Jaebon Hwang Emphasizes the Organ's Gentler Side at Her Balboa Park Recital July 22

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

Last night (Monday, July 22) my husband Charles and I went to the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for the sixth concert in their 36th annual Summer Organ Festival. The organist was Korean-born Jaebon Hwang, and the first thing that struck me about her when she finally came out after an extended eight-minute introduction by one of the homely middle-aged guys from the Spreckels Organ Society board was how tall she was. There’s a stereotype about Asian women classical musicians that they’re all petite little living china dolls. Hwang is quite tall and well-proportioned. The program she selected emphasized the gentler side of the organ and mostly avoided big, spectacular blockbusters. Hwang began with a “Toccata” by John Weaver (1937-2021), and then did an intriguing program of Baroque pieces transcribed for organ rather than originally composed for it. First up in that department was an “Arioso” by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) – one would think that Bach wrote enough organ pieces organists wouldn’t feel a need to transcribe pieces he wrote for other instruments, but Bach himself moved his stuff around so much he’s about the last composer of whom you could say, “This piece must be performed on only this instrument or combination.” Besides, the Bach “Arioso” she played was in a transcription by Virgil Fox, a name to conjure with in organ history. Then she played Carl McKinley’s transcription of six pieces from the Water Music suite by George Frideric Handel (1685-1759): “Allegro vivace,” “Air,” “Hornpipe,” “Minuet,” “Allegretto Giocoso” and “Allegro Maestoso.” Fortunately Hwang has mastered the art of playing a multi-movement work and keeping her pauses between movements short enough that the crowd didn’t have the chance to leap in with inappropriate applause between them!

Then Hwang played two rather gentle pieces by Louis Vierne (1870-1937) and said the first one, too, was about water: “Naïades,” French for “water nymphs.” The second was “Clair de Lune,” and while Vierne’s piece is hardly in the same league as Debussy’s little masterpiece of the same title, it similarly evoked a tranquil mood and Hwang did it full justice. After that she played a suite of three improvisations on Japanese folk songs (“Gujyo-bushi,” “Akatombo” – which means “Red Dragonfly” – and “Tokyo-ondo”) by French organist Guy Bovet (b. 1942). This originated when Bovet was playing a Japanese tour, and on one stop he was given those three songs and told to use them as the basis for an improvisation. He did that, and then he wrote out his improvisation from memory and published it as a notated composition. Bovet’s improvisations probably would have been thrilling if we’d heard them in real time, but as a notated piece they had some really nice moments but also got a bit dull after a while. Hwang concluded her program with two pieces she frankly admitted she’d put on as crowd-pleasers: Edwin H. Lemare’s Fantasia on themes from Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen and Harold Britton’s Variations on George Gershwin’s song “I Got Rhythm.” I liked at least one aspect of the Lemare offtake on Carmen: he arranged the themes in the order in which they appear in the opera. He began with the Overture, including the “Fate Motive,” then did the Children’s Chorus, the “Habañera,” a bit of the José-Micaëla duet, the Toreador Song, a bit of the “La-ra-la” duet in which Carmen taunts José and a reprise of the Toreador Song to close. Lemare did not include the “Seguidilla” or “Chanson bohème,” and he also did not include anything from the last two acts of Carmen. Thus he avoided all the most intense emotional moments of the opera, including the Card Scene and Carmen’s death, but clearly it was Lemare’s choice to emphasize the lighter, more “poppy” tunes from the first two acts. Hwang played it superbly and evoked the colors of Bizet’s orchestration as well as she could on the organ.

The “I Got Rhythm” variations were O.K. – though frankly I wish Hwang had played a transcription of Gershwin’s own “I Got Rhythm” Variations instead. After hearing an arrangement of Gershwin’s “Strike Up the Band” at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral on Friday, July 19 played by its transcriber, Joe Rodriguez, and wishing I could have heard him do it on the Spreckels organ, which includes drums and cymbals, instead of the St. Paul’s organ, which doesn’t, I found it ironic that Britton’s “I Got Rhythm” Variations didn’t include percussion either! Still, it was a decent enough offtake on Gershwin’s classic song. The only real disappointments were that Hwang didn’t play an encore (she begged off on one with a hands-above-her-head gesture indicating she was through for the evening – I was rather hoping she’d encore with Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” as a comparison piece to Vierne’s) and she didn’t play any of her own compositions. Like most organists, Hwang started out studying piano, but even before she took up organ she sidetracked into taking composition lessons and got degrees on composition and film scoring from Korea National University of Arts before she moved to the U.S. There’s a quite fascinating YouTube video of Hwang playing one of her own compositions for solo organ, “The Seventh Day of the Creation” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_Q4kj2HRSM), and having this or another of her works on the program would have made an already good concert even better. Still, it was a nice night at the Organ Pavilion and a welcome entry at the series’s midpoint.