San Diego Civic Youth Ballet Performs at Organ Pavilion April 2 to Promote Their "Midsummer Night's Dream" Production This Weekend
>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Yesterday (Sunday, April 2) my husband Charles nad I had a long day together during which we went to the organ concert in Balboa Park, which featured members of the San Diego Civic Youth Ballet dancing to excerpts from Mendelssohn’s incidental music to Shakeseare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream to promote full performances of the ballet Thursday, April 6 at 6 po.m., Friday, April 7 at 7 p.m. and Saturday, April 8 at 2 and 6 p.m. at the Casa del Prado Theater. Tickets are $20 each and are available online at https://sdcyballet.my.salesforce-sites.com/ticket#/events/a0S1G000006cdpSUAQ. “Incidental music” was what they had before there were film scores – indeed, before there were films. They were just like film scores except that they accompanied a live play – in this case, August Schlegel’s German translation of Shakespeare’s original.
Alas, San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez aid not accompany the dancers “live” on the organ; instead, as they had done the last time they performed at the Organ Pavilion, the Youth Ballet danced to a pre-recorded soundtrack of the original orchestral version. That wouldn’t have been so bad except that the D.J. who was plaing the music for them wasn’t as on top of things as the one they’d had the last time: all too many of the cues spilled over into the next one or were just a few seconds of annoying fragments of sound. I couldn’t follow the dancing that well, partly because I’m losing my eyesight my cataract surgery (at least hte first round, since they’re doing each surgery one eye at a time) is scheduled for April 26 and I can hardly wait – and partly due to the blizzard of rental beach umbrella between us and the stage. I’m glad the Spreckels Organ Society makes these available for a $2 rental fee during the concert – my heliophobic husband Charles always insists on renting one when we’re at the concert on a sunny day (which yesterday was, though today much less so). Raúl decided to tie in his program with the Midsummer Night’s Dream presentation by picking as his major work another piece by Mendelssohn, the Organ Sonata No. 4 (of six), which he played well and seemed to be having a lot of fun. Unfoirtunately, the piece was spoiled – at least for Charles and I – by the audience’s insistence on applauding after every movement, even the slow one. Raúl got so fed up with it that as soon as he finished the third movement and people in the audience started clapping, he went straight away into the fourth and final movement, after which Charles and I applauded now that it was time for it.
Raúl did not play the Bach Toccata in F he’d promised as an encore at the end of last week’s concert instead he went into the Toccata and Fugue in D minor because he always starts the first Sunday concert of a new month with that piece,even though Raúl also droned on and on and on about how it’s not really by Bach at all. In previous concerts he’s been more wishy-washy about that, but yesterday he definitely came down on the side of “not Bach,” or at least “not Johann Sebastian Bach.” I looked up the Wikipedia page on the Toccata and Fugue in D minor after last week’s all-Bach concert and found that one key element in Raúl’s case against Bach as the author of the Toccata and Fugue in D minor is B.S. Raúl has claimed that the earliest surviving manuscript of the Toccata and Fugue in D minor is an Italian copy made around 1820. Not true: the earliest source for the piece is a manuscript by Johannes Ringk dating from the 1730’s (Ringk made his first copy of a Bach piece in 1730, when he was 12, and scholars who’ve studied Ringk’s handwriting scholars who’ve studied Ringk’s handwriting as it evolved have deduced the copy of the Toccata and Fugue dates from the 1730’s, probably around 1735). Ringk was a student of one of Bach’s students, and the Toccata and Fugue manuscript dates from Bach’s lifetime and its source was a music student with at least a second-degree tie to the Bach family.
Though music scholars have advanced technical reasons for denying that Bach wrote the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, including the absence of counterpoint and the piece’s ending on a plagal cadence (no, I don’t know what a “plagal cadence” means; when music critic Wilfrid Mellers praised John Lennon for ending the Beatles’ song “Not a Second Time” witn “Aeolian cadences,” Lennon said years later, “To this day I don’t know what Aeolian cadences are. They sound like rare birds”). To me the Toccata and Fugue in D minor remains a piece of such towering musical genius it’s clear its composer was one of the all-time greats, and if Bach didn’t write it, where’s the other music from the composer who did? Raúl ended his concert with the audience favorite from his concert three weeks ago – the last tine he’d actually polled an audience – consisting of the final two movements, “The Hut of BabaYaga”and “The Great Gate at Kiev,” from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Since Mussorgsky intended the two movements to follow hard upon each other with no audibloe pause between them, Raúl at least didn’t have to worry about the audience interrupting the music with inappropriate applause. This is exactly the kind of music Raúl is best at: showy and bombastic, b ut with real substance underneath it.
Yesterday (Sunday, April 2) my husband Charles nad I had a long day together during which we went to the organ concert in Balboa Park, which featured members of the San Diego Civic Youth Ballet dancing to excerpts from Mendelssohn’s incidental music to Shakeseare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream to promote full performances of the ballet Thursday, April 6 at 6 po.m., Friday, April 7 at 7 p.m. and Saturday, April 8 at 2 and 6 p.m. at the Casa del Prado Theater. Tickets are $20 each and are available online at https://sdcyballet.my.salesforce-sites.com/ticket#/events/a0S1G000006cdpSUAQ. “Incidental music” was what they had before there were film scores – indeed, before there were films. They were just like film scores except that they accompanied a live play – in this case, August Schlegel’s German translation of Shakespeare’s original.
Alas, San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez aid not accompany the dancers “live” on the organ; instead, as they had done the last time they performed at the Organ Pavilion, the Youth Ballet danced to a pre-recorded soundtrack of the original orchestral version. That wouldn’t have been so bad except that the D.J. who was plaing the music for them wasn’t as on top of things as the one they’d had the last time: all too many of the cues spilled over into the next one or were just a few seconds of annoying fragments of sound. I couldn’t follow the dancing that well, partly because I’m losing my eyesight my cataract surgery (at least hte first round, since they’re doing each surgery one eye at a time) is scheduled for April 26 and I can hardly wait – and partly due to the blizzard of rental beach umbrella between us and the stage. I’m glad the Spreckels Organ Society makes these available for a $2 rental fee during the concert – my heliophobic husband Charles always insists on renting one when we’re at the concert on a sunny day (which yesterday was, though today much less so). Raúl decided to tie in his program with the Midsummer Night’s Dream presentation by picking as his major work another piece by Mendelssohn, the Organ Sonata No. 4 (of six), which he played well and seemed to be having a lot of fun. Unfoirtunately, the piece was spoiled – at least for Charles and I – by the audience’s insistence on applauding after every movement, even the slow one. Raúl got so fed up with it that as soon as he finished the third movement and people in the audience started clapping, he went straight away into the fourth and final movement, after which Charles and I applauded now that it was time for it.
Raúl did not play the Bach Toccata in F he’d promised as an encore at the end of last week’s concert instead he went into the Toccata and Fugue in D minor because he always starts the first Sunday concert of a new month with that piece,even though Raúl also droned on and on and on about how it’s not really by Bach at all. In previous concerts he’s been more wishy-washy about that, but yesterday he definitely came down on the side of “not Bach,” or at least “not Johann Sebastian Bach.” I looked up the Wikipedia page on the Toccata and Fugue in D minor after last week’s all-Bach concert and found that one key element in Raúl’s case against Bach as the author of the Toccata and Fugue in D minor is B.S. Raúl has claimed that the earliest surviving manuscript of the Toccata and Fugue in D minor is an Italian copy made around 1820. Not true: the earliest source for the piece is a manuscript by Johannes Ringk dating from the 1730’s (Ringk made his first copy of a Bach piece in 1730, when he was 12, and scholars who’ve studied Ringk’s handwriting scholars who’ve studied Ringk’s handwriting as it evolved have deduced the copy of the Toccata and Fugue dates from the 1730’s, probably around 1735). Ringk was a student of one of Bach’s students, and the Toccata and Fugue manuscript dates from Bach’s lifetime and its source was a music student with at least a second-degree tie to the Bach family.
Though music scholars have advanced technical reasons for denying that Bach wrote the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, including the absence of counterpoint and the piece’s ending on a plagal cadence (no, I don’t know what a “plagal cadence” means; when music critic Wilfrid Mellers praised John Lennon for ending the Beatles’ song “Not a Second Time” witn “Aeolian cadences,” Lennon said years later, “To this day I don’t know what Aeolian cadences are. They sound like rare birds”). To me the Toccata and Fugue in D minor remains a piece of such towering musical genius it’s clear its composer was one of the all-time greats, and if Bach didn’t write it, where’s the other music from the composer who did? Raúl ended his concert with the audience favorite from his concert three weeks ago – the last tine he’d actually polled an audience – consisting of the final two movements, “The Hut of BabaYaga”and “The Great Gate at Kiev,” from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Since Mussorgsky intended the two movements to follow hard upon each other with no audibloe pause between them, Raúl at least didn’t have to worry about the audience interrupting the music with inappropriate applause. This is exactly the kind of music Raúl is best at: showy and bombastic, b ut with real substance underneath it.
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