Soprano Alisa Jordheim Shines in August 4 Concert at Organ Pavilion with Raúl Prieto Ramírez as Her Organ Accompanist

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

Last night (Monday, August 14) my husband Charles and I returned to the Monday evening summer organ concerts in Balboa Park after missing last Monday’s with organist Ahreum Han because we were out of town. (At least two of our long-time friends there last night told us it was a great concert.) Last night we had to suffer through the typical egomania of San Diego’s civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, who was giving the concert himself as accompanist for a quite accomplished soprano named Alisa Jordheim. Her program was evenly divided between opera arias, Lieder, and selections from the “Great American Songbook” from Broadway and Hollywood in the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s. The program began with Raúl playing Johann Sebastian Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D, BWV 532. After he was done with the piece he made a slighting comment to the effect that he’d crossed off Bach from the list of things he had to do in the concert. He regularly refers to the Bach works he plays on his Sunday afternoon concerts, the basic responsibility of a San Diego civic organist, as his “Weekly Dose of Bach,” which irritates me no end as it suggests classical music in general and Bach in particular is something you have to listen to because “it’s good for you.” Then Jordheim came on for the first of her two groups of “Great American Songbook” standards: Victor Young’s and Edward Heyman’s “When I Fall In Love” from the 1952 film One Minute to Zero (I’d always thought that song was considerably older than that!), Richard Rodgers’s and Oscar Hammerstein II’s “If I Loved You” from Carousel (1945); and Frederick Loewe’s and Alan Jay Lerner’s “I Could Have Danced All Night” from My Fair Lady (1956). I give Jordheim a lot of credit for including the all-too-often omitted verses to these songs. She phrased them eloquently and well, even though her approach was “operatic,” very much in what Broadway directors and musical arrangers call “legit” as opposed to the “belting” style Ethel Merman became (in)famous for. (Often casting ads for new musicals say things like “legit, but must be able to belt.”)

The “Lieder” section that followed consisted of four songs by three women composers, two of whom had either familial or marital relationships with superstar male composers: Felix Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny and Robert Schumann’s wife Clara. The “Lieder” program opened with the one composer who didn’t have either a brother or a husband in the business: Amy Beach, who for years was billed as “Mrs. H. H. A. Beach” because her 20-years-older husband, Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, imposed what in a Fanfare review of her violin sonata I called “a series of restrictions on her budding musical career that by today’s standards border on the insane.” According to the program, Jordheim was supposed to sing a cycle of three songs based on poems by Robert Browning – “The Year’s At the Spring,” “Ah, Love, but a Day!,” and “I Send My Heart Up to Thee!” (either Browning, Beach, or both had a “thing” for ending titles with exclamation points). But she only sang one, “The Year’s At the Spring,” and it was just 50 seconds long. I was at first startled that Jordheim was singing in English until I remembered that Beach was an American and therefore English was her native language. Then she sang two songs by Fanny Mendelssohn, “When the Silver Moon Beckons through the Bushes” from her cycle Die Mainacht (“The May Night”) and “I Walk on a Silent Night” from Die Nachtwänderer (“The Night Traveler”), and one by Clara Schumann, “Lorelei.” These songs were originally written to be sung to piano accompaniment, and frankly I’d like to hear Jordheim sing them that way sometime; Raúl’s accompaniments were perfectly competent musically (as we were leaving the concert Charles commented on the vast gap between Raúl’s professional competence as a musician and his bizarre and often offensive stage persona), but the sheer weight and volume of the organ tended to overpower Jordheim’s voice except on the Clara Schumann “Lorelei,” a powerful tale of a shipwreck for which the organ’s power added to the drama.

After that Jordheim slipped in the second of her two groups of musical theatre songs (they were originally listed to close the program but Raúl, as is his wont in his own solo recitals, moved them): Harold Arlen’s and E. Y. Harburg’s “Over the Rainbow” from 1939’s The Wizard of Oz; Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” from 1935’s Jubilee; and George and Ira Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” from Girl Crazy (1930). Once again Jordheim included the verses to all these songs except “Begin the Beguine” (for which Porter probably didn’t write one; the song is already 108 bars long, 3 ½ times the standard 32-bar length of a pop song in that era, and fellow songwriters called it a “tapeworm” and predicted no jazz musician could possibly improvise on a song with that many chord changes – until Artie Shaw triumphantly did it in 1938 on a record that became his star-making hit). Jordheim was working under the long shadows of the original artists who introduced these songs – Judy Garland in “Over the Rainbow,” Artie Shaw in “Begin the Beguine” (he didn’t introduce it but he popularized it and it was the huge success of his recording that made it a standard), Ethel Merman in “I Got Rhythm” (though I’m not a Merman fan and I much preferred the 1930 recording by Kate Smith, whose voice was just as big as Merman’s and whose intonation was far better, on the 1999 Columbia CD compilation From Gershwin’s Time) – but she handled the songs marvelously if you’re O.K. with her quasi-operatic renditions. Then Raúl played two organ solos. One was the first of three “Britannic Rhapsody” songs by Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921), a suite of organ pieces based on folk songs from the province of Brittany in northern France – a quiet piece which, in one of Raúl’s rare attempts at humor that was actually amusing, he joked that he liked to play pieces like that on Monday nights rather than Sunday afternoons because there were fewer planes passing overhead on their way to the downtown San Diego airport. He followed that with a much louder, more bombastic piece: the opening movement of the Symphony No. 6 for solo organ by Charles-Marie Widor (1844-1937).

The concert concluded with Alisa Jordheim singing four operatic arias: “O mio babbino caro” from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, Musetta’s Waltz from Puccini’s La Bohème, the Fairy Godmother’s aria “Ah! douce enfant” from Massenet’s Cendrillon (i.e., Cinderella, and for some reason Massenet cast Cinderella as a mezzo-soprano and the Fairy Godmother as a coloratura soprano), and the cavatina/cabaletta sequence “Ah! fors è lui … Sempre libera” from the end of Act I of Verdi’s La Traviata. (The program listed another Puccini aria, “Signore, ascolta” from Turandot, but Jordheim and Raúl left that one out.) For an encore, they did George and Ira Gershwin’s “The Man I Love,” which flopped in every stage musical the Gershwins tried it in (Lady Be Good, Strike Up the Band, Rosalie), but achieved major success on its own when Lady Edwina Mountbatten took a copy of the sheet music to her native Britain, insisted that her favorite British dance orchestras play it, and it became a hit. While quite frankly I’d have rather they’d included “The Man I Love” as part of Jordheim’s second group of pop songs and saved the flashier “I Got Rhythm” for the encore, overall the concert was quite good. Jordheim handled the coloratura passages in her arias quite beautifully and she even sang the optional E-flat in alt at the end of “Sempre libera.” I used to dislike that interpolated high note, but I’ve come to regard it as essential to express the mania Verdi’s character, Violetta Valéry, feels in that moment as she’s torn between her life as a high-class prostitute (in the 19th century the eupehemism was “courtesan” and now it’s “escort”) and the promise of true love. Alas, the audience interrupted the sequence by applauding loudly and vociferously at the end of “Ah! fors è lui” and thereby spoiling Verdi’s carefully crafted dramatic effect. Nonetheless, it was an excellent concert overall and even Raúl’s attempts at comedy couldn’t spoil it.