Richard Hills Shines in Second Balboa Park Monday Night Organ Concert July 14

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

Last night (Monday, July 14) my husband Charles and I went to the second concert in the Monday night summer series the Spreckels Organ Society puts on every year in Balboa Park (though there wasn’t one in 2020 and a late-in-the-year one in 2021 due to the COVID-19 lockdowns). The concert was a sheer delight! It was given by British organist Richard Hills, who’s described in his official bio as “one of the very few musicians truly to have bridged and mastered the divide between the world of the classical organ and that of the theatre organ.” Actually, his program at the Spreckels Organ was more heavily weighted towards the theatre organ side, and it opened with a piece that itself bridged the gap. It was an organ transcription of the overture to the 1831 operetta Zampa by French composer Ferdinand Hérold (1791-1833). It not only sounded very much like the sort of music used to accompany action scenes in silent films, it probably was used for silent-film scores by a lot of theatre organists “in the day.” Then there was a charming, delicate piece called “Fleurette” (“Little Flower”) by American operetta composer Victor Herbert (1859-1922) which Herbert himself recorded for the Edison cylinder company in 1910. After that Hills played one of the gems of the evening, a full three-movement work called Spanish Suite: In Malaga by British light-music composer Frederic Curzon (1899-1973). Curzon wrote Spanish Suite: In Malaga in 1935 and seemed to have a real interest in Spanish music and culture even though, according to his Wikipedia page, he never lived or even visited there. The three movements are called “Spanish Ladies,” “Serenade to Eulalie,” and “Cachucha.”

The next item on Hills’s program was Thomas “Fats” Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” and given that Waller was himself a great organist as well as a great pianist, it’s an ongoing source of frustration to me that theatre organists who play Waller’s songs give them the usual thick, heavy theatre-organ voicings instead of the lighter, more transparent colors Waller himself used when he made his organ records. Though he still didn’t play “Ain’t Misbehavin’” on organ as well as Waller would have, Hills did a lot better than most and really made the piece swing. Then Hills swung more towards the “classical” side of his repertory with a quiet “Villanelle” by British composer John Ireland (1879-1962) – a name that made Charles chuckle because there was an American movie actor of that name, whose dates were 1914-1992 – which Hills preceded with a warning that the delicate colors of Ireland’s music might be a bit hard to hear if planes started flying overhead. There were a couple of planes that flew past while Hills was playing “Villanelle,” but fortunately they were flying low in the sky and at relatively low speeds so they weren’t all that bothersome. Next Hills played another piece on the cusp between classical and “theatre”: the big “Coronation March” from Giacomo Meyerbeer’s (1791-1864) 1849 opera Le Prophète. The story is about a young man who falls in with a gang of religious dissidents, the Anabaptists, who plot to pass him off as John of Leyden, essentially the Second Coming of Christ. The opera’s big scene is the coronation of John of Leyden as ruler of the German city of Münster. The Anabaptists have told their followers that John was literally created by God and therefore has no earthly parents, which forces him to pretend not to know his mother Fidès when she shows up at his big ceremony and tries to greet him. I’ve long had mixed feelings about Meyerbeer’s music; at times it sounds beautiful and noble, while at other times it sounds like mood music for Cecil B. DeMille.

Hills’s next selection was a medley of pieces from Sigmund Romberg’s (1887-1951) operetta The Desert Song (1926) containing many of the score’s biggest hits: “The Desert Song,” “One Alone,” “One Flower in Your Garden,” “French Military Marching Song” (ironically sung by the female lead), “Riff Song” (the Riffs are Arab freedom fighters in Morocco seeking to liberate it from the French occupiers), and “Romance.” Then Hills played a piece called “Ace of Hearts” from the Four Aces Suite by British light-music composer and pianist Billy Mayerl (1902-1959) before he switched back to his hardest-core classical repertory of the night: the soft, quiet “Arabesque” and the loud, bombastic “Carillon” from the 24 Pieces in Free Style by French organist Louis Vierne (1870-1937). Of course Hills couldn’t resist the story of how Vierne died: he was playing a concert at Nôtre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, where he was titulaire (principal organist). He was to play an improvisation at the end of his program, but instead he had a heart attack, collapsed on the organ manuals, and was pronounced dead as soon as doctors arrived. After that there was another medley, a piece called Boots and Saddles: A Cowboy Rhapsody by another British light-music composer Ronald Hanmer (1917-1994), which featured such famous American songs as “Home on the Range,” “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain,” “Skip to My Lou,” “On Top of Old Smokey,” “Arkansas Traveler,” and “Turkey in the Straw.”

Hills closed his official program with a march called Dignity and Impudence by another British composer, Percy Whitlock (1903-1946), which featured recognizable quotes from Edward Elgar’s infamous graduation piece, the Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1. Then Hills played an encore that was the best piece he’d performed all night: a wild arrangement of the Bill Haley 1954 rock ‘n’ roll hit “Rock Around the Clock,” which quoted from Bobby Troup’s “Route 66” and Wilbert Harrison’s hit “Kansas City,” that electrified what was left of the audience and brought the evening to a thoroughly delightful close. Richard Hills was a refreshingly modest on-stage personality whose jokes were actually funny – unlike San Diego’s civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, who’s become notorious for droning on and on and on between selections. Last night Raúl spent an incredible six minutes just giving Hills an introduction, though I was amused when he introduced the concert’s co-sponsors, Isaac and Monica Muñoz, as “Munoth.” That, I suspect, is the difference between Castilian Spanish (the language Raúl, a native of Barcelona, grew up with) and the Latin American Spanish we Anglo-Americans in California are used to hearing.