Thomas Gaynor Delivers a Great Evening of Organ Music in Balboa Park July 27

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

Last night (Monday, July 27) my husband Charles and I went to the third concert in the Spreckels Organ Society’s 38th annual Summer Organ Festival. The organist was Thomas Gaynor, who was born in Wellington, New Zealand (neither his bio in the program nor the available online sources say exactly when) but relocated to the U.S. as a young adult and settled in Philadelphia. He is currently assistant organist and choir master at St. Mark’s Church on Locust Street and was assistant organist at the Wanamaker Grand Court Organ in the Macy’s (formerly Wanamaker’s) department store until its recent closure for renovations. (The Web site for the Wanamaker organ insists that it will be played again when the store is reopened, and there are currently concerts being live-streamed even though the venue is not open to the public.) Gaynor is also an adjunct instructor of organ at Westminster Choir College of Rider University. Gaynor came out wearing an olive-green suit Charles originally mistook for sharkskin until he realized it was just cloth. Gaynor’s program consisted of four original organ works and seven transcriptions, and remarkably all but one of the transcriptions were by Gaynor himself. The one that wasn’t, the Prelude to Act III of Wagner’s Lohengrin, was attributed in the program merely to “Westbrook,” which leaves it open which of two historical organists with the last name “Westbrook” could have done it: the British William Joseph Westbrook (1831-1894) or the American Helen Searles Westbrook (1889-1967). Since Wagner composed Lohengrin in the late 1840’s just before his participation in the 1848 Dresden revolution led to his exile from Germany for the next 16 years (he spent most of that time in Switzerland), and it was premiered in 1850 in Weimar under Liszt’s direction, it’s entirely possible that a 19th century organist could have done this transcription. Gaynor opened his concert with his own transcription of Shostakovich’s “Festive Overture,” Op. 95, which I guessed was one of Shostakovich’s banal World War II potboilers to boost the Russians’ morale. I was wrong; he actually wrote it in 1954 for the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow to commemorate the 37th anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution that brought the Communists to power in Russia in the first place.

Then Gaynor played his own transcription of the “Sicilienne” from Gabriel Fauré’s incidental music to Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Pelléas et Mélisande. Just what about this rather wispy “symbolist” drama (the sort of story in which a pencil is never just a pencil) that attracted no fewer than four major composers of the turn of the last century to set it – Debussy as an opera and Fauré, Sibelius, and Schoenberg to write “incidental music” (which is just like film music except it accompanies a live performance of a play) – is something of a mystery. But the “Sicilienne” was a lovely piece of music and a welcome respite from the rather tacky Shostakovich, which Gaynor did the best he could with it as both transcriber and performer. Then Gaynor played his two biggest concessions to commercialism, both actual film music from movies he remembered fondly from his childhood: John Williams’s “Raiders’ March” from the film Raiders of the Lost Ark (1979) – first in the Indiana Jones cycle – and a medley of songs from Alan Menken’s score for the Walt Disney Aladdin (1992). (One of the grim ironies about the Disney Aladdin is that the lyricist, Howard Ashman, who had actually suggested the story to the Disney people, died of complications from AIDS in 1991 and the Aladdin songs were the last creative works of his lifetime. By macabre coincidence, Aladdin was also the last story another great Gay songwriter, Cole Porter, worked on in 1958 before his long-standing health problems led to the amputation of his legs and he did no more creative work for the last six years of his life.) Then Gaynor played a nice piece by Rachmaninoff, the “Vocalise” originally written for voice and piano, then set by Rachmaninoff for voice and orchestra, and finally transcribed by Gaynor for solo organ. Following that Gaynor played the mysterious “Woodhouse” transcription of Wagner’s Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin, which Gaynor introduced by saying that if you like opera, you like Wagner (not always true: I’ve met several people who love Italian opera but can’t stand Wagner) and joked about The Ring of the Nibelung, Wagner’s four-opera cycle which he said was 18 hours long. (It’s usually 15.) Unfortunately, though Wagner is my favorite composer, this particular work is five minutes of often noisy banality and I consider it one of his worst pieces. (If he’d wanted to play an excerpt from Lohengrin, it should have been the hauntingly beautiful Prelude to Act I instead.)

Then came two organ originals by British composers that were the high points of the proceedings: a “Scherzo” by blind organist and composer Alfred Hollins (1865-1942) and the awkwardly titled “Concertstück in the Form of a Polonaise” by Edwin H. Lemare (1865-1934). Lemare, though born in Ventnor on the Isle of Wight off the English coast, spent the last half of his life in the United States, and last night his piece got the biggest ovation of the night – more applause than the supposedly sure-fire crowd-pleasers by Williams and Menken. Then Gaynor played seven of the fourteen movements of Carnival of the Animals by French composer Charles Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921), which was first performed privately in Paris on March 3, 1886 and received its British premiere on September 2, 1905 even though Saint-Saëns had stipulated that the work not be published until after his death. Like a lot of other Saint-Saëns pieces, including Danse Macabre, it’s become a favorite of so-called “pops” concert programmers because it’s on the cusp between hard-core classical and so-called “easy listening.” The movements Gaynor played were No. 5, “Elephants”; No. 6, “Kangaroos”; No. 7, “Aquarium”; No. 10, “Aviary”; No. 12, “Fossils”; No. 13, “The Swan” (also known as “The Dying Swan” after it was choreographed by Mikhail Fokine for ballet star Anna Pavlova in 1905); and No. 14, “Finale,” also known as “The Piano Player.” Gaynor certainly rose to the challenges of this admittedly light music and gave a particularly eloquent performance of “The Swan.” Afterwards Gaynor played the Chaconne in F minor by Johannes Pachelbel (1653-1706), who’s best known for just one piece: the deathly dull Canon in D which inexplicably became a huge crossover hit in the 1970’s. Though I didn’t hear the parallel to the Orpheus and Eurydice story Gaynor gave us in the opening, it was an O.K. piece, definitely better than that annoying canon.

Gaynor closed with a spectacular piece of virtuoso bravura: the opening Allegro of the Organ Symphony No. 6 by French composer Charles-Marie Widor (1844-1937). Thanks in large measure to a French organ builder named Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (1811-1899), French organs in the late 19th century developed a range of instrumental colors approximating those of a full symphony orchestra. French composers who wrote for these instruments decided to call their works for solo organ “symphonies” instead of “sonatas” because they used the full range of orchestral colors available to a composer of symphonies. Widor wrote no fewer than 10 such organ symphonies, though by far the best-known excerpt from one is the final Toccata from Symphony No. 5. This opening Allegro from No. 6 is probably the second best-known, and Gaynor tore through it with élan and aplomb. Afterwards he departed the stage, leaving audience members who’d expected the usual encore rather disconcerted, but after a 95-minute concert without a break (not even the so-called “interviews” San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez had insisted on doing with the two previous organists in the series, Alcée Chriss III on July 13 and Isabelle Demers on July 20) I didn’t begrudge him his rest. Gaynor tossed off his whole program with first-rate musicianship, and I’m grateful he didn’t choose to narrate the Carnival of the Animals excerpts, either with Ogden Nash’s original text from 1947 for a 1949 Philadelphia Orchestra recording, the tweaks that have been made to Nash’s texts to update them over the years, or a truly awful narration written by Laurence O’Keefe and Neil Benjamin for a New York Philharmonic performance on December 31, 2015 in which they changed the animals into human “types” around the art world. (Next week’s performers, organ four-hands duettists Sunkyung Noh and Grant Smalls, have programmed a different set of excerpts from Carnival of the Animals, reflecting Saint-Saëns’s original version for two pianos before he orchestrated it! That’s on Monday, August 3, at 7:30 p.m. at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park.)