Engaging Monday Night Concert at the Organ Pavilion August 24 Featuring Civic Organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez and His Wife, Pianist Maria Teresa Sierra

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 scheduled to start with the last two movements, “Sérenade” and “Variations,” from the Six Duos, Op. 6, for piano and harmonium (a sort of small-scale version of an organ in which the musician plays the notes on a miniature keyboard with his or her hands while the feet pump a bellows that provides the motive power for the pipes; large organs were sounded with humans pumping the bellows in the days of Bach and Handel before they were motorized with air pumps in the 19th century), but in the end Raúl and Maria played only the “Sérenade.” The next work on the program was Shostakovich’s Concertino in A minor, Op. 94, originally written for two pianos but arranged for piano and organ by Raúl Prieto Ramírez. (All the pieces except the Widor were transcriptions by Raúl.) At that point the program was supposed to return to the second movement, “Allegro cantabile,” from the Widor Six Duos, but Raúl announced at that point that as a matter of so-called “family therapy” instead he was going to play, solo, his own transcription of Debussy’s piano standard “Clair de Lune” from the Suite Bergamasque.

It was actually one of the loveliest items we heard all night, much better than the Shostakovich – one woman wrote a letter to the editor of a music magazine complaining that with Shostakovich she never knew when she was supposed to take him seriously and when she was supposed to read his music as sarcastic political commentary on the Soviet regime. Obviously the man was doing something right to be able to survive under Lenin, Stalin (albeit just barely), Khrushchev, and Brezhnev and play the game he needed to play with the Soviet authorities to keep himself one step ahead of the secret police. But I still don’t care for Shostakovich that much, and when Time magazine named him the greatest composer of the 20th century, my thought was, “He wasn’t even the greatest Russian composer of the 20th century! I’d rate both Stravinsky and Prokofieff ahead of him.” (More recently I’ve found out that Prokofieff was actually Ukrainian.) Hearing Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” reminded me once again of Debussy’s comment that he wished someone would invent “a piano without hammers,” which has long struck me as something odd to say because there was essentially a piano without hammers in Debussy’s time. It was called the organ, and especially given that Debussy matured as a composer during the heyday of the French symphonic organ tradition, it seems odd that he never wrote for the organ (though that hasn’t stopped organists from transcribing Debussy’s solo piano works, often – as with Raúl last night – with quite beautiful results). Then Maria returned to the stage for the Widor “Allegro cantabile” (an odd title because “cantabile” means “song-like” and it’s more commonly preceded by “andante,” “slow,” rather than “allegro,” “fast”) and then the two big works of the evening. The first was a set of “Variations on a Theme by Paganini” by Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994), which like the “Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini” by Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943), was based on the 24th and last of Paganini’s 24 Caprices for Solo Violin. Not surprisingly given that they were separated by nearly two generations, Lutoslawski’s Variations seemed more “modern,” more dissonant, than Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody.” Lutoslawski originally designated the work as for two pianos, and later made his own orchestration as a piano concerto. Raul joked that his version for piano and organ was “unauthorized,” though that was only because he’d created it after Lutoslawski’s death in 1994. The Lutoslawski “Variations” consisted of an opening theme (mostly recognizable as Paganini’s but played with some admixtures of dissonance to make it sound “modern”), twelve variations, and a coda.

Then came the really big work of the night, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat, the “Emperor” (though Beethoven never called it that); it was also the only one of his piano concerti that he did not publicly perform himself. By 1811, when he composed it, Beethoven was too deaf to give concerts, so he entrusted the solo part at the November 28, 1811 premiere to Friedrich Schneider as soloist and Johann Philipp Christian Schultz conducting the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. (The word “Gewandhaus” means “laundry,” and the orchestra was so called because its initial concert hall was a converted laundry.) Raúl announced before the piece began that he’d been reluctant to transcribe the orchestral part for organ initially because “Beethoven’s orchestration is weird,” adding that whole Ph.D. theses have been written about the peculiarities of Beethoven’s orchestral style. I found Raúl’s transcription a bit too cheesy and calliope-like for my taste – I’ve heard at least one other transcription of a major Beethoven orchestral piece, the Fifth Symphony, by Thomas Heywood (who recorded it on a CD with the provocative title Who Needs an Orchestra?), and though I haven’t heard that in a while I remember his arrangement as more full-bodied and faithful to Beethoven’s original than Raúl’s. Maria Teresa Sierra played the piano part quite well, though Walter Gieseking’s fiery recording of the orchestral version from Berlin in 1944 with Artur Rother conducting the Berlin Radio Orchestra remains my favorite. (Never mind that the performance was given while World War II was still going on and you can hear the sound of German anti-aircraft guns being fired at Allied bombers while Gieseking plays the first-movement cadenza.) There were a couple of missed notes in Maria’s performance but I suspect they were mechanical flaws in her piano rather than mistakes in her playing. Overall it was an enjoyable performance, though there’s no question that the organ is at best only O.K. as a substitute for a full orchestra in this ballsy music. Raúl and Maria didn’t stay for an encore, though the concert was so intense I really didn’t blame them for wanting to call it an evening after the overwhelming quality of the Beethoven, the sort of piece that commands attention even in a mediocre performance (and last night’s, though hardly the last word in how this piece should sound, was considerably better than mediocre).