James Kealey: Hot Young British-Born Organist Headlines Opening Concert of Summer Organ Festival in Balboa Park

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

My husband Charles had the last two days off work, and after a pretty long and lazy day on Monday, June 26 we went out in the evening for the first of the summer organ festival concerts in Balboa Park, celebrating the 35th anniversary of them. Last night’s program was billed as the “Young Artist Concert,” said young artist being James Kealey, British-born organist from Rochester, New York (where he moved after he decided to pursue further organ studies in the U.S. and he works as a church organist and music director at Third Presbyterian Church). The program proclaimed him as the winner of the 2022 National Young Artists Competition of the American Guild of Organists, but what was most remarkable about Kealey is he does not play like a competition winner – or at least the typical stereotype of a competition winner: fast, loud, bombastic and with little soul or introspection. Instead he picked pieces that were mostly quiet and reflective, and he played them that way. I was a bit bored by the first item on his program, the “Allegro maestoso” first movement from Elgar’s 1890’s Organ Sonata in G, Op. 28. I don’t actively dislike Elgar the way I do Mahler, but he’s not a composer that really “turns my crank,” either. There’s quite a lot of the staid Victorian era about him (Queen Victoria was still alive and on the throne when this was written), and while a more energetic player might have been able to make this music exciting, that’s not Kealey’s style.

His style is soft, laid-back, self-effacing – exactly the opposite of San Diego’s civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez – and the contrast really came through in the two pieces Kealey played that are common staples of Raúl’s repertoire, César Franck’s “Pièce Heroïque” and Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Danse Macabre.” The contrast between the two showed not only in how they played these pieces but how they introduced them: Raúl drones on and on and on about the Franck piece being written for a parade of French soldiers returning home from the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian war (in which France got its proverbial ass kicked by Germany) while Kealey spoke about the piece in strictly musical terms. (He also mentioned that the piece wasn’t premiered until 1878, seven years after the war it supposedly commemorated.) Kealey also played the “Danse Macabre” in Edwin H. Lemare’s transcription (I think Raúl uses one of his own), and there were noticeable differences between them. The Lemare version is sparser, more chilling – especially when the organ cuts loose with the passage Saint-Saëns wrote for a single violin to represent Satan summoning various corpses to rise from their graves and dance in his honor – and my husband Charles said it sounded more like the Devil actually summoning souls for a dance of death than it did in Raúl’s version.

Between the Elgar opener and the “Pièce Heroïque” Kealey played two quiet mood pieces, one by Florence Price actually called “In Quiet Mood” (though I felt sorry for him when an airplane went by just as he was starting the Price work) which sounded a lot to me like the opening movement of Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite, and one of two pieces by living composers, “Church Bells Beyond the Stars” by Cecelia McDowall (b. 1951). After the “Pièce Heroïque” Kealey played two hymn settings by British pianist George Shearing (1919-2011), who was best known as a jazz and pop performer but there’s no trace of jazz in these arrangements of “There Is a Happy Land” and “Amazing Grace.” After the “Danse Macabre” – which Kealey played stunningly but also with a welcome degree of subtlety that eludes Raúl – Kealey took a short break but there was no intermission; instead after a couple of minutes of the usual bombast by the Spreckels Organ Society president, he returned for a Prelude and Fugue in G by Johann Sebastian Bach. Well, virtually no organ concert would be complete without something by Bach, and Kealey said this was an early work of Bach, more exuberant than much of his later stuff. He explained that the entire piece is based on the four-note motif which starts it, and it made an interesting contrast with the next piece on Kealey’s program, the Rhapsody No. 1 in D-flat by British composer Herbert Howells (1892-1983).

Herbert Howells is a recent discovery of mine; like Cecelia McDowall, Howells is best known as a composer of choral music for the Church of England, and it’s at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral that I’ve been introduced to his music. What l like about Howells’s music is its subtlety and its seeming remove from all the debates in the 20th century over the future of classical music and in particular whether it had to be serial (i.e., composed according to Arnold Schönberg’s 12-tone system). Howells’s music contains enough dissonance to be readily identifiable as from the 20th century, but unlike Schönberg and his disciples Howells is never in-your-face about it. Next on Kealey’s program was his other work by a living composer, “Humoresque” by Rachel Laurin (b. 1961. She’s a Canadian organist and composer from Québec, and “Humoresque” was commissioned by French organist Isabelle Demers (whom I’ve grown to love after seeing her at previous Spreckels Organ summer festivals). It’s reportedly based on another piece by Marcel Dupré (a favorite of mine from the 1950’s Bach LP he made for Mercury in which he managed to make Bach sound French without distorting or playing false to the music) and Kealey gave it a light-hearted scherzo feel. Kealey’s printed program closed with two separate movements from Louis Vierne’s organ symphonies, an “Adagio” from the Symphony No. 3 and the finale from the Symphony No. 6. Kealey identified the Symphony No. 6 finale with joy, but there wasn’t anything joyful about its opening, which reminded me of the start of the “Baba Yaga” movement from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. As an encore, Kealey played the charming, delicate “Lullaby” by the tragically short-lived Calvin Hampton (1938-1984), one of the earliest casualties of the AIDS epidemic and a fascinating musician and composer who deserved to be around a lot longer. The opening concert was a very nice one, beautiful in its understatement and a welcome contrast to Raúl’s fireworks (I have nothing in particular against Raúl as a musician but I can’t stand his stage act!).