David Ball and Friends Give Monday Night Concert at Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park August 12

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

Last night (Monday, August 12) my husband Charles and I went to the ninth of 12 organ concerts in Balboa Park Monday night, featuring David Ball, principal organist and music director of Christ Cathedral in Garden Grove, California. The building was originally Crystal Cathedral and was famous for being made almost entirely of glass. It was the home church for maverick televangelist Robert Schuller and his “Hour of Power” broadcasts until Schuller and his father (who had founded the ministry in the first place) got into a nasty argument that led to the church going out of business. It was bought by the Roman Catholic diocese in the area and reconsecrated as a Catholic cathedral, and the state-of-the-art organ the Schullers had commissioned and got funded by philanthropist Hazel Wright was restored and put back into service. I ran across this instrument when Gothic Records released two CD’s, The Hazel Wright Organ by David Ball and Hazel Is Back! by Emma Whitten, Ball’s assistant at the church and a major organist in her own right. The CD The Hazel Wright Organ had a rather jarring cover in that it featured a photo of Ball at the organ console, but his name was in teeny-tiny type while Hazel Wright’s name was emblazoned across the top of the cover. I remember seeing this and doing a classic double-take given that the organist was obviously a man, albeit a rather stout, dumpling-shaped man at that. Last night’s concert was billed as “David Ball and Friends,” and the “friends” included Emma Whitten, French horn player and sort-of singer (more on that later) Trevor Nuckols, and two women singers, Alyce Reynaud (definitely a soprano) and her teacher Lauren McCaul (also billed as a soprano, but her voice was discernibly lower and she sounded more like a mezzo to me).

It began with a surprisingly quiet piece by French composer Gabriel Fauré (1843-1924) called “Après un Rêve” (“After a Dream”) which was a duet for Ball on organ and Nuckols on French horn. Then Ball brought on the two women along with Nuckols for Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” (the principal chorus from the cantata “Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben” – “Heart and Mind and Deed and Life”), which they sang in English. Afterwards Ball played an organ solo consisting of the Bach Prelude and Fugue in E minor, BWV 548, but with a piece by another composer – a “Perpetuum Mobile for Pedals Alone” by Wilhelm Middelschulte (1863-1943) – sandwiched in between the prelude and fugue. Then, instead of the piece listed in the program – an arrangement by Max Reger (1873-1916) of two movements from Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti (the opening “Allegro” from No. 5 and the closing “Allegro assai” from No. 1), he and Emma Whitten played a four-hands, four-feet organ duet on John Rutter’s (b. 1945) “Variations on an Easter Theme.” He dedicated the Rutter piece to his organ teacher, who was in the audience. So were a lot of other people connected to David Ball, including much of the extended Filipino family he’s from, who crowded around him on stage after the concert. (I suspect there was a setup in the announcement from the concert MC before it began, when he asked a representative of the largest family in attendance to come up on stage. He likely knew in advance it was going to be Ball’s own family.)

The next item on the program was the madrigal “Zefiro torna è di soavi accenti” by Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), a pioneer in opera (his Orfeo from 1607 is the earliest opera in the standard repertory). This madrigal is from the point of view of a woman whose boyfriend abandoned her, and she’s praying to the winds to blow him back. After that there were a couple of “Pie Jesu” movements from two Requiems, the first by Gabriel Fauré and the last by Andrew Lloyd Webber (b. 1948). I remember getting the Lloyd Webber Requiem on CD when it first came out and noting that, aside from one movement of sheer show-tune banality, it was actually quite a beautiful work, well composed and a good showcase for tenor Plácido Domingo and soprano Sarah Brightman (then-Mrs. Andrew Lloyd Webber). In between Ball and Nuckols played another added piece: Erroll Garner’s “Misty,” originally composed for a piano-and-strings album Garner had been hired to make by Mercury. (The huge success of Charlie Parker’s recordings with strings led a lot of other jazz performers, including Cannonball Adderley, Clifford Brown, Charlie Shavers and Stan Getz, to do albums with string orchestras.) Ball announced it as a tribute to 1950’s pop singer Johnny Mathis – who amazingly at 89 is not only still alive but still performing – though one can trace the various versions of this song and note how much farther from the piece’s jazz roots each one has been.

After Garner’s instrumental version with strings became a hit, Johnny Burke added a set of lyrics to it, and while Dakota Staton was the first singer to record the vocal version, it became a major hit for Sarah Vaughan in 1958. Her version was stunning and showed she spoke the musical language of modern jazz, as had Garner when he wrote the melody in the first place. A year later it was covered by Johnny Mathis, who had an even bigger hit on it even though his version showed he totally lacked Vaughan’s skill at jazz phrasing – and the Nuckols/Ball version was if anything even farther removed from jazz. Nuckols, a genuinely talented and quite good French horn player, made the mistake of singing the song as well. Aside from totally cracking on a high note, he sang with a high, reedy voice that in no way communicated the romantic mood of Vaughan’s version. They closed with Ball playing a solo organ work, the three-movement suite by Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986). It begins with a surprisingly dark Prelude, continues with a Sicilienne (which Ball explained was a ballad form from Sicily, hence the title, and often was quite dark as well, given that the words were frequently about one lover mourning the death of his or her partner) and ends with a dense Toccata. While Ball didn’t play an encore – he stayed on stage quite a while after the end, but mainly to greet various members of his family in attendance (and since his parents had been unable to come, someone in the family had used their phone to FaceTime the entire concert so Ball’s parents could at least hear and see it on their phones) – I was able to buttonhole him and get him to sign my copy of his The Hazel Wright Organ CD. He saw it and said, “There aren’t many of those left! Now, everything is digital!”