Joshua Stafford Opens Balboa Park's Monday Night Concerts at Organ Pavilion July 7

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, July 7) my husband Charles and I went to the first of the nine scheduled Monday night summer organ concerts (two fewer than in most recent years) at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. The organist was Joshua Stafford, a nice-looking youngish man who’s the Minister of Music at the First Congregational Church in Columbus, Ohio. He also has a direct connection to the Organ Pavilion since he now holds the Jared Jacobsen chair at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York. Jacobsen himself had had that gig from 1996 until his tragic death in a car accident in Ohio in August 2019. Before that he’d been San Diego Civic Organist from 1978 to 1984 and still played the Spreckels Organ occasionally. Stafford got to sit next to Jacobsen at the Chautauqua organ bench and learn from him until Jacobsen’s death left the gig open and Stafford was hired as Jacobsen’s replacement in 2020. Apparently Jacobsen sang the praises of San Diego’s Spreckels Organ so intensely that Stafford had been waiting all these years for the chance to play it professionally. Stafford opened his concert with the “Scherzo Symphonique” by Pierre Cochereau (1924-1984), a French organist who improvised the piece in 1974. His recording was transcribed by Jeremy Fitsell to produce the notated piece Stafford played last night. It was a sparkling display of Stafford’s virtuosity.

Stafford’s next piece was Edwin H. Lemare’s Fantasy on Themes from Bizet’s opera Carmen, though like most such arrangements it focused on the first two acts of the opera and ignored the darker, more intense and dramatic music of the last two. The Fantasy began with Carmen’s cheery overture, interrupted as in the opera by the so-called “fate motive” that signals the dire ends both Carmen and her lover, Spanish soldier Don José, will come to. Then Stafford played the children’s chorus; Carmen’s opening aria, the “Habañera” (ironically a piece Bizet cribbed from Cuban composer Sebastian Yradier, who also wrote the song “La Paloma”); the duet between Don José and the “nice” girl Micaëla whom he abandons for Carmen; the almost too well-known “Toreador Song” (the theme for the bullfighter Escamillo, for whom Carmen leaves José); Carmen’s seduction of José; and a reprise of the “Toreador Song.” Then Stafford played yet another transcription from an opera, “Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix” (“My heart at thy sweet voice”), Delilah’s seduction song from Saint-Saëns’ opera Samson et Dalila. He followed that with a “Rhumba” by Robert Elmore (1913-1985), teacher of former San Diego Civic Organist Robert Plimpton (who replaced Jacobsen in 1985 and held the gig until 2001), that was hardly at the level of George Gershwin’s “Cuban Overture” but was a lot of fun.

Afterwards Stafford played Freddie Mercury’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” from the 1975 Queen album A Night at the Opera in his own transcription for solo organ. I was a bit surprised that San Diego’s incumbent civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, let Stafford get away with programming “Bohemian Rhapsody,” since the song is one of Raúl’s favored specialties in his own program. I don’t much like Raúl generally (he’s a fine musician but he talks way too much between selections), but I think his take on “Bohemian Rhapsody” is better than Stafford’s and comes closer to the excitement level of Queen’s original recording. Charles liked Stafford’s version better than I did, I think; he said he’s heard other organists either try to make it sound classical or try to make it sound rock, and Stafford’s version was more like musical-comedy music. (He pointed to a Dutch organ version by Bert Van Der Brink on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wd6qZS1_1aU&list=RDWd6qZS1_1aU&start_radio=1, in which he said it looked like his stop puller was trying to get him off the bench and take over. It looked to me like the stop puller was sitting at a separate keyboard for a smaller organ in the same building and actually playing parts of the song.)

After “Bohemian Rhapsody” Stafford then programmed George Gershwin’s lovely Three Preludes for solo piano, though he didn’t credit a transcriber, and while he played them eloquently the first and third preludes at least need the percussive power of the piano. (Organists trying to play Rachmaninoff’s famous Prelude in C-sharp minor have that same problem.) Then he played another opera excerpt, the “Largo” from Handel’s Xerxes (originally an aria for soprano castrato called “Ombra mai fu,” which means “There never was a shadow”), and after that he performed three pieces by the African-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912). Coleridge-Taylor was so obsessed with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem about Native American life, “The Song of Hiawatha,” that he not only composed at least four pieces based on it, three cantatas for voice, choir, and orchestra (one of which, “Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast,” was a major hit even though he sold the rights for just 15 guineas and therefore didn’t profit from its success) and one orchestral overture, he even named his son Hiawatha. The Coleridge-Taylor pieces Stafford played were “Second Impromptu,” “Idyll,” and “First Impromptu,” in that order, in transcriptions by British organist and composer Arthur Englefield Hull (1876-1928).

Stafford closed the regular part of his program with Edwin Lemare’s arrangement of Antonin Dvorák’s Carnival Overture, a high-energy piece, and for his encore he did “Tico Tico,” a Brazilian pop song by Zequinha de Abreu (1880-1935) that entered the pop organ repertory through the rendition by Ethel Smith (1902-1996). It was a fun and entertaining evening, not a concert for the ages but a genuinely good one, and Stafford’s boyish charms (despite the posted online sources playing coy about his age) added to the appeal of the show. It was also nice to see the Organ Pavilion so well filled, despite the usual annoyances of people (not too many people, fortunately!) leaving in the middle of the program. Also, Raúl Prieto Ramírez introduced the program and chewed out the audience members in advance about applauding too soon, which was decidedly nice of him, and the audience members blessedly got the message.