BIRTHDAY CONCERT SET FOR SUNDAY : SPRECKELS ORGAN IS STILL SPRY AT 70

Unlike other septuagenarians who settle back into genteel retirement, Balboa Park’s Spreckels Organ is making a vigorous return to public life. The park’s grand old lady turned 70 Tuesday, and interim civic organist Robert Plimpton is planning a birthday concert at 2 p.m. Sunday to launch her into her eighth decade.

“I want to put the organ front and center in the public’s awareness,” Plimpton said. “At one time in this city, the post of civic organist was musically very important. There’s no comparison with the situation today.”

When San Diego’s first civic organist, Humphrey Stewart, played the inaugural recital on New Year’s Day in 1915, it was quite an event. Stewart, a proper Englishman with an Oxford education, was brought to San Diego by the organ’s donor, John D. Spreckels. Spreckels’ biographer, H. Austin Adams, claimed that 60,000 people heard the opening recital.

To conjure up some of the organ’s colorful history, Plimpton will include in his Sunday program several pieces composed by Stewart and succeeding civic organists. “I’ve found Stewart’s ‘Montezuma March’ to play,” Plimpton said, “and I’ve been given a copy of a pedal solo--a Handel fugue arranged to be played with the feet only--by Stewart’s immediate successor, Royal Brown.”

Plimpton is still trying to track down the sheet music to Brown’s “Balboa Park Suite,” a programmatic gem Brown frequently performed when he was park organist. The suite depicts places in the park such as the lily pond and the organ itself, according to Donald Shanks, retired organist of St. Joseph’s Cathedral, who owns a vintage 78 rpm recording of the piece. Brown’s compositions are reputed to be stored but uncatalogued in the basement of the downtown San Diego Public Library.

Both Stewart and Brown were predecessors of Shanks at the cathedral, a post each held concurrently with that of civic organist. “I can recall being held on my father’s shoulders at the Organ Pavilion and watching Stewart accompany Madame Schumann-Heink (a celebrated German-American dramatic soprano),” Shanks said. “The crowd was a bit more ambulatory then.”

Marguerite Nobles, organist emeritus of the old First Congregational Church of San Diego, remembered attending the first recital played on the Spreckels organ. “I was here visiting from Redlands, Calif., and just happened to hear the inaugural recital. Later, I became a pupil of Dr. Stewart. He was a gentleman of the old English school. His playing was rather pedantic and unemotional. For his park programs he played the organ classics--he rarely played transcriptions of orchestral music.”

According to Shanks, Stewart’s honorary doctorate was bestowed by the College of the Pacific, a California school, for his compositional setting of the Francis Thompson poem, “The Hound of Heaven.”

In spite of encroaching vehicle traffic and sprawling parking lots, the rococo Spreckels Organ stands as an icon of San Diego history. John D. Spreckels and his San Francisco brother, Adolph, donated the organ to the city at the opening of the 1915 Panama-California Exposition. As a bronze plaque in the park states, they gave the organ “For the free use, benefit and enjoyment of the people of San Diego.”

John D. Spreckels was the oldest son of sugar magnate Claus Spreckels, known as the “Sugar King.” With his younger brothers Adolph and Rudolph, John took advantage of the family’s virtual monopoly over the sale and production of sugar on the West Coast and formed a steamship company that ran between the Spreckels’ sugar plantations in Hawaii and the mainland.

John Spreckels settled here in 1887 and quickly became one of the movers and shakers of turn-of-the-century San Diego. He was an organist by avocation, practicing daily on an organ in the music room of his Coronado mansion.

By the late 1970s, the Spreckels Organ was showing its age both inside and out. Renovation of the pavilion, the building that houses the organ, began in 1979, followed by a complete restoration of the instrument itself. Under the supervision of Lyle Blackinton, an El Cajon organ builder who maintains the organ, each of the 3,400 pipes was cleaned and rebuilt.

“Over the years, the weight of some of the pipes had caused the metal to sag, preventing them from sounding as they should,” Blackinton said. “We re-leathered the bellows and pipe valves, and we replaced all the regulators. Our goal was to make the organ sound just as it did in 1915.”

Some of the more complicated pipe work--the brilliant-sounding reeds--was sent back to the organ’s builder, the Austin organ factory in Connecticut, for sensitive revoicing.

The Spreckels’ face lift will be complete when new seating is installed in front of the pavilion, a project that was slated for this past fall but which, according to Blackinton, was put off by the city until fiscal 1985.