David Higgs Presents a Stunning Program of Hard-Core Classical Music at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion August 10

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 hymns – the two Higgs performed last night were “There Is a Happy Land” (not the beautiful ode to childhood the young David Bowie wrote in the mid-1960’s for his first album) and “I Love Thee, My Lord” – and, having already heard some items from Shearing’s organ collection in previous Organ Pavilion concerts, I was already aware that there was nothing about them that sounded even remotely jazzy. Perhaps because of the relative seriousness of the program, there were quite a bit fewer people there last night than we’d seen in previous concerts. Higgs opened with a Prelude and Fugue in A minor by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), a quite powerful rendition that set the tone for much of what came after. Then he played “Soliloquy” by California composer David Conte (b. 1955), a nicely phrased quiet piece that was a welcome respite between the power of the Bach and the third piece on the program, a Fantasia in G minor by Johann Gottfried Müthel (1728-1788). Müthel arrived in Leipzig in 1750 to study with Johann Sebastian Bach, though neither he nor Bach realized that Bach had only a few months to live and therefore Müthel’s studies with him were brief. But he’s considered one of the founders, along with Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, of the German Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement in music. Higgs said that this Fantasia was actually the first piece labeled by its composer as Sturm und Drang, and it certainly lived up to its title, especially in Higgs’s no-holds-barred rendition. After that Higgs wisely interspersed the two Shearing hymns before launching head-on into Mendelssohn’s Organ Sonata No. 1. Before playing the Mendelssohn Higgs launched into a long explanation of how the piece quoted an old German hymn, “Was mein Gott will, das ich g’scheh allzeit.” He argued that each of the four movements of the entire piece is essentially a setting of each of the four stanzas of the hymn, which (courtesy of Google Translate, which I used to change the original German into English), read as follows:

What my God wills, may it always be done, His will is the best. He is ready to help those who firmly believe in Him. He helps in times of need, the faithful God, He comforts the world immeasurably. Whoever trusts in God, who firmly builds on Him, He will not forsake.

God is my comfort, my confidence, my hope, and my life; what my God wills, that happens to me, I will not resist. His word is true, for He Himself has counted every hair on my head. He watches over us and always strives for us, that we may lack nothing.

Therefore, I, a sinner, must depart from this world according to God's will to my God; if it pleases Him, I will remain silent before Him. My poor soul I commend to God in my last hour: you faithful God, sin, hell, and death have overcome me.

One more thing, Lord, I ask of you, you will not refuse me: When the evil spirit assails me, do not let me despair, Lord. Help, guide, and defend me, O God, my Lord, to the glory of your name. Whoever desires this, to him it will be granted. To this I joyfully say: Amen.

Following Higgs’s impassioned performance of the Mendelssohn he played a piece that was not only written by a living composer, Stephen Kennedy’s (b. 1962) Toccata Saint-Sulpice, but Kennedy was there alongside him to manage the sheet music (Higgs had played all the earlier pieces from memory but for this one he needed the score) and pull stops for him. Kennedy wrote the piece specifically for Higgs to play at a recital at the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, the second largest cathedral in the city (after Nôtre-Dame) and which was mentioned by Dan Brown in his best-selling book The Da Vinci Code, though Brown (not surprisingly) got it wrong. (He referenced the church’s gnomon, an astronomical instrument built into the building, but called it the site of the “Rose Line.”) Kennedy’s Toccata is basically a Minimalist work that uses several patterns repeated over and over, though it’s sufficiently loud that both Higgs and Kennedy wore earplugs during the performance. The following piece was the second and third movements, “Menuetto” and “March,” from the Organ Symphony No. 3 by Charles-Marie Widor (1844-1937), who was staff organist at Saint-Sulpice. Though Higgs was able to play the Menuetto with his ears open, he put back the earplugs for the March. (Remember that we in the audience don’t realize how loud the instrument is to the people actually playing it.) The closing piece on Higgs’s program was Franz Liszt’s (1811-1886) Prelude and Fugue on the name B-A-C-H. The motif “B-A-C-H” (in German music notation, B flat-A-C-B) has been used by a number of composers paying tribute to the man who in so many ways was the foundational master of all classical music since. I’ve often argued that Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Max Reger seemed to be doing thought experiments when they wrote for organ: “What would Bach be writing for organ if he were alive today?” Liszt seemed to be doing that, too; his two biggest organ works, this one and his Fantasy and Fugue on the Chorale “Ad nos, ad salutarem undam” from Meyerbeer’s opera Le Prophète, both are long, extended, knotty developments of Bach’s approach brought up to date to the 19th century. Liszt made transcriptions of both works for piano, his usual instrument, but the organ versions are the originals. Higgs gave the Liszt an overwhelming performance that neatly bookended the concert, which had begun with an actual Bach piece and concluded with a tribute to him. But that wasn’t all; as an encore he came out and played “Harmonies du Soir” by Sigfrid Karg-Elert (1877-1933), a delicate piece influenced by the French organ style and actually dedicated to Alexandre Guilmant (1837-1911). I’ve often been surprised at the contrast between the heavily Germanic name of Karg-Elert and the quiet, almost French sound of his actual music. This piece was no exception, and it was a nice close to an amazing evening of great organ playing and a well-behaved audience. Aside from a handful of people who started applauding between the Prelude and Fugue of the Bach piece that opened the program, there was no applause between movements (a bane of many concertgoers, especially in a relatively informal setting like the Spreckels Organ Pavilion) and Higgs played powerfully and, at least when he was actually performing (some of his talks in between the music sounded a bit on the pretentious side), showed off a tough, no-nonsense style that, though quite a bit different from the infectious joy young real-life couple Grant Smith and Sunkyung Noh had showed off the previous week, made for a wonderful evening of hard-core classical organ music.