Jan Kraybill Plays "Feats for the Feet" at the Balboa Park Organ Pavilion July 29

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

Last night (Monday, July 29) the Spreckels Organ Society presented the seventh out of their series of 12 concerts for this year’s Summer Organ Festival, held every Monday night at 7:30 p.m. at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park through September 2. The organist was Jan Kraybill, a stout middle-aged blonde woman who works in Kansas City (her program bio didn’t say on which side of the river – there’s a Kansas City, Kansas and a Kansas City, Missouri) as conservator of the organ at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts (which according to its Web site is in Kansas City, Missouri, by far the larger of the two). She started playing piano at three and organ at 14, and never wanted to be anything other than a musician. She’s also organist in residence at the Community of Christ Headquarters and organist at Village on Antioch Presbyterian Church. (I’ve joked, “Who’s the most unemployable person in the world? An atheist organist.”) She’s also a motorcycle rider who owns a Harley-Davidson, and at one point she joked about being a “biker” when she talked about the Swedish composer Elfrida Andrée (1841-1929), an active feminist who had to face some pretty insane restrictions on her ability to study music. She was not allowed to attend official classes at the Swedish conservatory – though she studied privately under Niels Gade, a well-known composer of the time – and after she graduated she couldn’t get a job as a church organist because those positions were legally barred to women. Andrée became a leader in the Swedish feminist movement (good for her!) and at 26 was finally hired as the church organist in Gothenburg after the campaign she worked on got that law reversed. Kraybill played a “Cantabile” movement from Andrée’s Symphony No. 1 (she wrote two symphonies for organ – the “organ symphony” was a major genre in the late 19th century and denoted a work that was played by a single performer but exploited the many tonal colors of the organs of that time and reproduced the full palette of sounds of an orchestra – as well as two symphonies for orchestra and at least one opera) that seemed surprisingly harmonically advanced for the time, though I’ve been unable to determine from the usual online sources just when she wrote the piece.

Kraybill began her program, which she called “Feats for the Feet” to acknowledge that organists play melodies with their feet as well as their hands and also in honor of the Olympic Games currently underway in Paris, with “Variations de Concert,” Op. 1, by Joseph Bonnet (1884-1944). She had an unwelcome interruption from, of all people, herself. The Spreckels Organ Society has begun prefacing the concerts with video interviews featuring the performer who’s about to play, and due to a technical glitch her interview’s soundtrack started up again while she was in the middle of the Bonnet piece. I joked to my husband Charles, “Will Jan Kraybill please shut up so we can hear Jan Kraybill play?” She was at least good-humored about it, stopping the piece and joking that she had to accept unexpected interruptions in an outdoor venue like the Spreckels Organ Pavilion. Later she had another interruption when a person riding a motorcycle and playing loud, overbearing rap on his vehicle’s sound system drove around the Organ Pavilion. After the Bonnet, Kraybill fortunately didn’t have too many interruptions aside from the usual airplanes (in a previous year’s festival one of the organists joked that he’d been tempted to call the airport and ask for the plane schedules so he could make sure he was playing something especially loud that would drown them out – until he realized the airport authorities might think he was a terrorist and report him!). After the Bonnet she played a piece at least presumably by Johann Sebastian Bach, the “Gigue” Fugue in G minor, BWV 577. Then she played two marches, one obscure – the “Chaconne” from the First Suite for Military Band, Op. 28, no. 1 by Gustav Holst (1874-1934), a British composer despite his German-sounding name – and one familiar, the “Funeral March for a Marionette” by Charles Gounod (1818-1893). That one is familiar because Alfred Hitchcock used it as the opening theme for his Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series, though Kraybill didn’t mention that and I’m not sure that many people, especially the younger ones in the audience, would have recognized it.

Afterwards she played an “Intermezzo” from the Organ Symphony No. 6 by Belgian composer Charles-Marie Widor (1844-1937) and the “Cantabile” by Elfrida Andrée. Then Kraybill played a couple of paired pieces by living composers, the “Menuet nordique” by Gunnar Idenstam (b. 1961) and “Tambourines” by Libby Larsen (b. 1950). She joked that the “Menuet nordique” has got a number of different interpretations from listeners, including people saying it sounds like a Norwegian snowstorm and others calling it a Sahara sandstorm; what it sounded like to me was an update of Rimsky-Korsakoff’s “Flight of the Bumblebee.” Afterwards she played a sequence of four dance pieces: “Swing Five” by Johannes Matthias Michel (b. 1962) which was, shall we say, “inspired” by Paul Desmond’s jazz classic “Take Five,” recorded in 1959 by the Dave Brubeck Quartet when Desmond was its alto sax player; “Rhumba” by Robert Elmore (1913-1985), teacher of former San Diego civic organist Robert Plimpton; “Dancing Feet” by British organist and composer Noel Rawsthorne (1929-2019) – the only piece on the “Feats for the Feet” program played entirely with the feet – and Kraybill’s own arrangement of the Al Dubin/Joe Burke song “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” introduced by singer and ukulele player Nick Lucas in the 1929 film Gold Diggers on Broadway and revived by Tiny Tim in almost exactly the same arrangement 39 years later. The last piece on Kraybill’s program was “Pageant” by Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer and organist Leo Sowerby (1895-1968). Sowerby composed “Pageant” as a challenge to Gianluca Libertucci, then organist at the Vatican, and though it wasn’t written exclusively for the feet, the feet do get quite a workout in it (as do the hands). As an encore, Kraybill played the “Olympic Fanfare” by film composer John Williams (b. 1932) in honor of the current Olympics as well as just to make a convincing splash at the end of a quite impressive program that certainly covered a lot of bases.