Emma Whitten Returns to the Organ Pavilion – and Brings Maria Miller With Her to Sing

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
https://www.spreckelsorgan.org, and found that the regular civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, was not playing. From the moment I attended his audition concert 4 ½ years ago,I’ve been appalled by Raúl’s on-stage act– he’s a capable musician who’s at his best in music that’s loud and bombastic, but his stage raps I just find infuriating. Instead today’s concert featured Emma Whitten, associate organist at Christ Cathedral (formerly tte Crystal Cathedral of Robert Schuller’s independent ministry, now owned by the Roman Catholic Church) and also the organist at a church in Riverside, though she lives in Oceanside in San Diego’s North County. She brought along a good friend and fellow Oceanside resident, Maria Miller, a singer who was billed as a soprano but she sounds nire kuje a nezzo to me. Whitten gave a meat-and-potatoes organ recital with a few vocal features for Miller added. She opened with a piece by Johann Sebastian Bach, whose works remain the cornerstone of the organ repertoire even though he’s been dead for 273 years now. The Bach piece she opend with was the so-called “9/8”: Prelude in C, BWV 547 (the “9/8” subtitle is the time signature), and aside from the fact that from the very first notes it was obvious no one but Bach could have written it, it made a fun and flavorful opener. Next she played the “Trumpet Tune” by Frederick Swann, her illustrious predecessor at the Crystal Cathedral organ. After that Maria Miller came on for her first song, “Down by the Salley Gardens,” a traditional folk song with lyrics attributed to poet William Butler Yeats:

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

Miller phrased the song stunningly and sang it solidly in the mezzo register, which was nice, but what surprised me was that she didn’t change the lyrics. Instead of presenting herself as a woman who let a man get away, she kept the original words and presented it as a love song from a woman to a woman. And no, she’s not a Lesbian; as she greeted concertgoers after the performance she pointed out her husband standing nearby. I forgot to ask her why she’d kept the original lyrics, but maybe with Yeats’ name attached to them she felt too reverential to change them. After that Whitten anouo9nced that she was going to continue with the “Irishicity” of “Down By the Salley Gardens” and play a jug, though it was a German rather than an Irish jig and it was Bach’s “Gigue” Fugue in G, BWV 577. Then Maria Miller came back and literally burst onto the stage to sing the aria “Chacun le sait” from Gaetano Donizetti’s comic opera La Fille du Regiment. A lot of Italian composers, including not only Donizettibut also Rossini and Verdi, were hired by French opera companies to write operas in French, and this was one such. Miller handled the coloratura well enough but, though she made the aria’s treacherous high notes, the effort was very much apparent and she could have sung the aria better and had more fun with it if she had taken it down a half-tone.

After that Whitten returned for an additional piece she hadn’t listed in the program – how nice it is to hear an organist at the Pavilion whose announcements are so brief and to-the-point she can actually add things to her program instead of having to subtract things because he’s droned on and jabbered too long to play everything he’s listed! Whitten’s additional piece was a prelude and fugue in G minor by the 20th century French organist and composer Marcel Dupré (1888-1971, whose album of Bach pieces played in the laid-back French manner is one of my favorite organ records. Then she resumed her printed program and gave us a piece variously called “Retrospection” and “An Elf on a Moonbeam” by 20th century African-American composer Florence Price (1887-1963), the first Black woman to have a symphony premiered by a major U.S. orchestra. I find Price’s chamber music more emotionally intense than her symphonies, and this composition was a short mood piece, lovely and very much of its time. Maria Miller then returned for a pop song that fit in quite nicely, “Over the Rainbow” from Harold Arle3n’s and Yip Harburg’s score for the 1939 classic film The Wizard of Oz. Blessed be, Miller included the song’s wistful and rarely heard verse as well as the familiar chorus. This song also allowed her to return to the mezzo keys in which she’s clearly more comfortable. Whitten then joked about how the previous week’s concert,featuring Raúl Pro\ieto Ramírez leading lead singer Lauren Leigh-Martin and a vocal chorus in a tribute ot the Beatles had had to be cut short because of the raiin. As areasult people who’d a

ttended that concert hadn’t got to hear the last two Beatles songs listed, “Eleanor Rigby” and “All You Need Is Love.” No problem,Whitten said, and proceeded to play an elaborate toccata on “All You Need Is Love” by young American composer Paul Ayres (born 1979, ironically the same year the Beatles broke up)/ It was just barely possible to discern fragments of the Beatles’ song her and there – though I was a bit disappointed Ayres hadn’t included the opening strain of the French national anthem “La Marseillaise” which the Beatles quoted at the opening of their song. The last song was the U.S. national antme,, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” set to a melody by British composer John Stafford Smith (1750-1836) that was originally a drinking song called “To Anacreon in Heavne.” I was briefly pleased that Maria Miller took her place at the microphone for what I hoped would be a rare rendition of this by a professional singer. But Whitten cranked up the organ at such fotrissimo volume she all but drowned Miller out. Despite its somewhat disappointing ending, the concert was great fun and a welcome respite from Raúl Prieto Ramírez and his putrid stage act!