Raúl Prieto Ramírez Gives Third Monday Organ Concert. July 10
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 a German country village playing a magic violin that gives the local residents an irresistible urge to dance and couple at random until they lose consciousness after expressing their lusts. Raúl said that Lenau resented Goethe for having allowed Faust to escape eternal servitude to the Devil and ascend to heaven at the end – though in the original Faust Faust’s girlfriend Gretchen (renamed “Marguerite” in Gounod’s opera Faust and “Margherita” in Boïto’s Mefistofele) ascends to Heaven while Faust is dragged to hell. Apparently Lenau was responding to the posthumous publication of Faust, Part Two in 1832, one year after Goethe’s death, in which Faust finally escapes his contract and ascends to Heaven, though without Gretchen.
Raúl’s concert last night began with one of his favorite selections, the last two movements – “The Hut of Baba Yaga” and “The Great Gate at Kiev” (I should probably call it “Kyiv” these days!) – from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Charles and I have heard him play these many times already, and if anything last night’s performance seemed a bit lackluster. I suspect it was because he usually programs these pieces at the end of a program, when he’s fully warmed up, and it’s unusual for him to start with them (though I can’t hear “Baba Yaga” without thinking back to my childhood, when I was given a 78 rpm set of Vladimir Horowitz’s recording of Mussorgsky’s original piano version and “Baba Yaga” became my favorite part of the work: I played it almost literally to death). Next on Raúl’s program was a 2018 work called “Pahdo” by Korean-American composer Texu Kim, who was there last night and helped introduce the piece. “Pahdo” means “ocean waves” in Korean, and the piece is a depiction of ocean waves from the Pacific as they hit the east coast of Korea and then recede out to sea. For a while Kim was making his piece seem like a modern-day rehash of Debussy’s La Mer (1905), which it is and it isn’t; it lacks the sheer breadth and scope of Debussy’s masterpiece but it has some of the same playful, fun spirit. Texu Kim has been named a sort of composer in residence for this year’s series of concerts, and another work of his, “Mir,” will be performed August 14 at a concert in which Raúl will be joined by another organist, Jackson Hwang, and eight brass players from the San Diego Symphony. Because it was a relatively new work for him (Raúl said it was the piece’s West Coast premiere), he played it from a printed score instead of from memory, and Charles was gratified that the score was actually on paper instead of a computer tablet.
After that came a Johann Sebastian Bach work – Raúl almost always makes it a point to program something by Bach at every concert, and this time it was the Toccata in F, BWV 540. Once again he played from a printed score instead of from memory (when Raúl first started at the Organ Pavilion his scores hadn’t arrived from Barcelona, Spain yet and he got in the habit of playing from memory, which became so much of a trademark for him that it’s still a surprise when he resorts to a score), and in his introduction he hailed the mathematical perfection of the score as it looks on paper while simultaneously saying that perfection doesn’t get in the way of it being an emotionally satisfying piece of music. Next on Raúl’s program was Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1, which Liszt originally wrote for orchestra and then transcribed for piano. Raúl played his own transcription for organ (though he didn’t make it clear whether he’d worked from the original orchestral version or from Liszt’s own piano reduction), and frankly the music of Liszt brings out the best in him. It’s showy and bombastic the way Raúl loves it, but behind the showmanship and bombast there’s also real musical substance there.
After that Raúl played his own transcription of Ravel’s Bolero, which had been the featured work on the program given that he called the concert “Ravel’s Bolero and Romantic Tour-de-Force.” Raúl announced before he played Bolero that he was cutting it down from 20 minutes to 15 (though the most recent YouTube post of Ravel’s own recording of Bolero, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JKXbTHSTvk&t=0s, times out at 16:25), and it was a surprisingly dull transcription. As anyone who knows the work at all will remember, Bolero is just one theme repeated over and over, but with an ever-changing kaleidoscope of orchestral colors as well as a gradual increase in volume. It’s hard to do that on the organ, even one as large as the Spreckels Organ in Balboa Park with its multiplicity of tone colors, and Raúl basically played the Big Tune over and over with surprisingly little variation in registration or coloristic effects. Nonetheless, Raúl’s Bolero was fun, and what Leonard Bernstein said of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue applies even more to Bolero: you can cut it as much as you like and you won’t hurt it any except to make it shorter. (It’s easier to cut Bolero than the Rhapsody in Blue because Gershwin’s piece has three main themes – and you lose the effect if you don’t at least reference all of them, no matter how much you’ve abbreviated the piece – while Bolero just has one.)
After that came the biggest disappointment of the evening: for his final work Raúl had listed the Prelude to Act I of the opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg by Wagner, but because he’d had to stay up late to get a recalcitrant daughter to sleep he decided he hadn’t practiced the Wagner enough. Instead he substituted another old favorite of his that Charles and I had heard him play only the day before at the Sunday afternoon concert: the first movement of Charles-Marie Widor’s Organ Symphony No. 6. (A work for solo organ would ordinarily be called a sonata, but in the late 19th century French organist-composers, inspired by the elaborate “symphonic” organs built by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, started calling their organ works “symphonies” because the Cavaillé-Coll organs could emulate all or most of the instruments of a symphony orchestra.) It was a well-done piece and Raúl actually put more energy and emotion into it than he had the day before, when it was just another routine Sunday afternoon concert selection. I told Charles after the concert that Raúl had (mostly) been on his best behavior, and it’s true; though I still can’t stand his stage persona, last night he did a good job of controlling the more obnoxious parts of his public personality, and he played the music more than competently and kept his announcements within reason.
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 a German country village playing a magic violin that gives the local residents an irresistible urge to dance and couple at random until they lose consciousness after expressing their lusts. Raúl said that Lenau resented Goethe for having allowed Faust to escape eternal servitude to the Devil and ascend to heaven at the end – though in the original Faust Faust’s girlfriend Gretchen (renamed “Marguerite” in Gounod’s opera Faust and “Margherita” in Boïto’s Mefistofele) ascends to Heaven while Faust is dragged to hell. Apparently Lenau was responding to the posthumous publication of Faust, Part Two in 1832, one year after Goethe’s death, in which Faust finally escapes his contract and ascends to Heaven, though without Gretchen.
Raúl’s concert last night began with one of his favorite selections, the last two movements – “The Hut of Baba Yaga” and “The Great Gate at Kiev” (I should probably call it “Kyiv” these days!) – from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Charles and I have heard him play these many times already, and if anything last night’s performance seemed a bit lackluster. I suspect it was because he usually programs these pieces at the end of a program, when he’s fully warmed up, and it’s unusual for him to start with them (though I can’t hear “Baba Yaga” without thinking back to my childhood, when I was given a 78 rpm set of Vladimir Horowitz’s recording of Mussorgsky’s original piano version and “Baba Yaga” became my favorite part of the work: I played it almost literally to death). Next on Raúl’s program was a 2018 work called “Pahdo” by Korean-American composer Texu Kim, who was there last night and helped introduce the piece. “Pahdo” means “ocean waves” in Korean, and the piece is a depiction of ocean waves from the Pacific as they hit the east coast of Korea and then recede out to sea. For a while Kim was making his piece seem like a modern-day rehash of Debussy’s La Mer (1905), which it is and it isn’t; it lacks the sheer breadth and scope of Debussy’s masterpiece but it has some of the same playful, fun spirit. Texu Kim has been named a sort of composer in residence for this year’s series of concerts, and another work of his, “Mir,” will be performed August 14 at a concert in which Raúl will be joined by another organist, Jackson Hwang, and eight brass players from the San Diego Symphony. Because it was a relatively new work for him (Raúl said it was the piece’s West Coast premiere), he played it from a printed score instead of from memory, and Charles was gratified that the score was actually on paper instead of a computer tablet.
After that came a Johann Sebastian Bach work – Raúl almost always makes it a point to program something by Bach at every concert, and this time it was the Toccata in F, BWV 540. Once again he played from a printed score instead of from memory (when Raúl first started at the Organ Pavilion his scores hadn’t arrived from Barcelona, Spain yet and he got in the habit of playing from memory, which became so much of a trademark for him that it’s still a surprise when he resorts to a score), and in his introduction he hailed the mathematical perfection of the score as it looks on paper while simultaneously saying that perfection doesn’t get in the way of it being an emotionally satisfying piece of music. Next on Raúl’s program was Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1, which Liszt originally wrote for orchestra and then transcribed for piano. Raúl played his own transcription for organ (though he didn’t make it clear whether he’d worked from the original orchestral version or from Liszt’s own piano reduction), and frankly the music of Liszt brings out the best in him. It’s showy and bombastic the way Raúl loves it, but behind the showmanship and bombast there’s also real musical substance there.
After that Raúl played his own transcription of Ravel’s Bolero, which had been the featured work on the program given that he called the concert “Ravel’s Bolero and Romantic Tour-de-Force.” Raúl announced before he played Bolero that he was cutting it down from 20 minutes to 15 (though the most recent YouTube post of Ravel’s own recording of Bolero, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JKXbTHSTvk&t=0s, times out at 16:25), and it was a surprisingly dull transcription. As anyone who knows the work at all will remember, Bolero is just one theme repeated over and over, but with an ever-changing kaleidoscope of orchestral colors as well as a gradual increase in volume. It’s hard to do that on the organ, even one as large as the Spreckels Organ in Balboa Park with its multiplicity of tone colors, and Raúl basically played the Big Tune over and over with surprisingly little variation in registration or coloristic effects. Nonetheless, Raúl’s Bolero was fun, and what Leonard Bernstein said of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue applies even more to Bolero: you can cut it as much as you like and you won’t hurt it any except to make it shorter. (It’s easier to cut Bolero than the Rhapsody in Blue because Gershwin’s piece has three main themes – and you lose the effect if you don’t at least reference all of them, no matter how much you’ve abbreviated the piece – while Bolero just has one.)
After that came the biggest disappointment of the evening: for his final work Raúl had listed the Prelude to Act I of the opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg by Wagner, but because he’d had to stay up late to get a recalcitrant daughter to sleep he decided he hadn’t practiced the Wagner enough. Instead he substituted another old favorite of his that Charles and I had heard him play only the day before at the Sunday afternoon concert: the first movement of Charles-Marie Widor’s Organ Symphony No. 6. (A work for solo organ would ordinarily be called a sonata, but in the late 19th century French organist-composers, inspired by the elaborate “symphonic” organs built by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, started calling their organ works “symphonies” because the Cavaillé-Coll organs could emulate all or most of the instruments of a symphony orchestra.) It was a well-done piece and Raúl actually put more energy and emotion into it than he had the day before, when it was just another routine Sunday afternoon concert selection. I told Charles after the concert that Raúl had (mostly) been on his best behavior, and it’s true; though I still can’t stand his stage persona, last night he did a good job of controlling the more obnoxious parts of his public personality, and he played the music more than competently and kept his announcements within reason.
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