Dr. Nicole Simenthal Plays Passionate, Intense Bach Program at Spreckels Organ Pavilion July 24

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, and it was quite impressive.) Dr. Simenthal was a heavy-set woman with long, straight blonde hair; she wore a full-length black dress and a white chiffon cape over it that got in the way of the camera that was supposed to be showing a close-up shot of her feet at work on the organ pedals. (Fortunately, when they realized what was happening the stage crew at the Spreckels moved the camera so we got a side view of her feet unencumbered by the cape.)

She began her program with the Prelude from the Prelude and Fugue in E-flat, BWV 552, and ended it with the Fugue from that same piece. In between she alternated big preludes and fugues – in G, BWV 541; in E minor, BWV 548; in D, BWV 532 – with shorter chorale preludes: on “Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland” (“Now come, the gentle Savior”), BWV 659; “Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr” (“Glory to God Alone in the Highest”), BWV 664; and “Jesus Christus, unser Heiland” (“Jesus Christ, our Savior”), BWV 688. (The last took the place on the program of another Bach setting of “Allein Gott,” BWV 676, which she had originally planned for that slot.) Dr. Simenthal explained that she chose that particular program because she wanted to play a sequence that would follow a traditional Lutheran church service, For the first two pieces I found she was overdoing the delicacy; she was picking registrations that made the music sound light and flexible, creating an enjoyable sound world that charmed and entertained but at the cost of the power and profundity that is also a part of Bach’s music. Midway through her program – at the juncture between the prelude and fugue of BWV 548 – she suddenly turned up the intensity and for the rest of the evening played Bach the way I think he should be played: with power, majesty and raw emotion. Though she avoided a few important aspects of Bach’s musical universe – there were almost no transcriptions (some of the pieces came from Bach’s Clavierübung – “Organ Mass” – volume 3, though in most of Bach’s works for keyboard he drew a distinction between für Klavier, meaning a harpsichord or clavichord, and für Orgel), and none of Bach’s music for orchestra or chorus (by chance I’d listened at home to two of Bach’s violin concerti before Charles and I left for the concert) – the parts of Bach she did play she played with consummate artistry and skill.

Though her spoken introductions to some of the pieces were on the didactic side – she makes her living as a teacher and lecturer as well as a performer, and it showed; some of her comments were so technical they probably sailed over the heads of most of the non-musicians in the audience – her playing was finely honed and intense. She didn’t fall into the trap of a lot of Bach playing these days of becoming so enthralled with the mathematical precision of Bach’s music she lost sight of its emotional message; she kept the two sides of Bach’s art in balance. For her encore she joked that she was going to answer the question she figured a lot of people in the audience were asking about her – “Doesn’t she play anything other than Bach?” – with a powerful, hell-bent-for-leather performance of an organ étude called “Tierces” (“Thirds”) by British organist and composer David Briggs (b. 1962), number four in a series of six concert études (the word means “studies”) for organ. Briggs has recorded extensively, including transcriptions of at least three symphonies by Gustav Mahler (Nos. 2, 3 and 8) as well as organ symphonies by Widor and Vierne and at least one compilation of his own works. Dr. Simental tore through “Tierces” stunningly, and the piece itself sounded nothing like Bach but had some of the same spirit of exploration and demented virtuosity. It was an excellent capstone to an already incredible program, one of the best things Charles and I have heard at the Organ Pavilion in quite a while.