Organist Greg Zelek Delivers Electrifying Performance at Spreckels Pavilion in Balboa Park August 5

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

Last night (Monday, August 5) my husband Charles and I went to one of the best concerts we’ve seen and heard all year at the Spreckels Organ Society’s 36th annual Summer Organ Festival. The organist was Greg Zelek, who’s 32 years old and was originally from a Cuban-American family in Florida (though how a Cuban got the last name “Zelek” is a bit of a mystery to me; based on the bits of biography Zelek dropped during the concert, Charles suggests that only his mother was Cuban), though he’s settled in Madison, Wisconsin. He met and married a woman there and they have a baby daughter who’s just two months old, which is why his wife stayed home with their baby in Madison while he was accompanied by his mother. He established his Cuban “cred” by programming a couple of pieces by Ernesto Lecuona, one of Cuba’s greatest composers (he led a band in Havana in the 1930’s, published quite a lot of what would now be called “crossover” music, had at least two major U.S. hits – “Malagueña,” which he played at a previous concert; and “Andalucia,” a.k.a. “The Breeze and I,” which he played last night; when Fidel Castro took power in Cuba in 1959 Lecuona fled to New York and died there four years later) and introducing them in a bit of rapid-fire Spanish. I liked a lot of things about Zelek, including that he’s drop-dead gorgeous (his photo in the program looked like the young Elvis Presley); he’s got a charming, disarming stage presence (in the filmed interview shown before the concert he said if you want to be a performing musician, you not only have to develop your musical skills, you also have to project an engaging persona on stage) without a trace of the egomania of San Diego’s resident civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez; and he programmed quite creatively, freely mixing styles, genres and historical eras instead of starting with Johann Sebastian Bach and working chronologically from there.

Zelek opened with the finale from Louis Vierne’s Organ Symphony No. 1 in D minor, then paid homage to his Latin-American roots with “Libertango” by Argentinian composer Astor Piazzola. In fact, that was a tribute to his roots in more ways than one: Zelek recalled his parents asking to hear the record of “Libertango” and he and his mother dancing around the kitchen to it as she was supposed to be cooking. Then Zelek played a series of “concert variations” on “The Star-Spangled Banner” (originally a British drinking song called “To Anacreon in Heaven”) by American composer Dudley Buck (1839-1909), and he mentioned that he’d been practicing this while his wife was pregnant with their daughter, and once the kid was born she’d come out a full-fledged American patriot. (Given the piece’s origins in a drinking song, I whispered to Charles, “I hope she doesn’t grow up to be an alcoholic.”) After that he programmed “The Skater’s Waltz” by French composer Émile Waldteufel (1837-1915), saying to the audience that though they might not know the piece by that name, they’ve certainly heard it in lots of movie scores. Then there came time for what Raúl Prieto Ramírez calls “the daily dose of Bach,” which Zelek presented in an interesting fashion. He first played a transcription of the opening instrumental “Sinfonietta” from Bach’s Cantata No. 4 and then the familiar Fugue in D, BWV 532. He joined these at a previous concert in Madison because the cantata excerpt was in D minor and thus it flowed easily into the fugue in D major. The Bach Fugue in D is one of Raúl’s specialties, but Zelek totally outplayed him on it.

After that he played Arthur Sullivan’s “The Lost Chord” – this and “Onward, Christian Soldiers” are the two best-known Sullivan pieces that aren’t from his operettas with W. S. Gilbert, and it’s a perfectly decent piece but I’ll always associate it, especially on organ, with the notorious fiasco at Charlie Parker’s funeral. (Lennie Tristano had offered to play the organ at Parker’s funeral – he’d wanted to play Parker’s music – but he was turned down and instead the church brought in a staff organist who, because the deceased had been a musician, cranked out “The Lost Chord.” It became so infamous in the jazz world that when John Coltrane was on his deathbed, he told the two people planning his memorial – his wife Alice and his best friend, record producer Bob Thiele – he wanted Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler to perform at his funeral, which duly happened.) Afterwards he played two Lecuona pieces, “Andalucia” and a “Danse” he substituted at the last minute for the originally programmed work, “La Cumparsa” (he blissfully avoided the substitutions that Raúl has become notorious for; this was the only instance in which he deviated from his printed program), and he closed the official program with the complete four-movement “Suite Gothique” by French composer Léon Boëllmann (1862-1897). I think he might have left out the second movement – the piece seemed to go straight from the first movement, “Introduction Chorale,” to the lovely “Prière a Nôtre Dame” third, though I could be wrong and he might have played the second movement, “Menuet Gothique,” after all.

Zelek wrapped up a thoroughly delightful evening with an unexpected encore: his transcription of the closing section of Rossini’s William Tell overture. That brought back personal memories of how my then-partner, the late John Gabrish, and I stumbled on the very first concert in the Spreckels Organ Society’s Monday night series. It was the late 1980’s and we’d driven out to Balboa Park for a twilight walk – and were stunned to hear organ music playing at the Pavilion when as far as we knew they only gave concerts on Sunday afternoons. The organist was Hector Olivera from Argentina, and among the pieces he played that night was the complete William Tell Overture in his own transcription. (I’ve heard several organists play this since, but I’ve never heard one with the sheer energy and panache of Olivera’s version – though Zelek could probably give Olivera a run for his money if he played the entire piece.) Overall it was a night of sheer joy at the Organ Pavilion!