I Just Got Back from a Very Lovely Mother's Day Concert at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park!

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

This afternoon (Sunday, May 10) I went alone to the regular Sunday afternoon organ concert at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. I wanted to get back in touch with the Spreckels Organ Society (I re-upped the membership for my husband Charles and I) and also I figured that, even though the organist was the regular one, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, whose appalling stage antics I can’t stand, he was having a guest artist, singer Sarah-Nicole Carter, and usually the presence of another person on the program puts Raúl on his best behavior. It was actually quite a nice concert featuring Raúl playing three pieces solo following his obligatory opening sing-along of John Stafford Smith’s “To Anacreon in Heaven,” a.k.a. “The Star-Spangled Banner.” (It was originally an Oxford University drinking song and Charles, perhaps inspired by the anecdote I told him about how the Anglophile H. P. Lovecraft, one of the few New Englanders in history who genuinely regretted the outcome of the American Revolution, who would sing “God Save the King” during patriotic celebrations when “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” was being played, likes to sing the original words when we go to the Pavilion.) His first piece was Debussy’s “Golliwogg’s Cakewalk,” from the Children’s Corner suite for solo piano, transcribed for organ by Raúl himself. Then he played Franz Liszt’s variation on the Renaissance composer Jacques Arcadelt’s “Ave Maria” and, as the “audience favorite” from last week’s program (one of the things that really annoys me about Raúl is his practice of asking concertgoers to vote for their favorite piece from each week’s program so he can encore it the following week; you’ve already got the job and you don’t have to keep sucking up for it!), the opening “Allegro” movement from Charles-Marie Widor’s Organ Symphony No. 6. He introduced the piece by mentioning Widor’s Hungarian background even though he was French (his dad was a Hungarian who’d emigrated to France) and giving a virtuoso display of paralypsis (the rhetorical device frequently indulged in by Donald Trump of saying something by saying he’s not going to say it) that Widor’s Hungarian ancestry gave his music some personality.

The next item on Raúl’s program was one of his “Mowie Time!” features (since Spanish, unlike German, has the “v” sound I’m more annoyed than I would be otherwise that Raúl either can’t or won’t pronounce the “v” in the word “movie”), a medley of songs made famous by Glenn Miller, but he decided to skip it to make sure he got all the vocal selections in before the scheduled ending of the concert at 3 p.m. (though it still went five to 10 minutes over). Sarah-Nicole Carter came out and sang Schubert’s “Ave Maria” (in Latin, and quite beautifully even though she was singing into a too-soft microphone and Raúl was inadvertently drowning her out). Though she was billed as a mezzo-soprano she sounded more like a contralto to me, but then again I’ve long suspected that modern-day voice teachers, all too aware of where the big money is in opera, push women who come in with contralto voices to the mezzo range and women who come in with mezzo voices to the soprano range. She got better amplification for the rest of her program, which was a tribute to women composers, a number of them either the wives (Clara Schumann, Alma Mahler) or the sisters (Fanny Mendelssohn) of more famous men. Carter began her set of women composers with “The Year’s at the Spring,” one of the Three Browning Songs by Amy Beach (1867-1944). I’d just written a review of a Munich Orchestra recording of Beach’s Gaelic Symphony for Fanfare which was filled out with three voice-and-orchestra scenes, two in German and one in French even though Beach was an American. I’d called the vocal scenes on that album “a far cry from her rather pallid salon songs for voice and piano in English,” but after “The Year’s at the Spring” I may have to revise that opinion: both the song itself and Carter’s delivery of it had all the emotional power I was hoping for and missing in previous performances of Beach’s English-language voice-and-piano songs. Then Carter sang two of Fanny Mendelssohn’s songs, “Nachtwanderer” (“Night Wanderer”) and “Die Mainacht” (“The May Night”), after she and Raúl had said that since Mendelssohn’s parents had given them both first names beginning with “F,” because of the entrenched sexism of the era she could only publish her music as “F. Mendelssohn,” and a lot of people just assumed that “F. Mendelssohn” meant Felix. There’s a story that Felix gave a private performance for Queen Victoria, played an “F. Mendelssohn” piece the Queen particularly liked, and then said, “Now that you’ve shown me how much you like the piece by my sister, I’d like to play you one of my own.”

After that Carter and Ramírez interrupted their program of art songs with a pop tune, Consuelo Velázquez’s “Bésame Mucho,” which Raúl introduced by saying that Velázquez wrote it when she was 15 and never had actually been kissed. (The title, in case you haven’t guessed, means “Kiss me more.”) The next piece on the program was Alma Mahler’s “Bei dir ist es traut” (“It’s Cozy with You”), and Raúl actually said he thought Alma Mahler was a better songwriter than her husband Gustav. (I can’t stand most of Gustav Mahler’s music, and the fact that Gustav actively discouraged his wife’s interest in composition, to the extent that we have only 17 surviving songs by her, gives me another reason to hate him.) The next two pieces were by women who were not the spouses or sisters of famous names: Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677), a Renaissance musician and the first woman to publish her own music (though the oldest woman composer – indeed, the oldest known composer of either gender – was the amazing Hildegard von Bingen, c. 1098-1179, and she got to have her music preserved only by living a religious life and being the head of a convent), and Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944). I hadn’t liked the last Strozzi piece I’d heard, a 12-minute cantata called “Che Si Purò Fare” performed by soprano Ingrid Stromberg at an otherwise quite enjoyable concert at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Bankers’ Hill September 13, 2025, and this one, “Spesso per entro al petto” (“Often Inside the Chest”), I liked better, maybe because it was considerably shorter. Cécile Chaminade was a French pianist and composer from the 20th century who at the height of her fame actually had fan clubs in both Europe and America. Her song this afternoon was “The Silver Ring,” a quite dark tale about a woman who’s kept the silver ring she was given by a lover in her youth into old age. The finale was “Lorelei” by Clara Schumann, and though Raúl introduced it with some hard-to-believe anecdotes about Clara, her husband Robert, and their friends Liszt and Brahms (Raúl claimed that Robert Schumann committed suicide; the truth is he attempted suicide in 1854, was saved from drowning himself, and was put into a mental hospital where he died of pneumonia two years later), the song itself was overwhelmingly powerful and a good close to a nice afternoon of great music in Balboa Park.