San Diego Civic Organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez and Conductor Alejandro Goméz-Guillen Present Third Annual Organ-and-Orchestra Concert at Spreckels Organ Pavilion August 17

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 previous years which explains this piece’s importance. It seems that Horatio Parker, after years of studies in Germany under Joseph Rheinberger, was hired by Yale University as a composition teacher in 1894, and one of his students in his first class was a young iconoclast named Charles Ives. In previous reviews of the Parker organ concerto, both musicmagg posts on the 2024 and 2025 concerts and a Fanfare review of a recording of it by Paul Jacobs and the Nashiville Symphony, Giancarlo Guerrero conducting, I’ve noted the irony that a strait-laced German-trained musician like Parker was Ives’s composition teacher and compared it to Thomas Hart Benton, a mediocre landscape painter, being Jackson Pollock’s art teacher. In my review of the Parker organ concerto in the Jacobs/Guerrero recording on Naxos, I wrote, “[I]t’s clear from hearing Parker’s concerto, both live and in this excellent Naxos recording, that the biggest thing he lacked was Ives’s imagination. One waits through 20:40 of well-crafted music in vain for an Ivesian dissonance or an interjection of ‘Yankee Doodle’ or ‘Shall We Gather at the River?’” I also suspect Raúl and company had gone once too many times to the well with me on the Parker concerto, since it didn’t sound as stunning as it had I 2024 and 2025.

The next item on Raúl’s and Gómez-Guillén’s agenda was a Haydn organ concerto in F, Hoboken XVIII No. 7. (It strikes me as amusing that the definitive numbering system for Haydn’s works came from, of all places, Hoboken, New Jersey, also Frank Sinatra’s home town. The Hoboken catalog of Haydn’s works was begun in 1934 and finished in 1978.) Raúl and his pickup symphony, then conducted by Michael Gerdes, head of the orchestral music division at San Diego State University, played this Haydn concerto and a similar concerto by Handel, also in F (I wondered whether that was a particularly congenial key for organs then, especially paired with orchestras), in 2024, but he left it off the 2025 program. One particular quirk with the first part of the program is neither work used woodwind instruments; Parker deliberately left them out of his concerto (he used only organ, brass, percussion, and strings) and the Haydn work was for organ and strings only. Wind players showed up for the second half of the concert, prefaced by a blessedly brief announcement by Gómez-Guillén. The rest of the concert consisted of two works by late 19th century French composers: a one-movement “Dialogue-Fantasia” by Léon Boëllmann (1862-1897), who died tragically young at 35 from a long-standing lung disease (his teacher, Eugène Gigout, took over raising his three children after Boëllmann’s death); and a three-movement “Symphonie No. 1” by Alexandre Guilmant (1837-1911). Raúl did not play a work of his own, as he had the past two years, but the French pieces from the height of France’s symphonic organ tradition worked well enough and provided a nice close. Given that the audience, considerably less well behaved in the finer points of concert etiquette than the one at David Higgs’s concert the previous week, applauded at every between-movement pause in the Parker and Haydn pieces (something that bothers Charles even more than it does me), Raúl and Goméz-Guillén took as brief a pause as possible between the second (“Pastorale”) and third (“Final: Allegro assai”) movements of the Guilmant. (The Boëllmann, luckily, was in a single continuous movement that left no room for the audience to misbehave.)

Raúl then played two solo encores, both works by Johann Sebastian Bach and both pieces he’d used in previous years’ orchestral concerts: an “Exercise for the Pedals Alone” he’d played as one of his 2024 encores and the opening Toccata from the Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C, BWV 564, which he’d given in 2025. While this concert didn’t pack the punch of Raúl’s first organ-and-orchestra concert in 2024, it was a nice enough evening and it was surprisingly well attended – which Charles joked was probably at least in part because the concert was free (all concerts at the Spreckels Organ are supposed to be free according to the terms of the Deed of Gift by which John and Adolph Spreckels donated the Organ Pavilion and the organ itself to the city of San Diego in 1914) and thus the family members and significant others of the musicians had a rare chance to hear them without having to pay for tickets.

2024 Organ-and-Orchestra Concert Review: https://musicmagg.blogspot.com/2024/08/organ-pavilions-monday-night-concert.html

2025 Organ-and-Orchestra Concert Review: https://musicmagg.blogspot.com/2025/08/san-diego-civic-organist-raul-prieto.html