Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Two nights ago (Monday, August 24) my husband Charles and I went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park to attend the seventh of this year’s nine concerts in the 38th annual Summer Organ Festival every Monday from July 13 to September 7 at 7:30 p.m. The concert last night featured San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez and his wife, pianist Maria Teresa Sierra, who’d previously played a duet concert with him at one of the earlier Monday night concert seasons on August 27, 2018 (his first year as civic organist). Charles expressed concern that the organ would drown out the piano, and the concert’s tech people had fortunately thought of that because they miked the piano with three microphones to give Mrs. Ramírez a fighting chance against her husband at the Spreckels Organ console. The program was rather oddly structured and Raúl’s typical on-the-fly changes made it even odder. It was s...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, August 17) my husband Charles and I went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for the latest in the Monday night “Summer Organ Festival” concert series, featuring San Diego civic organist Raúi Prieto Ramírez with a relatively small pickup orchestra playing concerted works for organ and orchestra. This is the third year in a row he’s done such a concert, and this time he opened with a work he’s played all three years: the Concerto in E-flat minor for Organ and Orchestra, Op. 55, by American composer and professor Horatio Parker (1863-1919). This year neither he nor his conductor, Alejandro Gómez-Guillén, prefaced it with an announcement (in fact there was blessedly little talking throughout the concert, which I very much enjoyed; during his own concerts, especially the regular ones on Sunday afternoons, Raúl talks way too much and too annoyingly) they’ve given in previ...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, August 10) my husband Charles and I went to the fifth concert in this year’s 38th annual Spreckels Organ Society Summer Organ Festival. The organist was David Higgs, who’s mostly an academic (he chairs the organ department at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York) rather than a church organist. He scheduled a program that was almost all hard-core classical; the one concession to “crossover” music was programming two chorale preludes by George Shearing (1919-2011), and even those were relatively serious. First, Shearing, a top-flight jazz pianist (and occasional accordionist) but one who didn’t know much about the organ, needed editorial help with these pieces, and he got it from Dale Wood (1934-2003), a church organist and composer from California who edited the Sacred Music Press for a brief period in the mid-1970’s. Second, he based them on early Southern American...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, August 3) my husband Charles and I went to the fourth concert in this year’s Summer Organ Festival in the Organ Pavilion at Balboa Park. This one was advertised as “Organ Four-Hands and Four-Feet” and featured duo organists Grant Smith and Sunkyung Noh, a man and a woman who turned out to be married to each other. (I’ve already noticed that the great piano duos all seemed to have been people who had either a family or a romantic relationship with each other, including the Gay couple Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy.) Of the three concerts Charles and I have been to this year, this was actually the best. It opened with the last movement, “The Fairy Garden,” by Maurice Ravel from his suite Ma Mère l’Oye (“Mother Goose”). I was surprised that Grant Smith in his opening introduction said the piece was originally written for orchestra, because it wasn’t; it was originally part of a ...