The Best Concert Yet from This Year's Summer Organ Festival: Grant Smith and Sunkyung Noh Play "Organ Four-Hands, Four-Feet"

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 five-movement suite for piano four-hands, and I’d assumed until Smith’s introduction that they had worked from Ravel’s piano four-hands original rather than his later orchestration. (There are actually three versions of Ma Mère l’Oye: the original five-movement version for piano four-hands, the orchestration of the five movements, and an expanded 11-movement version Ravel created for a ballet by Jacques Rouché in 1912.) I wish they’d preceded it with the most stunning movement of the suite, “Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas,” with its awesome imitation of the sound of gamelan music, especially since Noh quite effectively used the organ’s tubular bells in a later selection, Leo Sowerby’s “Carillon” (1917). But “The Fairy Garden” is itself quite haunting in its own right as well as an effective conclusion to Ravel’s suite.

Then Smith and Noh played their own adaptation of seven movements from Camille Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals, which they began with two of the movements Thomas Gaynor had not played the week before, the opening “Introduction and Royal March of the Lion” and the third movement, “Wild Donkeys (Swift Animals).” Then they played five movements that Gaynor had also played: “The Elephants,” “Kangaroos,” “Aquarium,” “Swan” (also known as “The Dying Swan” after Mikhail Fokine’s adaptation of it as a mini-ballet for Anna Pavlova), and “Finale” (also known as “The Piano Player”). The total suite is 14 movements and, like Gaynor, Smith and Noh played seven of them. Smith and Noh seemed to be having a good deal more fun with this music than Gaynor had. After the Saint-Saëns the two split up and Smith played a work by Johann Sebastian Bach, the Fantasia in G minor, BWV 572, which he explained was in three sections: an opening virtuoso section, a slower, more reflective middle, and a more improvisatory finale. Then Noh came out for her own solo selection, Leo Sowerby’s “Carillon,” with its beautiful bell effects. After the Sowerby she and Smith reunited for the “Tarantella” last movement from Rachmaninoff’s Suite No. 2, Op. 17, which like the Ravel and Saint-Saëns selections, was originally for piano duo. Alas, it was the dullest piece on the program, and it ended with an organ drone that neither Rachmaninoff nor Smith and Noh intended. It turned out that one of the keys had got stuck, and the drone continued until one of the technicians responsible for keeping the organ in good repair came out and unstuck it. Then the concert continued with more solo selections by each of the organists. Noh played the earliest piece on the program, a “Ground” by British Renaissance composer Thomas Tomkins (1572-1656). A “Ground” simply means a piece with an unchanging bass line over which the right hand plays a series of figurations; later it was called a chaconne, a passacaglia, and in the U.S. jazz version a boogie-woogie. (Peter Schickele later did a parody of one called “Ground Round.”)

Then Smith played a surprisingly modernist work by the usually conservative German composer Sigfrid Karg-Elert (1877-1933): “Theme of the Stars,” the seventh and last movement of his suite Seven Pastels from the Lake of Constance (1920). When I first heard of Karg-Elert I expected from his heavy-duty Germanic name to be a neo-Wagnerian; instead his stuff sounded more like Debussy’s, and in this case he threw in some extended tonalities that seemed to evoke Schoenberg’s early works. (Earlier Franz Liszt had also written pieces evoking Lake Constance in Switzerland.) Smith’s performance of “Theme of the Stars” set a high bar for Noh to clear, but she managed it with a stunning performance of the last movement from Louis Vierne’s (1870-1937) sixth and final organ symphony that got the biggest applause of the night. The official program closed with another adaptation, this of three of Brahms’s Hungarian Dances: number one, “Allegro molto”; number seven, “Allegretto”; and the best known of the bunch, number five, “Allegro; Vivace; Allegro.” That was the one Allan Sherman devastatingly parodied in the 1950’s as “Hungarian Goulash,” and to this day it’s hard for me to listen to a “straight” version without thinking of Sherman’s wild, anarchic comedy lyric. Then they played an encore, once again of a piece originally written for piano duo: the final “Ballet” movement of Debussy’s Petite Suite (which, like most of the two-piano or piano four-hands pieces Smith and Noh played last night, it is best known in an orchestral version, this one by Debussy’s friend and colleague Henri Büsser). The Debussy selection was a lovely close to an evening of truly marvelous music. I had worried about whether two organists could fit together on the narrow organ bench that replaced the wider original when they changed out the console a few years ago, but fortunately Smith and Noh are both slender enough they could easily accommodate each other.