Monday Night Concert Series Opens at Spreckels Organ Pavilion June 17

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (June 17) was the start of the Balboa Park Summer Organ Festival, which runs every Monday night at 7:30 p.m. until September 2 and ends with a rock tribute to The Doors. When Carol Williams was civic organist she did tributes to The Doors, who at least had an organ player as an integral part of their sound, along with David Bowie. Under the current civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, they’ve done tributes to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, to my mind much less interesting groups. Last night’s concert presented Raúl with Jeff Thayer, concertmaster (i.e., first violinist) of the San Diego Symphony, in a program of works for violin and organ, mostly transcribed by Raúl from violin-and-piano originals. At least the presence of another musician on stage led Raúl to avoid (mostly) his seemingly endless monologues on stage – though he seized on the opportunity to go crazy about the second piece he actually played, and while he’s a capable musician his stage raps really turn me off. Alas, Raúl indulged big-time in his other annoying habit: he changes his musical program at the last minute so what he says he’s going to perform in the printed program rarely even comes close to matching what he actually does play. Raúl was supposed to open last night’s concert with the Johann Sebastian Bach Toccata in F, BWV 540, and then play one of his “greatest hits,” Jean Guillou’s organ transcription of Franz Liszt’s tone poem Prometheus.

Instead he chose to play three of the four movements of the “Suite Gothique” by Léon Boëllmann, a composer born in Alsace (a province on the border between France and Germany; Germany conquered it from France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and France took it back after World War I) in 1862. The audience (not composed of big-time classical music fans, who would know better) applauded after each movement instead of holding their applause until the very end of the piece. Then he played another one of Raúl’s Greatest Hits: the last two movements, “The Hut of Baba Yaga” and “The Great Gate of Kiev” (as it was spelled then), from Mussorgsky’s suite for solo piano, Pictures at an Exhibition. Raúl went into one of his frequent forays in false musicology before he played the Pictures excerpts, claiming that Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov had a lot to do with creating the version of Pictures that we know today (Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky’s friend and colleague in the so-called “Mighty Handful” of Russian nationalist composers in the 1870’s and 1880’s, did rewrite some of Mussorgsky’s works after Mussorgsky’s death in 1881, most notoriously his opera Boris Godunov, but according to critic B. H. Haggin he left Pictures pretty much alone), and in Raúl’s organ transcription he’d incorporated some of Maurice Ravel’s 1922 orchestration. Whatever Raúl’s merits (or lack thereof) as a musicologist, his version of the last two movements of Pictures is blazingly effective and reminded me of my childhood, when I was given a copy of the original 78’s of Vladimir Horowitz’s 1949 recording and played the “Baba Yaga” movement over and over again like a latter-day heavy-metal headbanger.

Then Raúl brought in his guest artist, Jeff Thayer, for a set that was surprisingly restrained by Raúl’s usual standards. Raúl didn’t try to outplay Thayer or drown him out, and Thayer’s violin was amplified with a clip-on pickup that made it loud enough to be audible over the organ without screwing up the tonal qualities. Thayer and Raúl performed all three movements of Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 8 (Op. 30, no. 3); the “Caprice Viennois” by early 20th century violinist Fritz Kreisler (which became enough of a pop standard Paul Whiteman’s pop-jazz band recorded it in the 1920’s and featured it in their film King of Jazz); and a little-known piece by another famous violinist, Czech musician Josef Suk, “Pisen Lásky” (“Love Scene”) from his six piano pieces, Op. 7, no. 1. Then Raúl played another of his usual games with the program; it announced the second and third movements of the so-called “F-A-E” violin sonata, an intermezzo by Robert Schumann and a scherzo by Johannes Brahms, and then two pieces by Spanish violin virtuoso Pablo de Sarasate, “Romanza Andalusia” and “Jota Navarra.” But he and Thayer (though I wonder just how much Thayer had to do with it) decided to switch pieces and play the two Sarasate works first, then the sonata movements. The Sarasate pieces were a lot of fun, especially the “Jota Navarra,” in which Raúl used an attachment on the organ to simulate castanets.

The “F-A-E” Sonata was an unusual three-person collaboration between Schumann, Brahms and Albert Dietrich, a music student of Schumann’s. It was written in Düsseldorf in 1853 and began with a sonata-form movement by Dietrich. The second movement was an intermezzo by Schumann, the third a scherzo by Brahms, and Schumann returned to compose the finale. Schumann later took back the two movements he’d written for the F-A-E Sonata and added another to create his Violin Sonata No. 3, but then he went crazy and ultimately died, his widow Clara suppressed the work and it wasn’t performed until well after her death. The parts of the F-A-E Sonata we heard last night were Schumann’s surprisingly brief intermezzo (when it ended abruptly one of our friends sitting in front of us said, “Where’s the rest of it?”) and Brahms’s surprisingly energetic Scherzo, on which Raúl finally kicked out the jams and played the organ with such ferocity, power and drive he came close to drowning Thayer out after all. Overall it was a lovely concert and proved that Raúl, for all his egomaniacal tendencies, can still “play well with others” and be part of a genuinely moving collaboration instead of parading his annoying stage persona of equal parts goofiness and arrogance.