Spreckels Organ Pavilion's Hallowe'en Concerts, October 28 and 29

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

Two nights ago (Saturday, October 28) I went to a Hallowe’en concert at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, which turned out to be an indigestible mess consisting of San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez performing songs from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals The Phantom of the Opera and the far less well-known sequel, Love Never Dies. (You didn’t know there was a sequel to The Phantom of the Opera? Neither did I.) The songs were sung by two of Raúl’s favorite local singers, Anna Belaya and Bernardo Bermudez. Belaya, who regularly appeared at the Organ Pavilion for a while after the start of the Ukraine-Russia war (oops, sorry, “special military operation”) to kick off Raúl’s concerts with the Ukrainian national anthem and one or two Ukrainian folk songs as a show of solidarity, is billed as a soprano but sounds more like a mezzo to me. Bermudez is billed as a “bari-tenor” and he’s basically a baritone, but with a formidable upper extension that allows him to hit high notes usually considered the province of tenors. Unfortunately, the amplification on both voices was so loud they turned piercing, rendering the listening experience almost excruciating. I’ve heard both singers before at the Organ Pavilion and they’ve never sounded as ugly as they did last night, which I attribute to the sonics rather than anything wrong with their voices per se. The program consisted of songs from Phantom and Love Never Dies interspersed with showings of two two-reel silent comedies – for which local theatre organist Russ Peck replaced Raúl at the console (it’s nice that there’s one thing Raúl admits he can’t do on the organ) – and a rather leaden dance to Michael Jackson’s song “Thriller” by a local dance group that appropriately calls itself “Thriller San Diego.” From where I was sitting (at the back of the first group of seats) it was hard to tell exactly what they were doing, and before they started there was a gap of several minutes while the sound people tried to get the record going (which made me wonder why Raúl didn’t just go ahead and play the piece himself; judging from his solo performances of Freddie Mercury’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” he’d probably do quite well with “Thriller”). I was also miffed that Vincent Price’s original rap from the record was replaced with a lousy imitator just so they could sneak in references to the Spreckels Organ and the venue; I hate those little self-promoting interjections a lot of local companies do.

The films were both slapstick comedies, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s Good Night, Nurse! from 1918 and Buster Keaton’s The Haunted House from 1921. The Arbuckle film was listed in the program as Good Night Nursey and imdb.com claims Good Night Nurse without the punctuation marks as an alternate title. It’s an O.K. movie whose best scenes are at the beginning: Arbuckle, after a long night “on the town,” stumbles home drunk and brings home an organ grinder and his monkey. He stops in front of a drugstore in a pouring rainstorm and takes quite a few pratfalls, including one involving a woman played by Arbuckle’s then-sidekick, Buster Keaton, in drag. When he comes home his long-suffering wife (unlisted on the film’s imdb.com page but quite possibly Minta Durfee, Arbuckle’s real-life wife at the time) has seen a newspaper story claiming that there is now a scientific cure for alcoholism being offered at the “No Hope Sanitarium.” So she signs him up for this 1918 version of rehab, only when he gets there he finds himself in an operating room – and the surgeon who’s going to operate on him is Buster Keaton, dressed in a blood-stained lab coat that undoubtedly doesn’t inspire Arbuckle’s confidence. They put Arbuckle under with a huge jug of ether and he gets in a pillow fight in the operating room that ends with him being hailed as some sort of hero – only that turns out to be a hallucinatory dream sequence and he comes to on the operating table and flees the establishment. This film is a souvenir of the days when pillows and comforters were still stuffed with goose down, and the “snow” really flies when the pillows are tossed around. The Haunted House was made three years later, after Arbuckle had graduated to feature-length comedies and producer Joseph M. Schenck had made Keaton the star of the two-reeler unit. Arbuckle’s career was cut short in 1923 when a starlet named Virginia Rappé died mysteriously at a wild party Arbuckle was hosting in a San Francisco hotel. Paramount immediately withdrew all Arbuckle’s films from release and he became an “unperson” in Hollywood. He also underwent three trials for allegedly raping and murdering Rappé; the first trial ended with the jury split 10 to 2 for acquittal, and the second with the opposite split – 10 to 2 for conviction. After Arbuckle was finally acquitted in the third trial, the jury foreman sent a note to the judge reading, “Acquittal is not good enough for Roscoe Arbuckle.” But Arbuckle’s career was ruined, though he secretly directed a few more movies under the pseudonym “Will B. Goodrich.” In 1933 Jack Warner gave Arbuckle a chance at a comeback and starred him in six sound two-reelers; they did well enough Warner offered Arbuckle a chance at a feature, but he died before he could make one. Keaton recalled that he was invited to that San Francisco party but turned it down, and he said that was the best career decision he ever made.

Keaton and Eddie Cline, a veteran of Mack Sennett’s Keystone studio, are credited with co-writing and co-directing The Haunted House, which like Good Night Nurse is an O.K. two-reel comedy, not as good as some of the other Keatons like One Week, The Boat, Cops and The Electric House but still with a good share of laughs. Keaton plays a bank clerk in a small town who mistakenly uses glue on his fingers instead of resin. He was hoping to make the stacks of cash easier to handle, but of course the glue has the opposite effect: the money literally sticks to his fingers (and his ass when he falls on top of it during a typical slapstick scene) and there are some good laughs, especially over Keaton’s attempts to pour hot water on himself and one of his colleagues so he can peel off the glue-soaked money. The titular “haunted house” isn’t really haunted; instead it’s been rigged up with various devices by a corrupt cashier at Keaton’s bank (Joe Roberts), who’s working with a gang of counterfeiters to launder their fake money through the bank. Among the tricks the crooks use to scare people away from the house where they have their press is a central staircase that, at the pull of a lever, turns into a slide and sends the person who’s walked up the stairs down again. Also in the mix is the local Daredevil Opera Company, who as a title explains is “executing Gounod’s Faust – and he deserved it.” The singer playing the Devil in the opera somehow makes his way to the house and helps establish its “hauntedicity,” as do a number of people covered in sheets. By far the best scene in The Haunted House is its ending: Keaton’s character has died and is ascending the staircase to heaven, only St. Peter decides he isn’t worthy enough and pulls a lever that turns the stairway to heaven into a slide to hell.

Russ Peck gave a brief explanation of how accompaniments for silent movies were arranged; the biggest theatres had full orchestras (Allan Dwan, who directed the 1922 Robin Hood with Douglas Fairbanks, recalled touring with the film and rehearsing the orchestra the night before it opened to make sure they’d supply the sound effects on cue). The next rung down had organs, the rung just below that had string trios (piano, violin and cello), and the cheapest theatres just had a piano. Music publishers put out books with themes that could be used for various types of scenes, including cues called “Hurry” for chase scenes as well as love music for romantic sequences. A theatre organist would weave together familiar bits of both classical and popular music of the time, the pre-printed cues from the theme books, and his or her own improvisations. The biggest films had scores especially composed for them which were sent out along with the films in various editions based on how many musicians the theatre had available – D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation had a score by an otherwise forgotten composer, Joseph Carl Breil, though for the climactic ride in which the Ku Klux Klan rides to the rescue of white Southern womanhood against out-of-control Black sex maniacs Griffith stipulated that the music be Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” (which I’ve called one racist artistic genius paying tribute to another). Before Good Night, Nurse – a film I suspect was inspired by the success of Charlie Chaplin’s The Cure, a much better film on the same subject (a drunk goes to rehab) – Peck demonstrated the song “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” which he was going to use for a scene in which Arbuckle and company literally end up in a lake. He pointed out that in 1918 audiences would have immediately recognized the song, whereas in 2023 it’s just another anonymous song in the mix. Overall the Hallowe’en concert at the Organ Pavilion was an O.K. event that could have been a lot better (in previous years they’ve shown the 1925 Lon Chaney, Sr. version of The Phantom of the Opera with live organ accompaniment, and though I’ve seen that film innumerable times I would have liked that better than what we actually got), and I’m sick to death of Raúl’s overbearing personality – which got even more overbearing than usual last night when he decided to attempt trick voices in some of his stage raps (and his normal voice is bothersome enough as it is).

Yesterday afternoon (Sunday, October 29) my husband Charles and I went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for another special Hallowe’en concert, this one featuring two ensembles from the San Diego Youth Symphony: the “Overture Strings,” conducted by Lowri Casimiro (who, alas, was obliged to lead the ensemble in a singularly ill-fitting and unconvincing T. rex costume), and the “Symphonic Strings,” conducted by Elli Reiner (in normal clothes, thank goodness). The Overture Strings played two short pieces, an “African Blessing” arranged by Debora Baker Monday, and Doug Spata’s “Gamelan Groove.” I give them credit for picking two pieces with world-music connotations, but they suffered from the usual flaw of amateur orchestras (including ones with musicians considerably older than them!): a lack of blend and intonation problems with the strings. These two pieces kicked off the concert, and afterwards San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez played two of his all-time greatest hits: Saint-Saëns’ “Danse Macabre” (this time at least he identified Edwin Lemare as the transcriber of this orchestral piece for organ) and Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565. Raúl flatly said in his introduction that the famous Toccata and Fugue aren’t really by Bach at all – in previous concerts he’s alluded to the controversy about whether or not Bach wrote it, but this time he was unequivocal that he didn’t. Raúl’s case is flatly wrong; he claims that the earliest surviving manuscript of the Toccata and Fugue is an Italian copy from 1820; in fact (at least according to the Wikipedia page on the piece) the earliest manuscript was from a German named Johann Krebs, written sometime in the 1730’s (most likely 1735) and hence from Bach’s lifetime. What’s more, Krebs was a student of a student of Bach’s, and therefore had at least some connection to the Bach circle. And the Toccata and Fugue in D minor is a work of such staggering brilliance it’s hard to imagine anyone else at the time having written it, or being able to do so. This time around Raúl played it a little slower than he has before – usually he tears through it in under seven minutes, thereby making it sound much less imposing and less “Bach-like” – though still fast enough that my joke about his previous performances, that I keep thinking a musical cop is going to pull him over and arrest him for speeding, still applies.

Afterwards the Symphonic Strings, a slightly older branch of the Youth Symphony, came out and did the “Moderato” second movement from a piece called Woodland Dances by John Capenegro, and then a bit of the film score from Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (a movie whose script was so confusing at least two reviewers joked it should have been called At Wit’s End) by Hans Zimmer. I’d previously been impressed enough by the Room Man’s score for the film Interstellar as performed on organ by Martin Ellis in his “Music in Movies” concert August 7 as part of the summer festival on Monday nights. Alas, Zimmer clearly wasn’t as inspired by yet another Pirates of the Caribbean movie as he’d been by Christopher Nolan’s dark dystopian sci-fi piece. The Symphonic Strings were older than the Orchestral Strings and seemed more competent, though both pieces they played contained at least limited amounts of the bowed-string ensembles that had been the bane of the younger Orchestral Strings. It helps that most of the string parts in Capenegro’s Woodland Dances “Moderato” were pizzicato instead of bowed, and at times the entire orchestra sounds like a giant-sized version of the Japanese stringed instrument, the koto. Then Raúl came back with yet another warhorse: the Toccata finale from Leon Boëllmann’s Suite Gothique, before he closed the concert with yet another idiotic “humor” routine he’s run into the ground. He announces that he’s going to close the program with some country’s national anthem (“What about Haiti’s?” Charles called out) before he “happens” to settle on ours. Actually, playing the American anthem at the end of each concert has been a tradition at the Organ Pavilion at least since World War II, and I liked the way the previous civic organist, British-born Carol Williams, would lead off each of her concerts with “God Save the Queen” (albeit as “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” or “America”) and close with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a.k.a. “To Anacreon in Heaven,” as if she were going to open with the national anthem of her native country and close with that of her adopted one. Nothing in Raúl’s presentation comes near that level of class; in the program notes for the October 28 Hallowe’en concert he was described as “sizzling,” “iconoclastic,” “impeccable” and “transcendent,” whereas I’d be more likely to use words like “obnoxious,” “offensive,” “unfunny” and “boring.” I have nothing in particular against Raúl as a musician – he’s not great but at least he knows his way around the organ and he’s good to listen to once he shuts up and plays, but I can’t stand his stage persona!