Returning to the Beginning

Thanks to a tip from a fellow pipe organ list member, I learned just in time about a concert yesterday given by a very special organist. I must admit, I was not prepared for the pleasure of listening to Dorothy Young Riess, MD.

Her theme: Music of Joy. In a brief speaking part she mentioned that this was partly joy in just being able to stand up at her age! But you could tell it was more than that, probably joy at being able to return to the pleasure of music she experienced years before. If you have been reading here long, you know what I think about harsh, painful, bombastic, alienating organ music. There was none of that here. This program by Dr. Reiss was almost a complete opposite, although there were a few chords here and there from Langlais (Fete) and Messiaen (Transport de Joie) that might disturb an extremely sensitive church lady.

While composing this blog post, I initially thought to make comparisons: A young organist who gave up music to study medicine then returned much later to pick up where she left off. But the similarities ended there. She obviously came to earth brimming with far more gifts than most. Genes perhaps (both parents were musicians) but also perseverance. Maybe some of it is the swimming.

She went on to study composition with Nadia Boulanger and organ with Marcel Dupre. However, following "a series of life changing events" including the death of her father when she was 20, she changed course and eventually practiced internal medicine until her retirement in 2000, at which time she began playing the organ again at age 72.

At this concert it sounded as though she had played all her life. Now proudly 80 years old, there was nothing to give away her age in either her bearing or her vibrant performance. Pieces chosen included her own arrangement of the Shostakovich "Suite for Variety Orchestra" (complete with an ending 32' low C pedal note, which worked by the way) and Waltz 2, a delightful almost theater-organ-like piece famous from the film "Eyes Wide Shut". She ended her concert with the same Olivier Messiaen piece with which in 1952, 59 years ago to the day, she had won the AGO National Competition in San Francisco in this very same Berkeley building, although presumably a different organ given that this one was built in 2006.

As if to summarize her life, in her touching short comments she quoted the poem "...and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." [T.S. Eliot, "Four Quartets"]