Isabelle Demers Scores in Second Monday Night Organ Pavilion Concert at This Year's Summer Festival

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

Last night (Monday, July 20) my husband Charles and I went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for the second in the nine concerts (down from the previous years’ 12 to 13) of this year’s 38th annual International Summer Organ Festival. The organist was Isabelle Demers, who was born in Lachine, Québec, Canada. She’s gone back and forth between her native country and the U.S. and she’s played at the Spreckels at least twice before, during one of which concerts I bought her CD The New and the Old. Demers began her concert with Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C, BWV 547, and then performed an interesting curio: four of the 15 Two-Part Inventions as composed by Bach and re-composed by Max Reger (1873-1916). Oddly, she didn’t seem to be that enamored of these pieces; she joked about how Reger had transferred the left-hand parts of Bach’s originals for harpsichord to the foot pedals of the organ and had concocted new left-hand parts of his own, so if we heard what sounded like wrong notes in her left hand those were Reger’s fault, not hers. I suspect I like Reger better than she does; former San Diego civic organist Robert Plimpton (who was actually at last night’s concert) once said that with other composers you looked at the black parts of the page to see what notes you were supposed to play. With Reger you look at the white parts of the page to see what notes you’re not supposed to play. My own comment about Reger is, “If there were such a thing as heavy-metal classical, Reger would be it.” Demers followed up Bach and Bach/Reger last night with her own organ transcription of the last three movements of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 5, the “Reformation,” the work that caused Mendelssohn such grief because when he premiered it he got a lot of anti-Semitic criticism to the effect of, “How dare a Jewish composer write a symphony about the Reformation!” This shocked Mendelssohn because he’d been born and raised a Lutheran; though of Jewish heritage, his parents had converted either before Mendelssohn was born or when he was still an infant (sources differ). So he’d never thought of himself as Jewish and it was a major trauma when he found out from those reviews that other people did.

Demers said he chose not to play the first movement because “it’s about religious wars, and we have too many of those today already.” I was a bit disappointed in that because it is the first movement that contains the quotes of the famous German hymn tune, the “Dresden Amen,” though I’ve often said that the difference between Mendelssohn’s use of the “Dresden Amen” in the “Reformation” Symphony and Wagner’s use of it in the prelude to Parsifal is the difference between talent and genius. Following the Mendelssohn, whose last movement extensively quotes Martin Luther’s own hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” Demers and current San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez did a 10-minute “interview” segment that I could have blessedly done without, though Demers said one interesting thing. Asked what’s the greatest technical challenge in being an organist rather than a pianist (which is how Demers started her musical career), Demers said it’s learning to synchronize your left hand and your feet, since the foot pedals on an organ actually sound notes, whereas on a piano (a standard modern piano, at least) the pedals are there only to alter the sound without changing the pitches. She started the second half of the program with another major work based on Martin Luther’s hymn tune, the “Impromptu sur le Chorale de Luther,” Op. 69, by French composer Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-1888). Alkan was a former child prodigy and a notorious recluse; acclaimed during his lifetime as a piano recitalist on the level of Liszt and Chopin (the latter of whom was a friend of his), he would drop out of the public eye for years, sometimes decades, at a time, then make triumphant comebacks, then disappear again. In the 1850’s Alkan took an interest in the so-called pedal piano (a piano with foot pedals that sound notes, like an organ); he gave concerts on that instrument and published a few pieces as for either organ or pedal piano. The list of Alkan’s works on Wikipedia marks the “Impromptu sur le Chorale de Luther” as for pedal piano, but Demers played it on organ last night and it sounded just fine even though she warned us about the sheer number of false endings it has.

The next piece on Demers’s agenda was an oddball item by Mozart, the Fantasia in F minor, K. 608, one of three pieces Mozart was commissioned by one Count Joseph Deym to write for the so-called mechanical clock. This was a sort of early player organ designed to play itself via clockwork. This particular piece was supposedly written for the then recently deceased Field Marshal Baron von Laudon to play itself in his mausoleum. Mozart was reportedly unhappy with the mechanical organ/clock because it was so small the pipes were short and therefore high-pitched. He would have preferred it to be played on a full-sized organ, though there have been other arrangements, including one by modern composer Iain Farrington for a 10-piece chamber ensemble (https://www.iainfarrington.com/mozart-fantasia-in-f-minor-ch.html). The last piece on Demers’s regular program was her own transcription of “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity” from Gustav Holst’s The Planets. I didn’t care for the high tremolos that substituted for the original’s high string trills, but aside from that glitch Demers did a first-rate transcription that did more than justice to Holst’s orchestral original. Following that, after the brief bit of feigned reluctance that has become de rigueur on these occasions, Demers came back for an encore. She announced it as a song she had played most recently as accompanist to a 100-voice chorus, which had pretty much drowned her out. The song turned out to be Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz, and aside from a couple of brief resorts to the celeste stop Demers played this magnificently, phrasing the song in an eloquent, heartfelt manner and mostly avoiding the sorts of cornball “theatre organ” voicings and registrations most organists resort to when playing 1920’s, 1930’s, or 1940’s pop songs. Overall, Isabelle Demers gave the audience at San Diego’s Organ Pavilion a beautiful concert, well grounded in different musico-historical eras and tastefully programmed to avoid the stylistic wrenches other organists have put us through at these events. And her announcements in between the pieces had an ironic, self-deprecating wit from which Raúl Prieto Ramírez could certainly learn!