David Ball and His Students Play a Great – but Wet – Concert at the Organ Pavilion January 15

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion concert in Balboa Park Sunday, January 15 at 2 p.m., but bailed and headed home instead of going on to St. Paul’s for that night’s Evensong service and the recital by organist Emma Whitten that was to follow. I went to the Organ Pavilion in spite of the predictions that, though it wasn’t raining this morning, it would be by 5 p.m. I ran into an old friend in the park, and he said the weather prediction he had got from his cell phone was that tie rain would start precisely at 2 p.m. and he expressed his opinion that those of us who were going to the concert were nuts, and so were the organizers for putting it on in the face of likely rain. Well, the rain held off for most of the afternoon but really opened up big-time during the final selection (aside from the inevitable closer of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a.k.a. “To Anacreon in Heaven,” in an arrangement by Virgil Fox that threw almost everyone who tried to sing along, including the three student organists – more on them later). When I got to the Pavilion there was actually a big crowd in the normal seats, but as the downpour loosed later in the afternoon I had a weird and rather sadistic bit of fun watching them flee like rats deserting a sinking ship from my relatively safe redoubt on the stage, where in a tradition started by Carol Williams during her tenure as San Diego civic organist, chairs had been set up to give a few concertgoers relative (but only relative!) respite from the rain.

I hadn’t originally intended to go to the Organ Pavilion but I looked up the Spreckels Organ Society Web site and determined that since the organist was someone other than Raúl Prieto Ramírez, I would attend after all. Raúl is a capable musician but I find his stage antics so appalling I try to avoid him except when he’s inevitable, like during the summer organ concerts on Monday nights or when he’s accompanying someone else. This week’s organist was David Ball, music director and principal organist at the Christ Cathedral in Garden Grove, California. This used to be known as the Crystal Cathedral and was built in the late 1970’s by Robert Schuller’s denomination, which went bankrupt in 2013 following years of infighting by members of Schuller’s family. It was sold to the Catholic Diocese of Orange County and formally reconsecrated as “Christ Cathedral” in 2019. Among the assets were the church’s huge organ, which has 300 ranks of pipes (compared to the 81 ranks of the Spreckels Organ), and David Ball indulged in the usual size-queeniness of organists: “My organ is bigger than yours!” For this concert he brought along three of his students, Alyce Reynaud, Ethan Chow and André Lombardi.

Reynaud is not only a student or organ but of voice as well, and the concert showcased her doing both. First she sang the aria “Angels ever bright and fair” from Handel’s oratorio Theodora with Ball accompanying her, then she played a quite lively “Prelude on a Chant Tune” by American composer and organ teacher Wilbur Held (born August 20 1914 and died March 24, 2015 – so he really did live to be 100!). Following that she returned to the vocal mike for Debussy’s “Nuit d’etoiles” (“Night of Stars”), which she did beautifully but I think I’d rather have heard her with the piano accompaniment Debussy wrote and in a small enough room she could have sung without amplification. The built-in P.A. at the Organ Pavilion was designed, let’s face it, for announcements, not music. (For a voice-and-piano version, check out the one by Jessye Norman and JKaIt turned poor Mademoiselle Reynaud’s voice all too strident,and it sounded like she was having more difficulty on the high notes than she in fact was. (For a voice-and-piano version, check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7pt91j_D4o for a recording by soprano Jessye Norman and pianist James Levine. There’s another one by lighter-voiced soprano Julie Fuchs and pianist Alphonse Cemin at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWaWUee4PcQ.)

Then came Ethan Chow, a strikingly tall young man, to perform a “Roulade” by Seth Bingham and the Toccata in F minor by Johann Sebastian Bach, BWV 540. Before the Bach piece David Ball made a wry little comment to the effect that if Bach had never lived, the organ repertory would have developed very differently – which was difficult for me to accept just two days after hearing Nicholas Halbert at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church play two amazing pieces by Dietrich Buxtehude, Bach’s mentor. Don’t get me wrong about Bach – he was a musical genius, one of the four greatest composers to come from the German-speaking musical world (along with Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner) – but judging from the great works by Buxtehude and another German Baroque composer from the generation before Bach’s, Georg Böhm (1661-1731) Halbert played January 13 at St. Paul’s, it seems to me that the German organ tradition was off to a great start even without Bach’s genius to send it into orbit.

Then came the real high point of the afternoon, Franz Liszt’s “Fantasia and Fugue on the Theme B-A-C-H” (“B-A-C-H” is a musical way of spelling out Bach’s name in German notation, which uses “B” for the note we call B-flat and “H” for the note we call B-natural; the first composer to use that particular figure was Bach himself, in the unfinished fugue he wrote as part of his last major piece, The Art of Fugue), played by a young, slightly built man named André Lombardi. The good news is his performance was absolutely terrific; especially for someone so young, he played this tough piece with total, absolute command of its technical intricacies, and from my vantage point on the stage, it was fun to watch his fingers and feet fly over the keys and pedals. Now for the bad news; apparently Mother Nature decided she wanted to join in. The rain started as a light sprinkle as Lombardi was getting into the Liszt, and by the time he was heading for the climax the sprinkle had become first a downpour and then a drench. More than once I thanked the powers that be in the universe for the clean clothes I had available to change into when I finally got home.