Clara Gerdes Plays Remarkable Concert at Spreckels Organ Pavilion July 15, Despite Lame Last Piece

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

Last night (Monday, July 15) my husband Charles and I went to the fifth of this year’s series of 12 Monday night organ concerts at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in San Diego’s Balboa Park. The featured organist was a young woman named Clara Gerdes, who we’re told at the end of her biography “lives in New Jersey with her husband and her son.” (That phraseology struck me as odd: why not “her husband and their son,” unless the boy is the product of a previous relationship of hers?) Both Charles and I were struck by how petite she is – as with some of the children who’ve won scholarships on the organ, it seemed like she’d have a hard time reaching all three manuals and the foot pedals – but she played magnificently, especially in offbeat repertoire. Gerdes opened with Johann Sebastian Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D, BWV 550, and she was quite good but not exceptional. Then, as if she’d needed the Bach work to warm up, she played a quite beautiful and properly atmospheric rendition of “Harmonies du Soir” by German composer Sigfried Karg-Elert (1877-1933). Karg-Elert is one of the quirkier organ composers because with such a self-consciously “heroic” German name, one would expect him to write loud, bombastic music along the lines of Wagner and Reger. Instead he wrote mostly quiet, pastoral pieces; he seemed to be going for the title “German Debussy,” and the French-language title he gave this piece only adds to the impression that he was looking for inspiration on the other side of the Franco-German border. Thanks to a misprint on the program, the Karg-Elert “Harmonies du Soir” was listed twice, but in place of the second listing Gerdes performed the Prelude and Fugue in B major by Marcel Dupré (1886-1971). She didn’t announce the piece before she played it, which left some audience members no doubt scratching their heads as they tried to figure out just what they were hearing, but the piece was lovely, and while there’s a YouTube video of it by Yves Castagnet (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HskcJlixGs), shot at the Nôtre-Dame Cathedral in 2017 (just two years before the catastrophic fire), I think Gerdes played it even better.

Then Gerdes played two pieces by a recently departed Canadian organ composer, Rachel Laurin (1961-2023), an “Impromptu” and “Theme and Variations” from Douze Courtes Pièces (“Twelve Short Pieces”), and after that she played a lovely work by British church composer Herbert Howells (1892-1983) called “Paean.” One of the things I like best about Howells is that his works almost totally ignore the controversy between tonality and serialism that roiled the classical-music world during his lifetime. They’re basically tonal but full of modern-sounding dissonances that mark them as unquestionably music of the 20th century, and they occupy a sound world of their own, not quite tonal but definitely not atonal. After the Howells piece (which Gerdes moved up several notches in her program), Gerdes took a five-minute intermission despite the Spreckels Organ Society’s current policy against intermissions, which they adopted when the city of San Diego demanded that the volunteers working their refreshments counter had to have food handlers’ permits. Blessedly, the people running the Spreckels Organ Society decided to shut up during her unilaterally declared intermission instead of hogging the microphone with endless hype. Following the intermission, Gerdes returned with two pieces by living composers. One was Hózhó by Native American composer Connor Chee (b. 1987), a male Navajo who’s made four CD’s of Navajo-influenced piano music along with some videos shot by a Navajo filmmaker (Michael Etcitty, Jr.) and filmed on the reservation. For more information visit Chee’s Web site, https://www.connorchee.com. Given Chee’s self-described mission as “combining his classical piano training with his Native American heritage,” one might have expected Hózhó to sound less like the sort of music that traditionally got slapped on the soundtracks of Western films to indicate the arrival of so-called “Indian” characters. The whole work is based on whole-tone scales and the kinds of pedal tones that symbolize “Indianicity” to most white American or European film composers, but it’s still an appealing piece and makes me curious about the rest of Chee’s output.

After that Gerdes played an interesting composition called “Gershwinesca,” adapted from themes of George Gershwin by Lebanese/French organist Naji Subhy Hakim (b. 1955). This isn’t your typical Gershwin medley; instead of presenting the famous melodies “straight,” Hakim carves them up and uses them as fragments for actual symphonic development. The piece is glued together by a driving ostinato that might have come from Gershwin’s Third Piano Prelude or might be original on Hakim’s part, and among the songs I recognized were “How Long Has This Been Going On?,” “Nice Work if You Can Get It,” “I Got Rhythm,” “Swanee” (Gershwin’s first big hit and his most successful song in his lifetime) and fragments of Rhapsody in Blue and Concerto in F. Then Gerdes played “Aria” by Belgian composer Flor Peeters (1903-1986), and afterwards she performed a 20-minute “Sonata on the 94th Psalm” by Julius Reubke (1834-1858). Reubke was a piano student of Franz Liszt and died of tuberculosis when he was just 24. Liszt was sufficiently broken up he wrote a letter of condolence to Reubke’s parents. According to the Wikipedia page on the piece, “The 94th Psalm Sonata is considered to be inspired by Liszt’s Fantasy and Fugue on the chorale Ad nos, ad salutarem undam [from Meyerbeer’s opera Le Prophète], Piano Sonata, symphonic poems and Wagner’s operas. It is nonetheless a very individual work composed well for the organ, requiring advanced pedal technique and a resourceful use of all the organ's departments.” Alas, in Gerdes’ hands the piece came off as a ponderous bore, though with some stirring moments, and seemed to drone on forever. Maybe Reubke would have developed into a better composer if he’d lived longer – though French composer Lili Boulanger (1893-1918) only made it to age 24 and her surviving works, some of which were also based on psalms, include several masterpieces. Despite the disappointing ending, though, Clara Gerdes’ Organ Pavilion concert was a great evening full of appealingly quirky music, excellently played.