Spreckels Organ's Mother's Day Concert: Civic Organist and Singer Delivers a Quiet, Lyrical Afternoon
Yesterday (Sunday, May 14) I had an interesting afternoon during which I first went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for a Mother’s Day concert featuring civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez and Ukrainian soprano Anna Belaya (and yes, the spelling of her first name with two “n”’s is correct, according to her Web page) in a surprisingly lovely program of mostly quiet, pastoral music. It began with Anna singing and Raúl playing the Ukrainian National Anthem, a gesture he’s been doing at most (though not all) of his Sunday afternoon concerts since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Then, after the usual speechifying by Raúl and organ Curator Dale Sorenson, Raúl went into his program with the last movement, “Golliwog’s Cakewalk,” from Debussy’s Children’s Corner suite for piano. It was written at a time when African-American musicians were starting to tour Europe basically as novelty acts, and introducing European musicians and listeners to the new style of ragtime. Debussy was quite taken by this music, and he attempted to write this piece in ragtime style. He also recorded “Golliwog’s Cakewalk” in 1913 for the Welte-Mignon piano roll company, and Lynn René Bayley wrote in a review of a CD of the complete Debussy Welte-Mignon recordings [Fanfare, January-February 2013], “I do believe that Debussy’s own sense of rhythm is represented properly in ‘Golliwog’s Cakewalk’, and it is different from the way nearly all professional pianists perform it. Debussy slightly shortens the first half of the beat of each syncopated two-note figure in the bass while slightly emphasizing and elongating the second half. This creates a rhythmic feel much closer to Black (African-American) ragtime performances than to white (imitation) rhythms. (Listen, too, to the way he crushes some of the chords, blurring the notes, the way Black pianists did.)” Needless to say, Raúl is not capable of those kinds of rhythmic subtleties, but he still got through this little piece in a fun, appealing way.
Then followed one of the most lyrical and beautiful pieces I’ve ever heard Raúl play, the “Ave Maria von Arcadeli” by Franz Liszt, from his late-in-life years in which he lived in semi-retirement in Rome and took minor orders as the Abbé Liszt. It was based on an old Gregorian chant that Liszt had heard from a church while he was down in the dumps over the young death of his daughter Blandine – whom Raúl said, in one of the biggest whoppers of his stage raps, was Liszt’s only child and had died in infancy. In fact Liszt had three children, daughters Blandine and Cosima and son Daniel, and Blandine died in childbirth (which meant she at least lived long enough to get pregnant!). Daniel died at age 20, but Cosima outlived Liszt by nearly 50 years (he died in 1886, she in 1930) after being married twice, first to conductor Hans von Bülow and second to composer Richard Wagner (yes, that Richard Wagner). Then Raúl brought back Anna Belaya for a program of songs including Schubert’s familiar “Ave Maria” (which they performed right after Liszt’s “Ave Maria von Arcadeli,” so they did two Marian works in a row) and the aria “Lascia ch’io pianga” (“Let me weep”) from Handel’s opera Rinaldo (though apparently Handel used it for several other operas as well: he first wrote it as an instrumental saraband for the opera Almira, then set it to words as “Lascia la spina, cogli la rosa” – “Leave the thorn, take the rose” – for an oratorio called The Triumph of Time and Truth before its third appearance as “Lascia ch’io pianga” in Rinaldo).
Then Raúl and Belaya moved the 1940 bolero “Bésame Mucho” (“Kiss Me Often”) by Mexican composer Consuelo Vélasquez (the printed program co-credited the song to American trombonist, bandleader and arranger Ray Conniff, but the song’s Wikipedia page doesn’t list him) from the end of a group of songs by women composers to the beginning. After that the two presented songs by Robert Schumann’s wife Clara, Felix Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny, and American women composers Amy Beach and Florence Price. Three of these four women had to deal with sexism: Fanny Mendelssohn’s father insisted that her compositions be published under Felix’s name until he died; Clara Schumann had to keep her works under wraps until Robert’s death; and Beach was allowed to publish, but only under the name “Mrs. H. H. A. Beach.” It wasn’t until after her death in 1944 that music historians were able to research her background and discover her first name. And Florence Price was Black, so she had to deal with the double whammy of racism and sexism. Amy Beach was the first American composer of either gender to compose and publish a symphony, and Florence Price was the first Black woman to publish one and get it premiered by an American orchestra. The songs Raúl and Belaya performed were Beach’s “The Year’s at the Spring” (Op. 44, no. 3), which sounded a bit too much like Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” to work as a song heralding spring; Fanny Mendelssohn’s “Nachtwanderer” (“Night Walker”), which was O.K., and “Die Mainacht” (“The May Night”), which was by far the best of these songs, really beautiful and lyrical; Florence Price’s “An April Day” (which seemed better than Beach’s but still a bit too self-consciously “heroic” for a song about spring); and Clara Schumann’s (billed under her maiden name, Clara Wieck) “Lorelei,” good but once again too bombastic for a song about the seemingly delicate temptress whose singing supposedly lured German sailors to their deaths.
The concert ended with a couple of “jokes” Raúl has been telling over and over and over – the one about how the percussion instruments that are part of the organ are played by volunteers who are kept there with balls and chains and fed only pizza (they’re really played mechanically by controls built into the organ) and how he’s going to play a randomly selected national anthem as his closing number and it just happens to be that of the United States. (The concerts have been ending with the American national anthem since that was begun as a patriotic gesture during World War II.) Along with the lame attempts at humor Raúl played a standard “Mowie Time!” medley (it’s really “Movie Time!,” but he likes to pretend that his English is even worse than it is) of Alfred Newman’s 20th Century-Fox fanfare and two songs associated with Glenn Miller’s band, “Moonlight Serenade” (composed by Miller with lyrics by Mitchell Parish, who also wrote the words to Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust”) and “In the Mood” (credited to tenor saxophonist Joe Garland, the only Black musician Miller hired for his band, though it’s a knock-off of Horace Henderson’s “Hot and Anxious”), which he’s repeated at concert after concert after concert and just reveals his lack of sympathy with the music of the 1920’s, 1930’s and 1940’s. (On the other hand, Raúl relates to rock because it was the popular music of his youth; one of the most stunning items in his repertoire is his transcription for solo organ of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”) Despite the lame ending, this was actually one of Raúl’s better Sunday afternoons: I especially liked Fanny Mendelssohn’s “Die Mainacht” and the Liszt piece, the latter because Raúl usually uses Liszt’s music to sound loud and bombastic – his most commonly played Liszt works are the tone poem “Prometheus” and the “Ad nos” Fantasy and Fugue based on a chorale from Meyerbeer’s opera Le Prophète (“The Prophet,” based on the real-life religious cult leader John of Leyden) – yet here he was playing Liszt at his most quiet, reverent and lyrical, and Raúl’s playing matched the music’s gentle mood.
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