Music Magg

Fifth Concert in the 35th Annual Monday Night Concert Series at 7:30 p.m. by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, July 24) my husband Charles and I attended the fifth of this year’s 11 Monday night concerts at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, featuring a Chicago-born, Ohio-based organist named Dr. Nicole Simenthal playing an all-Bach program called “Bach’s Musical Universe.” And in case you were wondering, that was all Johann Sebastian Bach – not any of the other musicians in Bach’s family, including the four of Bach’s 20 children that had significant musical careers of their own: Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach and Johann Christian Bach. (Mozart was particularly fond of the music of Bach’s kids, including the Italian-language operas of Johann Christian; I’ve heard his Telemaco , based on the story of Odysseus’s son Telemachus

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, July 17) the Spreckels Organ Society held the fourth of the 11 Monday night concerts in their 35th annual summer organ festival – though there wasn’t one in 2020 because of the COVID-19 lockdowns and the 2021 festival was hastily thrown together and occurred later in the year than usual. This time the organ player was Peter Richard Conte, who’d previously performed at the 2019 festival, and whose regular gig is playing the Wanamaker Organ in Philadelphia. The Wanamaker Organ has a fabled history of its own: it was built in 1904 in St. Louis, Missouri for the St. Louis World’s Fair (the one Judy Garland and her family were eagerly anticipating in the 1944 MGM film Meet. Me in St. Louis ), and they brought French organist Alexander Guilmant to play it. Guilmant had such a large repertoire he was able to play a concert every day during the three-month ru

Civic Organist Plays Well and Keeps His Obnoxious Stage Personality Mostly Under Wraps by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, July 10) my husband Charles and I went to the third of the 11 Monday night organ concerts as part of this year’s Summer Organ Festival. This concert featured San Diego’s civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, whom I’ve already said enough nasty things about over the years since the board of directors of the Spreckels Organ Society inflicted him upon us in 2018. As a musician, Raúl is professionally competent; as a stage presence, he’s infuriating. Raúl drones on and on and on during his introductions and frequently garbles basic facts in them – like he did last night when he tried to explicate the difference between Goethe’s Faust and Nikolaus Lenau’s prior to playing Liszt’s “Mephisto Waltz No. 1,” based on a scene in Lenau’s Faust in which the Devil shows up at

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved Last night's (Monday, July 3) concert at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion, featuring organist Robert Alan York, was actually one of the better ones I’ve heard there. My husband Charles had to work last night – in fact he had to work from 3:30 p.m. to closing at midnight – and so he missed it, though he didn’t think he’d be missing much because the concert program looked like the usual pre-Fourth of July patriotic sludge: interminable medleys of military themes (including all five of the American service anthems, since there isn’t one yet for Donald Trump’s rump “Space Force”), an opening presentation of “The Star-Spangled Banner” (a.k.a. “To Anacreon in Heaven”) and medleys of the usual suspects among the Great American Songbook composers: George M. Cohan (“I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “Over There” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag”), George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodge