Soprano Alisa Jordheim Shines at Organ Pavilion's "Holiday Magic" Concert December 14

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

Last Saturday, December 14 my husband Charles and I went to Balboa Park for what was billed as a “Holiday Magic” concert at the Organ Pavilion, featuring San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez, soprano Alisa Jordheim (who’s quite good, well above the level of most wanna-be opera singers who perform in venues like this), the San Diego Opera Chorus conducted by Bruce Stasnya, and Marco Clavel and Carlos Herrera from the Marie Hitchcock Puppet Theatre. The last two I could definitely have done without; they displayed two rather formless puppets and told some of the worst so-called “jokes” of all time! I can only hope that the scripts they perform at the Marie Hitchcock Puppet Theatre are better than their material last night! Though the concert’s advertised start time was 5:30 p.m., the puppet masters and their insufferable material actually began at 5, much to my dissatisfaction. I’d gone to the concert having no idea how long it would be – I was really worried that it would stretch out so long that we’d have a hard time getting home in time to watch Eddie Muller’s Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” presentation of a 1961 West German film called Schwarzer Kies, which means “Black Gravel” – but in the end it only lasted about an hour and 15 minutes once the puppeteers stopped their inane gabbling and the music started. Raúl complained about being under a tight time regime that forced him to skip three items on his printed program – the arias “Rejoice Greatly” from Handel’s oratorio The Messiah and “Mein Herr Marquis” from Johann Strauss, Jr.’s operetta Die Fledermaus, to be sung by Jordheim with Raúl’s organ accompanying, and the organ-only finale to Charles-Marie Widor’s Symphony No. 6. At least this time, as Charles joked later, he was running late and had to drop items from his program because he was on a tight schedule and not because he’d wasted so much energy and time telling unfunny anecdotes about Buxtehude’s allegedly ugly daughter and the other dull and awful tales that clutter up Raúl’s solo concerts. Admittedly he’s generally on his best behavior when there are other people on the program.

The concert opened with Raúl soloing on the “Grand Choeur Dialogué” by French organist and composer Eugène Gigout (1844-1925) – and for once he was actually French, not a French-speaking immigrant from Belgium. Then he brought on Alisa Jordheim for three pop Christmas songs, “The Christmas Song” by Mel Tormé and Robert Wells; “White Christmas” by Irving Berlin; and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane. Though her voice didn’t have the wondrously prayerful quality Judy Garland brought to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (it’s not terribly surprising Judy sang it better than anyone else given that it was written for her!), her voice was perfect for this material and she sang it all with real feeling and musical as well as emotional intensity. Jordheim followed up with two arias: Gretel’s dream sequence, “Wo bin ich?,” from (the original) Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel und Gretel and the Snow Maiden’s aria from the prologue to Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Snow Maiden. (Charles joked the opera is a predecessor to the song and TV show Frosty the Snowman because, like Frosty, the Snow Maiden melts at the end.) I was a bit surprised that Jordheim sang the Hansel und Gretel aria in the original German when the Metropolitan Opera routinely does this score in English translation (obviously treating it as an opera for children), but she has quite a lovely voice and she did full justice to the material. Then Raúl played a piece by Johann Sebastian Bach – not the one he’d listed in his program (the Toccata in F, BWV 540) but a Toccata in C, BWV 564 and the one in the Bach Werke Verlag catalog just before the famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, though I believe he just played the toccata and not its normally accompanying fugue. After that the San Diego Opera Chorus, featuring a large Black man in the back wearing a red sweater that proclaimed him to be Santa Claus and a middle-aged white woman in a white fur-lined jacket, came out and joined Jordheim for two big numbers, Pietro You’s “Gesú Bambino” (the other Christmas song that contains the Latin words “Venite adoremus”) and Adolphe Adam’s “O Holy Night,” before she exited the stage and the choir and Raúl’s organ closed out with the “Hallelujah!” chorus from Handel’s The Messiah.

All in all, it was a nice night of music. It didn’t storm the heavens, but then it wasn’t intended to, either. Charles was put out by some aspects of the program, including the fact that the puppets were clearly there to entertain children while the rest of the program wasn’t especially “family-friendly,” and though the program was called “Holiday Magic” the focus was almost exclusively on Christmas. There weren’t any Hanukkah songs (not that there are that many Hanukkah songs – apart from “The Dreidel Song” I can’t think of one, and the efforts of Ernest Bloch and other 20th Century Jewish composers to create monumental works for their religion the way Bach and Handel had done for Christianity don’t seem to have extended down to creating a corpus of Hanukkah carols), and there weren’t any secular winter songs like “Jingle Bells” or “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” either. (Ironically, this afternoon I was inside the CVS at City Heights and they were playing on the store’s sound system a Spanish-language version of “Jingle Bells” that included the word “Navidad” – so maybe the English “Jingle Bells” isn’t explicitly a Christmas song but the Spanish version, or at least that Spanish version, is.) Charles had also asked me what’s the most recent Christmas-themed song that’s become a standard; I said it was Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” but he didn’t think that counted because it’s not a song amateurs get together and sing on their own. I liked the concert considerably better than Charles did, I think, and as I noted before both of us liked that Raúl didn’t clog up the proceedings with his usual unfunny anecdotes (though one could say he simply left that part of the program to the puppeteers!) but, as usual when he’s on a program that includes other people, he was on his best behavior. Charles and I also hadn’t really prepared for the cold weather; though it was nowhere nearly as bad as the infamous 100th anniversary concert Carol Williams performed on New Year’s Eve 2014, for which Charles and I both took the blankets we’d brought to sit on and instead wrapped them around ourselves in a vain attempt to keep warm, this time we didn’t bring blankets at all and could really have used them. He wore both a sweater and a jacket during the later stages of the concert, and I did something I almost never do: I wore an undershirt.