San Diego Civic Organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez Leads an Effective Organ-and-Orchestra Concert in Balboa Park August 18

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

Last night (Monday, August 18) my husband Charles and I went to the seventh of this year’s nine concerts in the Summer Organ Festival series in Balboa Park. This was the one featuring San Diego’s civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, along with a 38-piece symphony orchestra (all the players were listed in the program so I was able to count them) playing works for organ and orchestra by Francis Poulenc, Johann Sebastian Bach, Horatio Parker, and Raúl Prieto Ramírez himself. Raúl had given a similar concert at last year’s summer organ festival, but this time he had a new conductor (Arizona-based Alejandro Goméz-Guillén instead of San Diego-based Michael Gerdes) and, of the four pieces in his 2024 program, the Parker was the only one that was repeated. Instead of organ concerti in F by Handel and Haydn (I wondered in my review of the 2024 concert whether F was a particularly congenial key for the organs of Handel’s and Haydn’s time) Raúl played the Concerto in G minor for organ, strings, and tympani by Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) and a transcription of the Concerto for Harpsichord and Orchestra in A by Johann Sebastian Bach, BWV 1055. Charles made a rather odd joke to our old friend Bob, who was sitting just in front of us, that he wondered where the harpsichord player was and if we were going to be hearing an “organcord.” That’s just about what we did hear, since Raúl didn’t use the organ’s foot pedals at all during the Bach piece and played exclusively on the manuals. It was a welcome respite from the rather tortured sound of the Poulenc (a composer I ordinarily like, but not so much in this work; earlier in discussing Poulenc I’ve noted his life-long struggle with being both a devout Roman Catholic and a Gay man, and after the concert as we were waiting for the #215 bus home our friend Lee played us a bit of Poulenc’s Gloria, a sacred work which was everything the organ concerto was not: calm, lyrical, beautiful).

Then Raúl and conductor Goméz-Guillén brought in the brass players for the Ramírez and Parker works. Raúl played a different original composition this year than he had last; instead of a “Fantasy” it was called “Organ Concerto No. 1.” It was dedicated to the memory of Dr. Lynn Reaser (1947-2024), a business economist and long-time financial supporter of the Spreckels Organ Society. As little as I like his stage persona, Raúl is a highly talented composer with a flair for Bartókian polytonality, and certainly after the banal short pieces his predecessor as civic organist, Dr. Carol Williams, inflicted regularly on us in her last two years on the job, Raúl shines by comparison. Raúl also wisely made his concerto just a single continuous movement, and fortunately for both him and us the Poulenc is also in just one movement. This is an issue because after each pause in the three-movement Bach and Parker works, the audience started applauding. This drove Charles even crazier than it drove me; he wished the players could have started each movement immediately after its predecessor so the audience wouldn’t have had the chance to start applauding inappropriately. I guess it’s something almost Pavlovian with these people: “They’ve stopped playing? Clap!” Even more obnoxious during the Poulenc was a family who brought their two daughters with them, one of whom was jabbering away during the piece while her mom tried in vain to get her to whisper. Fortunately, they left after the Poulenc was over. Also I found myself wondering where the harpist was in the Parker concerto, which I’d first heard on Raúl’s 2024 symphony concert and been sufficiently impressed by I ordered a recording from Amazon.com and reviewed it in the May-June 2025 Fanfare. In my review, I wrote, “I got the impression that if Brahms had ever written an organ concerto, this is what it would have sounded like.”

Charles thought there wasn’t a harpist – just Raúl playing a “harp” part on a gadget attached to the organ – but a harpist, Stefan Wendel, was listed in the program. My guess was he was stationed behind the big amplifier on house left, where Charles and I couldn’t see him through the amp. There’s also a recording of the Bach concerto in the original harpsichord/orchestra version by the Netherlands Bach Society: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXMH56hJBVI&list=RDpXMH56hJBVI&start_radio=1. For Raúl’s encore he played a solo piece by Bach, too: not the “Exercise for the Pedals Alone” and the Prelude in G, BWV 541, which he’d played as his encores in 2024, but the Toccata from the Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C, BWV 564. Once again the orchestra had to sit there doing nothing while the organist did his thing – I felt a bit sorry for them – but it was a nice ending to a nice concert, even though it didn’t have the galvanic effect I’d had from the one in 2024.