Peter Richard Conte at the Organ Pavilion July 17: Regular Player of the World's Largest Indoor Organ Comes to Perform on the World's Largest Outdoor Organ

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 run of the World’s Fair, and not repeat a single piece. (San Diego civic organists, please take note!) Many of Guilmant’s pieces were his own compositions, and in his honor Conte’s program last night included Guilmant’s paraphrase on themes from Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabeus and two works by Guilmant’s student Marcel Dupré based on plainsong hymns, “Regina Coeli” and “Placare, Christus Servulis.” Most of Conte’s repertoire last night derived from operas or operettas; he opened with the overture from Sir Arthur Sullivan’s The Yeomen of the Guard in his own transcription (this was one of the so-called “Gilbert and Sullivan” operettas, with W. S. Gilbert being the book and lyric writer). He then played the Guilmant, and after that a lovely version of the Pilgrim’s Chorus from Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser, in a transcription by turn-of-the-last-century organist Edwin H. Lemare with edits by Conte himself.

After that Conte played the overture to Gioacchino Rossini’s opera The Barber of Seville (originally written for Rossini’s opera Elisabetta, Regina d’Inghilterra and used by him as curtain-raiser for some other operas as well; though the piece sounds too much fun to be suitable for anything other than a comic opera like The Barber of Seville, some of the operas Rossini attached it to were dramatic and/or tragic). At this point Conte was supposed to play a chorale improvisation on the German hymn “Naher, mein Gott, zu dir” by Sigfrid Karg-Elert (whose pieces are generally more subtle and low-keyed than you might expect from his name), but instead he performed the two short Dupré pieces and two pieces by organist and college musical director Robert Elmore (teacher of former San Diego civic organist Robert Plimpton), “Night Song” and “Fantasy on Nursery Rhymes” (mostly “Three Blind Mice”). Conte lucked out on the airliners that often fly over the Organ Pavilion during concerts; he was just wrapping up the soft, beautiful ending of Elmore’s “Night Song” when I heard the sound of a plane. Fortunately, it was flying relatively far from the Pavilion and Conte was able to maintain the piece’s quiet mood without aeronautical distractions. Then Conte played the Karg-Elert work, and after that he performed the Easter Hymn from Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. Mascagni composed that opera, based on a brutal and almost noir tale by Sicilian author Giovanni Verga, which takes place in a small Sicilian village. The leads are peasant Turiddu, teamster Alfio, Turiddu’s girlfriend Santuzza, Lola (Alfio’s wife and the woman Turiddu wants to dump Santuzza for), and Lucia (Turiddu’s mother, who tries in vain to talk some sense into him). Because Santuzza has been barred from setting foot inside the local church due to her unsanctioned, non-marital relationship with Turiddu, she has to wait outside while the church holds its Easter service, but she hears the hymn outside the church and starts singing along with it. (Eventually Alfio catches on that Turiddu has a crush on Alfio’s wife Laura, challenges him to a duel, and kills Turiddu.)

Cavalleria Rusticana was premiered in 1890 and was the biggest hit of Mascagni’s career; though he lived until 1945 (and, like Richard Strauss under Hitler, he had to crank out a lot of fascist potboilers at Mussolini’s insistence just as Shostakovich and Prokofieff had to write similar “socialist-realist” pieces for Stalin), he never wrote another opera of anywhere near its popularity. After that Conte was scheduled to perform a Chaconne in E minor by German composer Dietrich Buxtehude (born two generations before Johann Sebastian Bach, who idolized him), but instead he decided to substitute a far more famous work by Chopin, the “Military” Polonaise No. 1 (the second-best known of Chopin’s polonaises, after the “Heroic” No. 6, and the piece used as the opening theme for Ernst Lubitsch’s marvelous 1942 anti-Nazi film satire To Be or Not to Be). Then Conte closed his program with a five-movement suite from an opera even better known than Cavalleria Rusticana: Georges Bizet’s Carmen. Rather than play any of the standard orchestral suites from Carmen, Conte did one by Edwin H. Lemare that consisted of the opera’s brilliant overture (alas, without the “Fate Motive” that steals in under the main theme and indicates to the audience that this is going to be a dark tale of love, obsession, revenge and murder, not a happy trip to sunny Spain), the children’s chorus from Act I, the “Habañera” (the impudent song with which Carmen introduces herself and tells of her philosophy of life and love: “Love is like a rebellious bird/And it has never heard of law/If you love me, I don’t love you/If you don’t love me, look out for yourself!”), a bit of the duet between soldier Don José and Micaëla (the “good girl” in José’s life to Carmen’s “bad girl”), and the “Toreador Song” sung by the bullfighter Escamillo, whom Carmen dumps José for in the last act only to get herself murdered by José in a jealous rage. Here, as in his other performances of hit tunes from operas, Conte was magnificent and fun, ably presenting the music in all its swagger and drive.

Bizet tragically died at 36, shortly after the premiere of Carmen, having no idea his last work would become one of the most popular and best-loved operas of all time. As I’ve said before, we’re with Bizet where we would be with Verdi if he’d died right after writing Rigoletto: a few operas of promise, a deathless masterpiece, and then silence. I could fault Lemare’s Carmen arrangement for not giving much of a sense of the richness of Carmen or the darkness of its story (and for not containing any of the opera’s music past the middle of Act II of four), but that would be beside the point: Lemare wanted to emphasize the score’s pop hits, and he did that beautifully, creating a showpiece for organ that deftly exploits the resources of those big symphonic instruments. When the Spreckels Organ was built in 1914 Lemare was at the peak of his career (maybe just a bit down from it), and it was a time when organ builders, following the example of the Frenchman Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, were creating instruments with as many symphony-orchestra colors as they could – and French composers like Charles-Marie Widor and Louis Vierne were writing pieces for solo organ which they called “symphonies” instead of “sonatas” because they were meant to exploit the orchestral richnesses of Cavaillé-Coll’s organs. Peter Richard Conte’s usual gig is as organist for the Macy’s store in Philadelphia where the Wanamaker organ still exists today – after its debut at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair John Wanamaker bought it, had it shipped in 17 freight cars to Philadelphia and installed in his store – and it’s considered the largest indoor organ which is still fully functional. (There’s an even larger indoor organ in a convention center in Atlantic City, New Jersey, but the people who built that one had the bad luck to do so just as the 1929 Depression hit, so the building was a white elephant from the get-go, the organ fell into disrepair and wasn’t played after 1957, and though a modern program to restore it was undertaken, so far they’ve only fixed the Great section.) So, as in 2019, Peter Richard Conte, whose regular gig is playing the world’s largest indoor organ for two 45-minute concerts a day, six days a week (he gets Sundays off), came out to San Diego to play the world’s largest outdoor organ!