Iveta Apkalna, organist. Davies Hall. March 28, 2010

Iveta Apkalna is a young organist from Riga who made her US debut tonight, in a program of music that was mostly unheard in this country. She gave a charming speech at the start of the concert, saying she was glad to have such a large audience ("You must all be organists, or husbands of organists, or wives of organists!") and felt welcomed ("So many smiling eyes" -- her idioms not quite in place). She said she would be playing mostly music by composers from Latvia, her country, and didn't apologize for it. "If we don't play this music, who will?"

The first piece, I was disappointed to see, was the warhorse of warhorses, Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565. If she was right about the audience, at least half of them have played this piece in their youth. Her rendition wasn't special, though her technique was fine. As many performers do, she play that last page of chords and arpeggios lickety-split. I don't see the point. If you're going to play this piece, you might as well do it in full-on Majestic. Go for gravitas; skip the kitsch.

Once that was dispensed with, the next piece was a Toccata on the Chorale Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr by Aivars Kalējs. A delightful piece, it's one long crescendo, which is always dramatically satisfying. This was followed by "Four Miniatures" by a composer whose name I didn't catch. (It was a last-minute substitution for some other piece, but apart from re-ordering the pieces on the program, I think she actually played everything that was listed. Much confusion. A piece had been dropped, we were told, because of some mechanical problem with the organ.)

These miniatures are for pedal solo. Hands-free organ pieces exist for two reasons, to show interesting sounds way down in the low register that you'd never hear otherwise, and to show off the organist's technique (more often the latter). These miniatures didn't seem miniature enough to me. I'm not a fan of technique alone. That is, if you realize that she's playing all that with her feet, why, it's dazzling. But if you close your eyes and just listen to the music, it's not so dazzling. Indeed, with a Pedal-to-Great coupler, you could play the whole piece with your hands. Now would the music sound so impressive? Right; didn't think so.

There are piano pieces for the left hand alone, and there are stories about pianists who played these pieces because they lost an arm in wartime, or in the famous case of Leon Fleischer, a peacetime injury to his hand that healed decades later. They are also good exercise pieces. After some shoulder surgery last summer, my right arm was out of commission for a while, and I dragged out Brahms' left-hand-only version of the Bach Chaconne and played that for weeks. Anyone who has ever heard Marc-André Hamelin play those incredible left-hand-only pieces in Godowsky's Studies on Chopin's Etudes knows that there can be great compositions in this format, music you'd love even with your eyes closed.

But pedal-only pieces aren't like that. They are more like transcriptions, which are sometimes fun to play but often strike me as bizarre. Years ago, I heard Eliot Fisk play Scarlatti harpsichord sonatas -- on the guitar, in his own transcriptions. Peerless technique, a great musician, but I kept thinking, did he run out of guitar pieces to play and had to borrow some elsewhere? The answer could well be yes; the guitar literature is tiny compared to that of the harpsichord. But at some point, it goes overboard.

This evening, we heard such a transcription, Jean Gillou's transcription of Liszt's Symphonic Poem No. 5, Prometheus. I don't think I've ever heard the orchestral version, and I probably wouldn't like it. (I didn't like his Tasso when the SF Symphony played it recently.) But even on a large organ like the Ruffatti, it's impossible to capture the big-orchestra bombast of Liszt. For one thing, this organ doesn't have cymbals. (Liszt for theater organ? That might fit.)

For another thing, Davies Hall is quite dry. Great swaths of the organ literature were written for big, echo-y churches, where you can hear that final, final chord still ringing when you're halfway out to the parking lot. Such pieces are much harder to play in a dry acoustic, because the performer can't use the hall. The advantage of dryness is that you get to hear details that get lost in the cathedral, so with music that's changing harmonies quickly, or is thickly textured in some other way, a dry hall can help. I like the Hindemith Sonatas for Organ. When I first took organ lessons at 15, struggling through the Bach chorales, I listened to another student who was learning Hindemith's First Sonata, and I thought it was the weirdest music I'd ever heard. A few years later, I worked on the First Sonata, and like the other two, it's filled with crisp harmonies, so strange that you really need to hear them clearly. Now Hindemith himself played them on the organ in Woolsey Hall, which has an enormous reverberation. (As a symphony critic once wrote, "Only organists like Woolsey Hall.") Of course, if you're playing softly, and the audience is sitting close to the stage, the sound is direct. Who knows? Maybe Hindemith liked the effect.

A piece that worked really well tonight was Evocation II by Thierry Esciach, a composer in Paris, where all the churches echo a lot. But this piece has a repeated eight-note going on in the pedal, while increasingly wild things happen above it on the manuals. I think this piece would get lost in a big church. Or perhaps it was such a success here because Apkalna's technique is so good; she probably had to play it faster than the composer does at Saint-Étienne-du-Mont. That pedal pattern is obsessive and scary by the time the piece is done.

We also heard a Toccata by Marie-Alphonse-Nicholas-Joseph Jongen (what were his parents thinking?), and a Fantasia, written for and dedicated to Miss Apkalna by Ēriks Ešenvalds. In announcing this piece, she said, "It is his first piece for organ, and as far as I know, his last." That drew chuckles from the audience. She explained that the composer is busily writing in other forms, e.g., an opera, but we got the hint that this might not be terribly well-suited for the organ. Actually, I thought it worked quite well. For one thing, it was nice to hear some slow, quiet music (much of the program was fast and loud), and the voices were often major sevenths apart as they ambled around. The middle section was a little rough: big, crunchy chords, the sort where you can't tell whether the performer is playing the right notes at all. But it ended in the style with which it began. A success.

The Liszt transcription was the last piece on the program, but happily for us, Apkalna played an encore, a transcription, also by Jean Gillou, of Prokofiev's Toccata in D Minor, Op. 11. Now this transcription really worked, probably because the piece was originally written for piano. It's very fast, incredibly difficult, and when it reaches its grandest, craziest moments, Apkalna's hands and feet were flying everywhere. When it ended, a breathtaking 4 minutes later, the crowd roared, but she just smiled and bowed. No big deal. Right.

I enjoy hearing music for the first time, and I'll probably never get to Latvia, so this was a perfect concert for me. Apkalna said several times that she hoped that the young composers would be invited to play in San Francisco. I hope just hope we get to hear her again.