San Diego Civic Organist Presents "A Sterophonic Stravaganza" with Brass Players from the San Diego Symphony August 14

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

Two nights ago (Monday, August 14) my husband Charles and I went to the eighth of the 11 Monday night organ concert at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, featuring San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez and eight brass players from the San Diego Symphony: trumpeters Christopher Smith, Ray Nowak and Jonah Levy; trombonists Kyle Covington and Kyle Mendigucha; French horn players Darby Hinshaw and Tricia Skye; and tuba player Scott Sutherland (replacing the originally scheduled Aaron McCalla. The concert was called “An Early Stereophonic Stravaganza” (and no, I have no idea why “stravaganza” was spelled that way unless Raúl, a native Spanish speaker, likes it better), and the first half was all Baroque music by obscure (and, if you ask me, deservedly so) composers: Giovanni Bonaventura Viviani (1638-1693), Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562-1621), and Giovanni Gabrieli (1554-1612). My problem with Baroque music is that the forms Baroque composers used were so rigid and strict it was relatively easy to compose professional and musically appealing Baroque pieces. It was very hard to compose at the genius level of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750: I put in Bach’s dates mainly to show he was at least two generations removed from the bores that made up this program, and music overall had improved immeasurably in those 50 to 100 years) or my second favorite Baroque composer, Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741), but it was easy enough to crank out the sort of stuff Viviani, Sweelinck or Gabrieli churned out like musical yard goods. Also the pieces were so short they didn’t seem to go anywhere or do very much of interest.

One effect Raúl and company tried for was the so-called “echo” effect, with Levy inside the building playing what was supposed to be a distant accompaniment to the other two trumpeters. They put a video camera inside the building to show where Levy was and miked him so his contribution could be heard – only they miked him too loudly, so instead of the “echo” effect we were promised, we get Levy from a left-side speaker just as loud, if not louder, as Smith and Nowak on the stage of the Organ Pavilion from the right side. Things got considerably better in the second half of the concert, with a selection listed as “Choir 3 & Basso Seguente” (“basso seguente” apparently means a more elaborate and “fixed” writing for bass than the later “basso continuo,” which gave the players on the lower instruments cues as to what the bass parts should be but allowed them freedom to improvise on top of them, in what was called “realizing” the continuo part). Raúl didn’t play on that selection; instead he conducted and brought out a younger organist, Jaebon Hwang, to play – though I wondered just how she watched his cues when she was sitting at the console with her back to him. (Did she have a mirror?) Then Raúl played an organ solo on Eugène Gigout’s Grand Choeur Dialogue – and much of the audience, which had been sitting politely through the brass choir stuff, lit up. Raúl and the brass next played a decent but unnecessary arrangement of Debussy’s piano prelude “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair,” and then instead of the next scheduled piece on the program – Edward Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” March No. 1 (the one you’ve heard ad nauseam at graduation ceremonies or movies depicting them) – Raúl pulled rank and played another organ solo, one of his mind-numbingly familiar warhorses: Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre.

After that Raúl brought the brass players back on for Astor Piazzola’s (1921-1992) “Ave Maria” – it’s odd, to say the least, that Raúl would program a Piazzola piece that isn’t a tango,the sort of thing he's most famous for – and then a world premiere by a young Korean-American composer named Texu Kim, Mir. Though Kim was born in 1980, he looks like a little kid on stage; he introduced Mir before the ensemble played it and said it was based on an old Korean legend about a snake who turns into a dragon – a good dragon, he stressed, probably all too aware that in most of the Western fiction about them dragons are villains. To me Mir sounded like the brass-heavy, interest-grabbing but rather shrill arrangements Stan Kenton played with his band in the late 1940’s, which weren’t really jazz but had enough of a jazz feel they fit in with the overall Kenton sound. The last piece was by French composer Alexandre Guilmant: the finale from his Concerto No. 1 for Organ and Orchestra, with Raúl reducing the orchestral part for brass choir. In his previous concerts Raúl has defended Guilmant against the charge that his music is cheap and superficial, and in its bombastic showiness Guilmant’s music, like Franz Liszt’s, fits Raúl’s personality perfectly. My husband Charles liked the concert better than I did – at least for the first half of the program Raúl didn’t jabber on and on and on and on the way he usually does when he’s alone on stage – though a friend of ours in the audience whom I ran into the next night at the Kearny Mesa Concert Band show said he found the opening so boring he walked out. I told him the second half got considerably better, though when I told him about Raúl’s program change and deletion of the Elgar “Pomp and Circumstance” march in favor of yet another plow-through of the Danse Macabre, he seemed O.K. with having missed it!