Young Organist Bryan Anderson Shines at Summer Organ Festival in Balboa Park July 8

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

Last night (Monday, July 8) my husband Charles and I went to the fourth concert of the 36th annual Summer Organ Festival at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. The featured organist was Bryan Anderson, a quite accomplished young organist (in his early 30’s, married to a woman, with two children already and a third on the way, he said) who serves as the musical director of St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church in Houston, Texas – though he said he isn’t a Texas native and the usual online sources don’t specify exactly where he was born. He won the 2023 Longwood Gardens International Organ Competition in Philadelphia (after placing second in the same event in 2019), and that’s how he got to play in San Diego: San Diego’s civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, was one of the Longwood Gardens judges. Anderson’s program got off to a slow start – his opener was Eric Coates’ “Dam Busters March,” a theme from a 1952 documentary about the Royal Air Force’s program during World War II to use small, light bombing planes to destroy enemy dams, which he played well enough. But the piece had been a favorite of San Diego’s last civic organist, Carol Williams, and I recall her as bringing more panache to it. Then Anderson played his own transcription of the overture to Giuseppe Verdi’s opera La Forza del Destino (“The Force of Destiny”), which was O.K. even though the three chords at the opening that are supposed to represent “the force of destiny” cut off all too quickly and didn’t have the sustaining power they do in the original orchestral version.

After that Anderson played Dudley Buck’s set of variations on the traditional Irish folk song “The Last Rose of Summer,” mentioning that Beethoven had published an arrangement of the song (just for the money; he got a large offer from a British publisher to do arrangements of Scottish and Irish songs, including something called “Sally in Our Alley”!) but not that it was used quite hauntingly in Friedrich von Flotow’s once popular but virtually forgotten opera Martha. I was a bit concerned that he was taking the lovely melody too fast when he began the piece, but soon I realized that Buck had supplied not just an “arrangement” of “The Last Rose of Summer,” but a full-fledged set of variations. Anderson’s playing and the overall spirit of his concert improved on his next piece, a transcribed improvisation on the Spanish folk song “Salamanca” by French organist Guy Bovet (b. 1942). When he introduced the piece, Anderson explained Bovet had been given the theme to improvise on at a church concert in Spain. Then he wrote out the piece from memory and played it at another Spanish church – only this was in a region where the term “salamanca” had a different meaning and referred to, as Anderson delicately put it, “the oldest profession.” Then Anderson played the Triumphal March from Sir Edward Elgar’s oratorio Caractacus, about the leader of the British resistance to Roman occupation in the first century C.E. who was captured, brought to Rome and made ready for execution – only Caractacus was able to talk the Romans out of killing him and lived out the rest of his days in Rome on a nice pension from the Roman government. Anderson’s playing of Elgar’s piece was properly “triumphant.”

Next he played two pieces he coupled, a recent novelty called “Live Wire” by Iain Farrington (b. 1977), deliberately retro since it sounded like “Kitten on the Keys” and the other semi-classical, semi-jazz novelties churned out by composers like Zez Confrey in the 1920’s; and the Andantino in D-flat by Edwin H. Lemare (1865-1934), Lemare was a British organist who settled in the U.S. and became a major concert attraction. Lemare composed the Andantino in 1888 and sold it outright to British publisher Robert Cocks for three guineas four years later. In 1921 U.S. songwriters Charles Daniels and Ben Black stole the piece and republished it as a pop song called “Moonlight and Roses.” The song became a major hit and sold over a million copies, but Lemare didn’t make any money from it until he threatened to sue in 1925. Luckily the publishers agreed to pay royalties to settle the suit out of court. The printed program listed another piece in between “Live Wire” and Lemare’s Andantino – Anderson’s own transcription of Debussy’s overture to Diane – but he didn’t play it because Raúl Prieto Ramírez had looked over his program and told him it was too long. (That’s interesting, given that Raúl’s own programs almost always run long because of his interminable and unentertaining stage raps.) I was particularly disappointed not only because Debussy is one of my favorite composers but I was looking forward to hearing a piece of his I didn’t know existed.

Fortunately, after the Elmore, Anderson played the most exciting and adventurous piece on his program: Maurice Duruflé’s “Tambourin” in his own transcription. According to Anderson, Duruflé wrote this as so-called “incidental music” (which was like film music, except it accompanied a live play) for a so-called “Primitivist” drama, but the play’s producer didn’t like it and Duruflé recycled it as the last of a cycle of three pieces which he published as for piano, two pianos, piano four-hands (two people playing the same piano at once) and orchestra. Anderson stressed how different this sounds from Duruflé’s usual output (which was either church music or instrumental music sounding much like it) and compared it to Stravinsky in general and The Rite of Spring in particular. The last two pieces on his printed program were Robert Hebble’s arrangement of “Londonderry Air,” also known as “Danny Boy,” and a “Danse Diabolique” by fellow Texan George Baker (b. 1951). Baker apparently went to France to study organ, and wrote “Danse Diabolique” in the French toccata style. But he also threw in pop tunes, notably Vincent Youmans’ “Tea for Two,” along with quoting the classic Dies Irae plainchant for a musical battle between the sacred and the profane. Anderson had more or less promised an encore, and he delivered, though it was only a brief one: piano virtuoso Marc-André Hamelin’s “Irritation Waltz,” which according to Google Hamelin based on the original ring tone for the Nokia cell phone. (My hopes that he’d dig out the Debussy Diane overture as his encore were dashed.) Bryan Anderson is definitely a major new voice on the organ and it was a blessing that we got to hear him.