste in classic rock ran much more towards former civic organist Carol Williams’s than Raúl’s: Williams did tribute concerts to The Doors and Davie Bowie, Raúl to Lez Zeppelin and Pink Floyd.)
Raúl closed the program with two short pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach: the Fantasia and Fugue in G minor, BWV 542 (apparently composed after Bach went to Carlsbad, Germany to take the baths and returned home to find his first wife dead, so it’s one of Bach’s gloomier pieces with no “Come, sweet death” nonsense about it) and a chorale prelude on “Liebster Jesú, wir Sind Hier,” and César Franck’s “Piéce Heroïque.” This was a curious piece for Charles and I to hear because it was composed in honor of the returning French soldiers of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 (in which France got its ass kicked by Prussia just before Prussia united all Germany under its rule) and we’d just watched Val Lewton’s film Mademoiselle Fifi, also set in the Franco-Prussian war. Raúl did one of his usual inane demonstrations of the piece before he actually played it, but he managed to capture the odd mix of heroism and tragedy inherent in the piece which Franck wrote to honor the veterans of a war his country had lost. The biggest surprise o9f Raúl’s performance wasn’t the music but his anecdote about having had a grandfather who fought in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. Raúl said he and his siblings would try to get the old man to talk about his war experiences, but he never would, and Raúl said he later figured out that was because the experience of combat is so terrible he never wanted to re-live it. It was a rare human moment from a personality I usually can’t stand.
Yesterday my husband Charles and I completed my trifecta of free classical music concerts int he area – or should I say a “”quadrifecta,” since we actually went to two events yesterday afternoon. The first was the usual Sunday afternoon organ concert at 2 p.m. with civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez playing a program honoring the sacrifices of American and other servicemembers in the various wars in the world.He explained this because even though Veterans’ Day is next Friday, November 11, and it’s being celebrated the following Monday, November 14. This is in line with the decision of the U.S. government during the Nixon years to shift all holiday celebrations except Thanksgiving and Christmas to Mondays regardless of what date the holiday actually falls on so they’ll all create three-day weekends. Ordinarily Raúl explained that he would have given the Veterans’ Day concert next Sunday, November 13, but he’d already arranged with the San Diego Youth Ballet to perform Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker (or however much will fit in an hour-long time slot) on November 13 sohe decided to do the servicemembers’ tribute concert one week early. He opened with his own transcription of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man (quite well done, too, with plenty of opportunities for the big, flashy playing he likes to do).
Then he did a medley of marches by John Philip Sousa, beginning witn the familiar “Semper Fidelis” and ending with the hyper-familiar “Stars and Stripes Forever” (though frankly I’ve heard better organ transcriptions of that than the one he did; Raúl prided himself on getting in all the band colors into his arrangement, but some of the inner voices sounded muffled to me). The most moving Sousa piece was the one he played in the middle, “In Memoriam,” a funeral march for the assassinated President John Garfield that was surprisingly moving and showed Sousa’s acquaintance with the most advanced musical language of the time. Then he shoved into his program a medley of the five official songs of the various branches of the U.S. military. (Apparently there actually is a song for the Space Force, the one past and likely future President Donald Trump created out of whole cloth by executive order, but Raúl didn’t play it.) Raúl led off with “The Caisson Song,” the official theme song of the Army (though the current version no longer mentions caissons – which were trailers to carry artillery shells into the battlefield), then the Marine hymn, then “Anchors Aweigh” (which, predictably for a Navy town like San Diego, got the biggest audience reaction), then the “Wild Blue Yonder” song of the Air Force (the last military branch actually created by Congressional action, in 1955), and finally “Semper Paratus,” the official anthem of the Coast Guard. Raúl wrapped up his medley with a short fantasia cobbled together from the melodies of all of them.
Afterwards Raúl played the last movement, “In Paradisum,” of the Requiem by Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924), originally composed in 1998 for chamber orchestra and choir and reworked in 1900 for full orchestra. The passage Raúl played was originally for boy choristers and orchestra – apparently the Roman Catholic Church at the end of the 19th century didn’t allow women to sing in church, so Fauré had to write the high choral parts for boys – and Raúl announced that he was going to play the boys’ part on the pedals, which surprised me because I thought organ pedals played bass notes exclusively. The result was quite lovely and a welcome preview of the event Charles and I were going to later in the evening, which was an Evensong service at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral followed by a complete performance of theFauré Requiem. After that Raúl did one of his typical hapless attempts at pre-rock American popular music, wrong-headed versions of Glenn Miller’s hits “Moonlight Serenade” and “In the Mood.” Raúl identified both pieces as from the 1940’s (Miller first recorded both of them in 1939), and for some reason he decided to use the organ’s stroke cabal (a pathetically inadequate attempt to simulate a jazz drummer’s ride cymbal) throughout “Moonlight Serenade” but not during “In the Mood.” (A jazz drummer would have played “Moonlight Serenade” with brushes and “In the Mood” with sticks.) Every time Raúl tries to play pre-rock American pop he reveals how little feeling he has for the idiom – and there’s no particular reason why he should; he’s not American and he’s young enough to have grown up when rock had become the lingua franca of the world’s popular music. I enjoy his rock concerts (even though my taste in classic rock ran much more towards former civic organist Carol Williams’s than Raúl’s: Williams did tribute concerts to The Doors and Davie Bowie, Raúl to Lez Zeppelin and Pink Floyd.)
Raúl closed the program with two short pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach: the Fantasia and Fugue in G minor, BWV 542 (apparently composed after Bach went to Carlsbad, Germany to take the baths and returned home to find his first wife dead, so it’s one of Bach’s gloomier pieces with no “Come, sweet death” nonsense about it) and a chorale prelude on “Liebster Jesú, wir Sind Hier,” and César Franck’s “Piéce Heroïque.” This was a curious piece for Charles and I to hear because it was composed in honor of the returning French soldiers of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 (in which France got its ass kicked by Prussia just before Prussia united all Germany under its rule) and we’d just watched Val Lewton’s film Mademoiselle Fifi, also set in the Franco-Prussian war. Raúl did one of his usual inane demonstrations of the piece before he actually played it, but he managed to capture the odd mix of heroism and tragedy inherent in the piece which Franck wrote to honor the veterans of a war his country had lost. The biggest surprise o9f Raúl’s performance wasn’t the music but his anecdote about having had a grandfather who fought in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. Raúl said he and his siblings would try to get the old man to talk about his war experiences, but he never would, and Raúl said he later figured out that was because the experience of combat is so terrible he never wanted to re-live it. It was a rare human moment from a personality I usually can’t stand.
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