Adam Ferrara and the Long Beach Youth Chorus: A Beautiful Afternoon at the Organ Pavilion

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

Last Sunday, May 28 my husband Charles and I went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for a really fun concert featuring guest organist Adam Ferrara and the Long Beach Youth Chorus. Adam Ferrara turned out to be a blessed relief from San Diego’s current civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, whose stage presence is so offensive I’ve dubbed him “The Spanish Clown.” Ferrara is a medium-tall young man who came out dressed in a red shirt and a black-and-white tie, and aside from being drop-dead gorgeous he’s a fine musician with a quiet, un-flamboyant stage manner. He began with a piece billed as the “Organ Concerto II in A minor,” ostensibly by Johann Sebastian Bach but actually written by Antonio Vivaldi as a concerto for two violins and orchestra and transcribed by Bach for organ. I’ll never forget my joy when one day during the early 1980’s I was in the late, lamented Classic Encounters record store in downtown San Diego and spotted some Bach organ recordings from East Germany in their cut-out bin, including an LP of three Bach transcriptions of concerti, one by Johann Hasse and two by Vivaldi. I was struck by the fact that there was actually a collaboration of sorts between the two greatest composers of the Baroque era (though I’ve become less enamored of Vivaldi over the years; he was undoubtedly a great composer but there’s some truth to Stravinsky’s jibe about him: “Vivaldi didn’t compose 900 concerti, he composed one concerto 900 times”), and certainly Ferrara did more than justice to the work. By coincidence I’d just heard the same piece (BWV 593, in case you’re keeping track) performed at St. Paul’s cathedral by Nicholas Halbert as part of his all-Bach mini-recital on Friday, May 19. It’s a great piece, no matter who performs it, and a worthy meeting ground of two great composers.

Afterwards Ferrara brought up the Long Beach Youth Chorus, or 12 members thereof (there are apparently 40 or so in all) – all but two or three of whom were girls, though at their age (‘tweens and early teens) there’s not much vocal difference between girls and boys. Ferrara introduced the group’s artistic director and conductor merely as “Stevie,” and that jolted me at first because I literally couldn’t tell her gender. Fortunately the Long Beach Youth Chorus’s Web site, https://www.longbeachyouthchorus.org/our-staff, gives her true identity: her name is Stevie J. Hirner, she’s a Transwoman (and the site specifies she uses female pronouns), and I can readily imagine the hissy-fits among the cultural Right about having a Transgender person in charge of a youth choir even though the results speak – or sing – for themselves. The Long Beach Youth Chorus opened with a patriotic medley by Carl Strommen (b. 1939) called “An American Celebration” consisting of the usual suspects – “America, the Beautiful,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (in which for some reason the choristers pronounced the word “lightning” as “lighting”), and “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” Afterwards they continued the patriotic theme with a Mark Hayes arrangement of “The Star-Spangled Banner” that for some reason made the song’s tessitura even more treacherous than usual: the chart took the key higher at the lines “the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,” and it’s a testament to the skill of the Youth Chorus and the training Hirner has given them that they managed to negotiate the ultra-high key of a song already murderously difficult come scritto.

Following that came a rendition of what’s come to be called the African-American national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” written in 1900 by composer J. Rosamond Johnson with lyrics by his brother, James Weldon Johnson. The program credited it to Robin Dilworth (b. 1970), but that was just the vocal arrangement. It still strikes me as a thoroughly mediocre piece of music and it irks me that the “Black national anthem” isn’t something by Duke Ellington instead, though Charles said he was moved to tears by this song and it occurred to him that his late nephew Miles Hall was part of “the blood of the slaughtered.” But it is what it is and the Long Beach Youth Chorus did it credibly well. Afterwards one of the women choristers came out and did a solo performance of a traditional Mexican folk song called “Malagueña Salerosa” backed only by Stan DeWitt’s guitar (an acoustic guitar with a microphone inside rather than an actual electric guitar) – he was credited in the program but she was not, alas – and then the chorus went into a pop set. The songs they sang here were an odd assortment of recent pieces and relatively obscure old songs, including the stunning “Orange-Colored Sky,” written in 1950 by Milton Delugg and Willie Stein.

The first recording of it was made July 11, 1950 by singer Janet Brace with Delugg’s orchestra for the Cincinnati-based King label, though the best-known version was made August 16, 1950 by two of Capitol Records’ biggest artists, Nat “King” Cole and Stan Kenton. I first heard it on Natalie Cole’s Unforgettable, the multi-Grammy winning tribute album to her dad, and later when I heard the Nat “King” Cole/Kenton version, with Kenton’s band playing its typical fortississimo brass blasts emphasizing the “Flash, bam, alakazam” lyrics of the chorus, and at the end Cole joked, “I thought love was quieter than this,” I talked back to the record and said, “Of course you did! Your wife had sung with Duke Ellington!” (I first read that in Duke’s autobiography, Music is My Mistress; Cole’s wife Maria had originally been an Ellington vocalist using just the name “Marie,” because at the time she was a divorcée from an African-American servicemember named “Ellington” and Duke didn’t want to use that name because he didn’t want people to think he’d given her the job because they were related, which they weren’t. When I first read that I thought, “No wonder Natalie Cole has such a great voice! She gets it from both sides!”) Once again, the program for the Long Beach Youth Chorus concert gave the composer as Anita Cracauer (b. 1977), but she was just the arranger.

After that the chorus did some pretty pat “inspirational” pieces, including one called “I Dream a World” by André J. Thomas (b. 1952), a quite good version of the old spiritual “We Shall Not Be Moved” by Adam and Matt Podd, and a rather bland sing-along called “Love Is Love Is Love Is Love” by Abbie Bettinis (b. 1980). From the moment Adam Ferrara asked us to sing along with the chorus, “Love, Love, Love,” I was struck by the song’s, shall we say, resemblance to The Beatles’ classic “All You Need Is Love,” and I couldn’t help but wish they’d done that one instead. (I’m guessing they couldn’t have afforded the rights.) The program closed with three more selections by Adam Ferrara: a truly demented arrangement of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” by Charles W. Ore (b. 1936) that made it sound like Jesus had run off to join the circus; the “Andantino in D-flat” by Edwin H. Lemare (1865-1934) that got turned into the pop song “Moonlight and Roses”; and a closer by Ferrara himself called “Joyful Morning” that combined the big theme from the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the song “Morning Has Broken” by Cat Stevens. Apparently this was a piece he wrote for his organ teacher, Ellen Woodward, whose mother had passed away; he combined the pieces because those were the two favorite melodies of Mrs. Woodward. The concert was a quite lovely and welcome diversion and an occasion for sheer joy, and I hope we get to hear Adam Ferrara again, both with the chorus and on his own.