Improved Spreckels Organ Is Star of Summer Festival

Summer means baseball to most Americans, but to the members of the Spreckels Organ Society, it means the return of Monday night organ concerts in Balboa Park.

Civic organist Robert Plimpton and society president Vivian Evenson recently announced the 10-week summer organ festival, which includes guest organists from France, England and North America.

The society’s fourth season will open, appropriately, on Spreckels Organ Day, July 1, with an 8 p.m. concert by Plimpton and the San Diego Brass Consort. Before the concert on Spreckels Organ Day, so declared by City Council, the society will unveil for City Councilman John Hartley about $23,000 in improvements to the mechanism of the 76-year-old Spreckels Organ.

Plimpton explained that, before the recent repairs, the organ’s percussion effects had been unreliable. The bass drum, for example, was intolerably sluggish, and the cymbals were completely erratic in their percussive embellishment.

Two years ago, the hard-working local society added $50,000 worth of new pipes to augment the instrument’s sonic power.

“We finally solved the problem of airplane noise,” Plimpton noted. “The 32-foot Bombarde stop in the pedal division can drown out the sound of planes as they come in to land at Lindbergh Field.”

The Spreckels Organ is the world’s largest outdoor pipe organ, according to Plimpton, although there is not much competition in this category. Nevertheless, the Spreckels Organ is an impressive musical instrument. Built in 1915 for the city’s Panama-California Exposition, the instrument and its ornate classical pavilion were a gift of local philanthropist John D. Spreckels. As civic organist, every Sunday at 2 p.m. Plimpton plays a free recital aimed at the casual Balboa Park visitor. The summer evening programs, played when there is less noise and traffic in the park, target the serious music aficionado.

On July 8, Frederick Swann, organist of the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, will continue the series with a solo recital of Bach, Mozart and Franck. One of the best-known U.S. recitalists, Swann was formerly the organist of New York City’s famed Riverside Church. He was lured to the West Coast several years ago by the cathedral’s founder and senior minister, Robert Schuller. Although the noted television preacher admired Swann’s musicianship, he did require one minor alteration from his New York recruit. Once Swann joined Schuller’s team, he acquired a telegenic hairpiece for his formerly shining pate.

International guests on the summer series include Thomas Trotter, July 22, the youngest organist ever to hold the position of city organist in Birmingham, England. The British musician will also play Mozart, as well as Sowerby, Mendelssohn, and Rossini. On Aug. 26, French virtuoso Jacques Taddei, successor to Cesar Franck at Sainte Clothilde Basilica, Paris, will perform Bach, Handel, and Franck. Argentine organist Hector Olivera, known for his improvisations and flamboyant transcriptions, will return to the Spreckels console to close the series on Sept. 16.

Meanwhile, the society has announced the release of Plimpton’s second recording of music performed on the Spreckels Organ. “Live from Balboa Park, Vol. II” will be available in both cassette and compact disc form. According to Plimpton, this is the first CD of the Spreckels Organ.

“To avoid planes and traffic noise, we did most of the recording in sessions that started at 5 a.m.,” Plimpton explained. “It turned out that was just about the time the park birds woke up, but we decided to leave the bird song on the recording.”

Call it “authentic performance practice” for an organ in a park.

Pops moves in. Over the past week, construction workers have swarmed over Embarcadero Marina Park South to set up the stage, shell and support facilities for the San Diego Symphony’s summer pops season. Target date for the construction completion is June 19, when the orchestra inaugurates its summer season and new site on San Diego Bay.

The summer pops compound boasts views of Coronado and the downtown San Diego skyline. It occupies 2.75 acres of the Port Authority’s land, a narrow peninsula that parallels the San Diego Convention Center, from which it is separated by a boat marina. In the new facility, the symphony will be able to seat 2,160 patrons at cabaret tables and another 2,000 in the bleachers.

The trial run for the new pops facility will be a private performance June 18 for the annual convention of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, which meets here June 14-19. Symphony officials expect 600 conventioneers that night.

Symphony public relations chief Les Smith noted that Embarcadero Marina Park South is a rather awkward moniker.

“We’d like something a lot shorter and simpler. Something like ‘Pops Park.’ ”