Emma Whitten and Maria Miller: Bach, Strauss and Contemporary Music Make for a Lovely Evening at Balboa Park Organ Pavilion

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Monday, July 31) my husband Charles and I went to the Organ Pavilion for the sixth out of the 11 Monday night concerts in this year’s summer organ festival, featuring a favorite musician of mine: Emma Whitten, a resident of Oceanside in San Diego’s North County and a frequent guest organist at St. Paul’s Cathedral Church in Bankers’ Hill between Hillcrest and downtown. I recently bought CD’s featuring Whitten and David Ball, another organist who’s played here a few times, recorded on the Hazel Wright Organ at what used to be the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove but, after its builders, Robert H. Schuller Ministries, went bankrupt in 2010 the building was sold to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange in 2012 and modified to accommodate the Catholic liturgy. The building was re-consecrated and reopened in 2019 and is now known as Christ Cathedral, and the organ was subsequently also restored and Gothic Records put out a pair of CD’s called The Hazel Wright Organ (Ball) and Hazel Is Back! (Whitten). Hazel Wright, in case you were wondering, was the philanthropist who donated the money to Schuller’s church to construct the organ in the first place. I’ve heard Emma Whitten a number of times at St. Paul’s and at least once before at the Organ Pavilion, on February 26, 2023, with featured soprano Maria Miller (not to be confused with 1920’s and 1930’s Czech and Austrian soprano Maria Müller). Miller also made a guest appearance last night, though she only sang two songs: “Mein Herr Marquis” from Die Fledermaus (“The Bat” – literally “the flying mouse”) and a vocal waltz from 1001 Nights, both operettas by Johann Strauss, Jr. (the waltz guy). The audience audibly lit up when Miller appeared and sang, and it’s a pity she didn’t do more.

The liner notes on Emma Whitten’s Hazel Wright Organ CD identify her as a specialist in Baroque music and also in contemporary works, and both were on display, though she actually played more contemporary music last night. The only Baroque or pre-Baroque works Whitten performed were three short pieces from a 1599 manuscript by Susanne van Soldt (one of the earliest surviving examples of Dutch organ music, though it’s not clear whether van Soldt actually composed this music or just copied it out for herself from other sources) and a long piece by Johann Sebastian Bach, the Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C, BWV 564. Otherwise, besides the selections from Strauss operettas, it was all either 20th or 21st century music. She opened with a “Rhumba” by Robert Elmore (1913-1988), teacher of former San Diego civic organist Robert Plimpton (whom I remember fondly for the sheer breadth and scope of his repertoire; you could go to Plimpton’s regular Sunday afternoon concerts for three months without hearing him play the same piece twice, which alas has not been true of his two successors!) and then played “At the Ballet” from Five Dances by Calvin Hampton (1938-1984), a New York-based organist and composer taken far too soon by AIDS. After that Whitten played a “Giga” (i.e., “Jig”) by Italian composer and organist Marco Enrico Bossi (1861-1935), originally written for flute and piano and transcribed for organ in 1953 by the legendary Virgil Fox. Whitten wasn’t through jigging for the night: her next piece was “Jig for the Feet (Totentanz)” by the multi-talented American composer and pianist William Bolcom (who along with Joshua Rifkin was instrumental in reviving interest in the music of ragtime great Scott Joplin in the early 1970’s). The subtitle “Totentanz” means “Dance of the Dead,” which is probably an indication of how difficult it is to play, since virtually all of it is sounded with the organ’s foot pedals. (A lot of people don’t realize that, unlike a piano – which is played exclusively by the hands, and whose foot pedals only alter the quality of the sound – an organ actually has pedal keys that sound notes.)

Then Whitten played the Bach Toccata, Adagio and Fugue, and afterwards she and Miller did the Strauss songs and Whitten played three selections from the Susanne van Soldt manuscript. Then she concluded with four pieces by three living composers: a “Fuga sopra un soggetto” and “Salamanca” by Guy Bovet (b. 1942), three “Arabesques” by Lebanese-American composer Naji Hakim (b. 1955) and a “Tango Toccata” by Pamela Decker (also b. 1955) written for an American Guild of Organists convention held in San Diego in 2010. The “Fuga sopra un soggetto” (“Fugue on One Subject”) was based on, of all things, Henry Mancini’s theme from the 1964 movie The Pink Panther, and it was a fun excursion into fugal discipline applied to a familiar song. “Salamanca” was a tone poem about the Spanish city and it gave Whitten a chance to use the big trumpet stops of the Spreckels Organ as well as a full complement of its reeds. The three “Arabesques” were short works with the expected Middle Eastern flavor (the movement titles were “Pastorale,” “Libianese” and “Arabesque”), and rather than pause after the final “Arabesque” Whitten went right into the Decker “Tango Toccata.” Though, according to her publisher, the work is based on a 1609 hymn tune by Melchior Vulpius (c. 1570-1615), Decker’s piece is definitely a 21st century work, full of exciting dissonances and unusual tone colors. It must have given the American Guild of Organists convention attendees a definite run for their money when it was featured in their competition, and Whitten dispatched it with real flair. Overall the concert was a lovely evening – even the weather cooperated, cooling down and making for a really pleasant time – though there were some of the distractions endemic to outdoor musical events, including a motorcycle club who decided to use this of all nights to do a tour through the park while Whitten was trying to play quietly.