Barbara Scheidker, Kenneth Herman Play Lovely, Charming Concert at First Unitarian-Universalist Church October 21

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

Last night (Saturday, October 21) there was a quite charming concert at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church in Mission Hills near UCSD Medical Center featuring keyboard players Barbara Scheidker and Kenneth Herman. Barbara Scheidker is a new name to me but Ken Herman has been a friend of my husband Charles and I literally for decades. We’ve often seen him on buses in the area, and he’s always fun to talk to despite – or maybe because of – his rather snobby attitudes towards culture in general and music in particular. But I’ve never heard him as a performing musician before, and he’s quite impressive. The program opened with a two-movement “Sonata for Two Organs,” with Herman playing the church’s main organ and Scheidker playing the smaller tracker organ. The work is variously attributed to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his contemporary Muzio Clementi, though musicologists are still arguing over whether Mozart had anything to do with it at all and, if so, just what parts are his and what parts are Clementi’s. I remember a two-LP set of Clementi’s four symphonies that came out in the late 1970’s and revealed him to be a genuinely impressive composer midway in style between Mozart and Beethoven, though the symphonies themselves had survived only in incomplete manuscripts and it took a lot of restoration work on the part of conductor Claudio Scimone to render them playable. (It was worth it.) Then Scheidker gave a solo performance of a miniature (one-movement, five-minute) organ sonata by Marianne von Martinez, born Anna Catherina Martines (the last name ending in “s” instead of “z” suggests she was Portuguese, but she was actually Spanish; her dad had settled in Naples, Italy and was a friend of the great opera librettist Pietro Metastasio, whose letters detailing his frustrations at the way composers tore open and screwed up his libretti made me think that if he were alive today, he’d feel right at home at a Writers’ Guild of America meeting hearing them bitch about what directors had done to their scripts). Scheidker noted that Martinez got an unusually good musical education for her time, especially for a woman (at a time when women with musical talent were generally told it could be an “ornament” to improve their marriage prospects but definitely not something they should pursue as a career), including being taught by Haydn.

Then Scheidker and Herman sat down together to play piano four-hands duets by Haydn (a divertimento called “The Master and the Scholar” – presumably the Master sat on the right at the upper end of the keyboard and gave the Scholar the grunt work of supplying the bass) and Ravel. The Ravel piece was the original five-movement version of Ma Mère l’Oye (“Mother Goose”), written in 1910 for two of Ravel’s piano students, six-year-old Mimì Godebski and her seven-year-old brother Jean . Only the piece was too difficult for them and ultimately Ravel had to farm it out to adult professionals Jeanne Leleu and Geneviève Durony to get it performed at the 1910 premiere. I’d always thought of Ma Mère l’Oye as a work for full orchestra, and the suite as just a condensation of the full ballet score. In fact, it was originally written for piano four-hands and was later (in 1912) orchestrated by Ravel and lengthened into a half-hour ballet score. So, unlike such other famously truncated ballet scores as Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, Stravinsky’s The Firebird and Copland’s Appalachian Spring, Ma Mère l’Oye’s suite pre-dated the full ballet and the piano four-hands version is actually the composer’s original. Mother Goose is one of my very favorite Ravel pieces (along with the two-handed piano concerto, the full Daphnis and Chloë ballet – another piece of ballet music we usually hear in truncated suites – the solo piano suite “Gaspard de la Nuit” and the song cycle Shéhérazade). The five movements are “Sleeping Beauty Pavane,” “Tom Thumb,” “Laideronette, the Empress of the Pagodas” (in the program for this concert she’s described as evil, but I rather resent that given that it’s my favorite part of the suite, filled with dazzling chinoiserie and double-time portions reflecting Ravel’s interest in Balinese gamelan music), “Conversations Between Beauty and the Beast” (Ken Herman joked that Scheidker would play Beauty and he’d be the Beast) and “The Enchanted Garden.” It’s a remarkable piece both in its original four-hands version and as orchestrated by Ravel (Ravel was known as a master orchestrator, though for some reason I’ve never particularly liked his version of Mussorgsky’s solo-piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition; I love Mussorgsky and I love Ravel, but their sound worlds are just too different for the piece to mesh, at least for me).

Next both Scheidker and Herman sat at two toy pianos for two movements from a suite by the American composer Amy Beach (1867-1944). Scheidker introduced the pieces with an account of the dastardly sexism that hampered her career, especially once she married Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach in 1885. Though she’d already started to establish a career as a piano virtuoso under her original name, Amy Marcy Cheney, Dr. Beach insisted that she could only give two concerts per year; that the income from them had to go to charity (i.e., she could not profit financially from them); that she also could not either take lessons or give them; and that all her published compositions had to be credited to “Mrs. H. H. A. Beach.” Apparently he imposed these insane restrictions on her because he didn’t want people to think he couldn’t support his wife financially. She tried to re-establish her performing career after Dr. Beach died in 1910, but her attempts failed because no one had heard of her except as “Mrs. H. H. A. Beach,” and I’ve read one story that it wasn’t until decades after her death that historians finally discovered her first name. The two Amy Beach pieces Scheidker and Herman performed last night on toy pianos were “Elfin Tarantelle” and “The Brownies,” both from a suite of elf- and fairy-themed music called Summer Dreams, and it made me curious to hear more of Amy Beach’s music and to hear it on full-scaled instruments instead of toy pianos – though Scheidker wore an elf’s hat during these pieces and gave a disquisition on how you can order elf’s ears from a private company online and they come with a supply of spirit gum and instructions on how to use it. (Scheidker was wearing her hair so long it was covering her ears, so even if she’d been wearing elf’s ears no one would have noticed.) Then Herman played an organ solo by African-American composer Adolphus Hailstork called Fantasy on “Brother James’s Air,” based on a British folk song and a quite remarkable and impressive piece of music. Herman introduced it by saying that Hailstork had actually been commissioned to write a piece for the First Unitarian-Universalist Church in San Diego and had come out from his home in Virginia to hear the first performance, so he thought it was appropriate to program another Hailstork composition for his concert.

After that Scheidker and Herman played another two-organ piece, actually listed on their program before the Hailstork: two movements, “Cantabile” and “Minuet,” from a suite by yet another Mozart contemporary, the Spanish composer Antonio Soler. (Mozart quotes one of his pieces in the party scene from Don Giovanni.) The concert closed with two duets with Scheidker playing piano and Herman on organ, one a set of variations by Charles Callahan on “Amazing Grace” and one the pop song from the 1950’s, “Autumn Leaves,” originally composed by Joseph Kosma (music) and Jacques Prévert (lyrics) in France in 1945 as Les Feuilles Mortes (“Dead Leaves”) and reworked into a pop song in the U.S. in 1955. Pianist Roger Williams had an instrumental hit on it and in 1956 it was used as the theme song for a film noir, also called Autumn Leaves, starring Joan Crawford and Cliff Robertson, directed by Robert Aldrich (who would later direct Crawford and Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?) and sung on the soundtrack by Nat “King” Cole, using an English lyric by Johnny Mercer. The Callahan Variations on “Amazing Grace” seemed disappointing to me, especially when compared to African-American woman composer Errollyn Wallen’s stunning orchestral fantasia Mighty River, which drew on both “Amazing Grace” and “Deep River” for thematic material. I heard the Wallen as filler on a BBC Music Magazine recording of Florence Price’s Symphony No. 3 and it blew me away; as good as Price’s symphony was, it was Wallen’s work that had the true spark of genius. By comparison Callahan’s piece sounded acceptable but earthbound, though it was still nice to hear. As for “Autumn Leaves,” it was done in a quite charming (though uncredited) arrangement that traded the main melody back and forth between Scheidker’s piano and Herman’s organ, which made a nice close to a concert that didn’t really scale the heights (except for the Ravel piece and, arguably, Hailstork’s as well) but provided a quite lovely evening’s entertainment to the 60 or so people who attended.