Robert Alan York's Spreckels Organ Concert July 3: Much More than the Usual Patriotic Sludge

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 Rodgers (misspelled “Rogers” in the program) and Lorenz Hart, and Irving Berlin. To leaven the Americana a bit the organist, Robert Alan York, played all four movements of the “St. Francis Suite” by Richard Purvis (1913-1994): “Ascription,” “Hymn to the Moon,” “Earth Carol” and “Canticle of the Sun” (one could readily imagine John Coltrane using these movement titles!), and the famous toccata finale of Charles-Marie Widor’s Symphony No. 5. (York said that Widor’s metronome marking for that is 100 and he was going to play it that way, even though most organists take it way faster – which reminded me of the way Raúl Prieto Ramírez zips through the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor; I’ve joked that some day a police officer is going to write him a ticket for musical speeding!)

Things got better in the second half of the program – for which there was no intermission; after the concert I had a chance to talk to Spreckels Organ Society president Randy Ward, and he explained that because the San Diego Park and Recreation Department now insists that all the volunteers who serve food have to have food handlers’ permits even though they’re serving only food in pre-packaged containers, they can’t have a refreshments table and therefore they’ve decided to dispense with the intermissions (also the volunteer base hasn’t recovered enough for them to have a gift shop either) – after a surprisingly leaden Gershwin tribute that included bits of Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris along with “S’Wonderful,” “Embraceable You” and “I Got Rhythm.” The second half of York’s program was a decided improvement on the first. It began with a Cole Porter tribute that was considerably expanded from what he’d listed on his program (“I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “It’s De-Lovely,” “I Love Paris” and “Begin the Beguine”) to include “Let’s Do It,” “True Love,” “Just One of Those Things,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “Night and Day” and a bit of a non-Porter tune, Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream Wedding March. York played “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” in all-out jazz style (he joked beforehand that he was going to turn the Spreckels Organ into a Hammond B-3), though like Carol Williams used to he way overused the organ’s mechanical ride cymbal. He also gave “I Love Paris” an intriguing voicing: he played three choruses and the second he did in traditional theatre-organ style, but for the first and third he made the organ sound like the sort of accordion one might hear from a strolling street musician in a Paris sidewalk café.

For the Rodgers and Hart medley he began with a song not listed on his program and one which Rodgers wrote after both Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II had died: “Do I Hear a Waltz?,” the title song from a musical Rodgers did with Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story collaborators, lyricist Stephen Sondheim and book writer Arthur Laurents, based on Laurents’ own play The Time of the Cuckoo which was also filmed as a non-musical, Summertime, starring Katharine Hepburn. Then he swung into “Falling in Love with Love,” “My Funny Valentine,” “The Lady Is a Tramp” and “Isn’t It Romantic?” (a particular favorite of mine because it was written for what I still consider the greatest musical film of all time, Love Me Tonight). Rather than take a break York went right into the Irving Berlin medley, which rather surprisingly did not contain “White Christmas” (which I think is still the most popular song of all time) but did include “Cheek to Cheek,” “Always,” “Stepping Out with My Baby,” “They Say It’s Wonderful,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business” (on which I give York major points for not trying to make the organ sound like Ethel Merman, who introduced the song; instead he used surprisingly quiet voicings) and “God Bless America,” on the last of which he invited the audience to sing along. Next came the Widor, and after it York played an improvisation on the old Shaker hymn “The Gift to Be Simple” which Aaron Copland both set as one of his “Old American Songs” and used quite powerfully in his ballet Appalachian Spring. York was surprisingly short – just 5’ 3” – and I wasn’t the only person in the audience who noticed that; he also startled me by announcing that he had a 12-year-old grandson (he hardly looks old enough to have a 12-year-old son, let alone a grandson!) in the context of a joke about how he’s going to tell the boy when he turns 16 not to drive his Corvette faster than 35 miles an hour. (He told that joke apropos of his announcement that he was going to play the Widor Toccata at its marked tempo and not speed it up.)