MUSIC REVIEW : Sound Selections Help Organist

Although the summer season brings out the lighter side of the San Diego Symphony’s musical repertory, it has the opposite effect on programming at the Spreckels organ pavilion in Balboa Park. During the Spreckels Organ Society’s nine-week series in July and August, each Monday evening visiting organists take advantage of warm weather and the park’s relative quiet to perform their most serious recitals.

Leonard Raver, the New York Philharmonic’s regular organist, was the latest to take up the challenge, offering a neatly balanced program of traditional recital fare and several unfamiliar works of recent vintage. From his relaxed and witty spoken introductions to each piece on the program, it was clear that Raver did not approach serious music--Bach, Guilmant, Widor and Barber--with a musicologist’s dour demeanor.

If only Raver’s performing insights had been equal to his savvy programming. With its massive sound, the Spreckels organ has the navigational qualities of an ocean liner, but Raver attempted to pilot it as if it were a sailboat.

In J. S. Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D Major, he applied the nuances and mannered articulations that would have given the work authentic character played on a clean-sounding Baroque instrument of Bach’s era. But on the mighty Spreckels, built in the Romantic tradition and fortified for its outdoor location, such articulations sounded awkward and tended to unbalance the piece. His unsteady tempo in the fugue only compounded the problem.

Raver had the right idea, however, in his performance of Alexander Guilmant’s “March on a Theme of Handel,” a deliciously grandiose 19th-Century concoction. By choosing a fluid, legato interpretation, Raver harnessed the instrument’s sonic momentum to give the march its wonted panache.

Dan Locklair’s “Inventions for Organ,” a four-movement suite written for Raver in 1978, demonstrated a tongue-in-cheek attitude that organ composers rarely explore. From the asymmetrical pedal solo at the opening, to the sonic belches of the movement titled “Levity,” Raver clearly relished this playful idiom and dispatched the suite with confident bravura. Locklair’s finale turned out to be a heavy-handed ostinato as relentless as Ravel’s “Bolero,” but only half the fun.

A pair of recent works by New Mexico composer Franklin Ashdown displayed a surprisingly conventional tonal idiom unrelieved by fresh structural insights. His “Sunday Scherzo” was well-crafted but sounded like a Seth Bingham retread. In lieu of the final movement of Louis Vierne’s Sixth Organ Symphony, which was supposed to close the recital, Raver gave a conventional account of the ubiquitous Widor F Major Toccata.