Chelsea Chen Delights at Organ Pavilion August 11

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

Last night (Monday, August 11) my husband Charles and I attended the sixth of nine concerts in the Summer Organ Festival Monday nights in Balboa Park until September 1, when they plan to close out the season with a Beatles tribute. (So far they’ve done The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and an all-around tribute to women in rock which omitted all too many important women rockers, like Suzi Quatro, Pat Benatar, Chrissie Hynde, and Patti Smith, to concentrate way too much on the band Heart; when, I keep wondering, are they going to do Queen, especially since one of civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez’s best selections is his stunning solo organ transcription of “Bohemian Rhapsody”?) The featured organist last night was Chelsea Chen, whom I feel like we’ve grown up with – which we have. She made her Spreckels Organ debut in 2000 when she was still in high school, and now she’s in her early 40’s and the mother of a two-year-old son. With one exception – Johann Sebastian Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D, BWV 532, which Raúl had played himself the previous week (and played it better, actually; Chen’s version sounded more like a dutiful slog through the music than an actual performance – she played it impeccably from the technical standpoint but brought little feeling or emotion to it) – Chen programmed exclusively 19th and 20th century French music as well as newer works by herself or one of her organ teachers, John Weaver (1937-2021). Chen opened with a work by Weaver called Variations on “Sine Nomine” – the subtitle means “Without Name” and at least two of the songs on which the variations were based were readily recognizable, “When the Saints Go Marching In” and “Abide with Me.” (Both have jazz connections; “Saints” is well known as a traditional jazz standard, and “Abide with Me” opened Thelonious Monk’s 1957 album Monk’s Music in a one-minute arrangement for four horns – John Coltrane, Coleman Hawkins, Gigi Gryce, and Ray Copeland. Monk said the tune had been a long-time favorite of his because it was written by a namesake, William H. Monk.)

After the Bach piece, which came second, Chen played a piece of her own called “Children’s Dances,” based on three traditional Chinese songs Chen said she’d learned in her own childhood. She didn’t announce their titles, but said the second piece was a lullaby and the third was a Taiwanese folk song she’d learned from her father. (Chen had a father from Taiwan and a mother from the Chinese mainland.) Chen said that to this day she doesn’t know what the lyrics of the Taiwanese song mean because she’s never learned to speak the Taiwanese dialect, though she’s taught the song to her two-year-old son. Afterwards Chen played two pieces by Louis Vierne (1870-1937), who famously died of a heart attack in the middle of a concert he was giving at Nôtre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. (Chen seemed uncertain as to where in the program he was when he croaked. My understanding is that he had completed the printed part of his program and was about to undertake an improvisation on a submitted theme. He’d just opened the envelope containing the theme when he collapsed at the console. As Vierne collapsed, his body hit the organ keys, and the organ emitted a loud, thundering chord which just about everyone in the audience assumed was the beginning of his improvisation – until it wasn’t followed up with anything else. Eventually people realized that the reason he wasn’t playing was that he had collapsed at the console, and he was either dead or so close to it that the medical technology of 1937 couldn’t save him.) The two Vierne pieces Chen played last night were the relatively quiet “Naïades” (French for “fairy nymphs,” supernatural creatures said to live in the water), number four of his “Fantasy Pieces”; and the considerably louder, ballsier, more virtuosic finale from his Organ Symphony No. 6. (In the late 19th century, as French organ builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll designed organs that mimicked the sound of symphony orchestras, composers writing pieces for these organs started calling them “symphonies” instead of “sonatas” even though they were still solo organ works.)

Then she played a quite charming piece of her own, a set of variations on the musical themes built into the Super Mario Brothers video game. Though the piece was credited in the program to Koji Kondo (b. 1961), staff composer for Nintendo who wrote the original soundtrack bits, Chen obviously put a lot of thought into it. She said it was inspired by her older (by seven years) brother, who would get on the family game console and play Super Mario Brothers literally for hours; she’d be patiently waiting her turn, only he was so good at the game he would play through all its levels without losing and giving her a chance. On a previous Organ Pavilion Monday night concert she’d made the “Super Mario Fantasia,” as she called it in the program, her encore, but this time she placed it in the middle of the program and used an even more familiar piece as her encore. Then she played a piece called “Miroir” (“Mirror”) by Dutch composer Ad Wammes (b. 1953), whom she introduced as the only person who’s graduated from a youthful career in rock music to become a classical composer. (As I said to Charles, “Does the name ‘Keith Emerson’ mean anything to you?” We spent much of the rest of the evening mentioning former rock musicians who’ve taken up classical composition – as well as ones like Danny Elfman, Jonny Greenwood, and Trent Reznor, who’ve become orchestral film composers.) Then Chen played one of the more challenging works on her program, the Prelude and Fugue in D, Op. 7, no. 1 by French organist and composer Marcel Dupré (1886-1971). One of my all-time favorite organ albums is one Dupré recorded in the early 1950’s in Paris for the American Mercury label, in which he took three big works by Johann Sebastian Bach and put an engagingly French “spin” on them. Here Dupré was copying a format often used by Bach but applying his own style to it.

Chen’s written program closed with two pieces by Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921), and as with her earlier pair by Vierne she picked a relatively quiet one, “The Swan” from Carnival of the Animals (originally for two pianos and transcribed for organ by Alexandre Guilmant); and a loud, bombastic one, the finale from his “Organ” Symphony. Chen noted that the Saint-Saëns “Organ” Symphony (which is basically a standard symphony that features the organ only in the second and fourth movements) had become popular from its use in the film Babe, a fantasy about a pig who becomes a sheepherder and wins a contest usually open only to dogs. The transcription she played was by David Briggs (b. 1962) and starts with the thundering organ chord with which the soloist announces his or her entry into the piece between the third and fourth movements. (I remember first hearing the “Organ” Symphony on an old Musical Heritage Society LP which programmed it along with two Saint-Saëns tone poems, Omphale’s Spinning Wheel – source of the theme for the radio show The Shadow – and Danse Macabre. Unfortunately, whoever programmed the LP put the first three movements of the “Organ” Symphony on side one and the fourth movement on side two, followed by the two tone poems, thereby spoiling the shock effect Saint-Saëns intended of having the organ suddenly burst in, since the composer wanted the third and fourth movements played without any audible break.) Briggs’s transcription easily encompassed both the original organ part and the orchestra, though it created a minefield which Chen negotiated perfectly. After the usual brief show of reluctance, Chen returned for an encore: a medley of famous themes from John Williams’s score for the first Star Wars movie (1977), now rather awkwardly called Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. Chen electrified the audience when they recognized the familiar main title, and her encore provided a nice ending to a quite engaging concert that, except for her rather pedestrian Bach, expertly combined serious classical music with lighter selections for maximum audience appeal.