Organist’s Rewarding Concert

After delays, disappointments and the near-devastation caused by the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the Skinner organ in UCLA’s Royce Hall is whole again and has been re-inaugurated.

Tuesday night, university organist Thomas Harmon introduced the restored and enlarged instrument to an avid, large audience in the historic auditorium, itself recently restored and reconfigured. Harmon played two representative organ concertos from this century, assisted enthusiastically, if with minimal polish, by the UCLA Philharmonia Orchestra.

The demonstration brought major loudness back to Royce Hall, and the refurbished organ held its own against the raucous student ensemble. I’ve been hearing the old Skinner regularly since the early 1950s, and it has never sounded so powerful--or versatile. For practically the first time, the listener was not struck by its quaintness, but by its resources.

Harmon brought out the best in Mark Carlson’s attractive 1997 Organ Concerto, a tuneful and, by turns, melancholy and jolly piece with a perceived English accent--attractively modal, that is--in an idiom that recalls the 1930s. But it is a winner, and Harmon and the orchestra gave it a rich reading.

Joseph Jongen’s sprawling Symphonie Concertante, which is actually from the ‘30s, also provides the listener pungent pleasures, though at least one of its movements--the murky, meandering third--goes on too long for the thrills it produces. Harmon triumphed over all its moments, quiet or resounding, aided spiritedly by conductor Jon Robertson and the orchestra.

At the beginning of the program, Robertson and his young associates attacked Richard Strauss’ exposing “Don Juan” with admirable bravado but regularly failed to clarify its complexities.