Summer Stars finale mixes contemporary organ works with light classical fare

QUINTON TRAMM

The last concert in Ocean Grove’s 2024 Summer Stars series took place on Aug. 1.

The tradition of the organ concerto reaches back to the 17th century. But the final concert of the 2024 Summer Stars festival in Ocean Grove explored the contemporary, secular side of the artform, and lightened things up with some crowd-pleasing standards of the classical concert repertoire. “The King of Instruments and the Prince of Tenors” finale, which took place on Aug. 1 at The Great Auditorium, featured organist Gordon Turk and tenor Ronald Naldi with conductor Jason Tramm and the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra.

Turk showed off the expressive possibilities of the venue’s 13,000-pipe organ in Charles Callahan’s “Mosaics” and Horatio Parker’s “Concerto for Organ and Orchestra.” Naldi dipped into two popular Italian arias by Giacomo Puccini and a popular English song by Vincent Youmans, while concertmaster and solo violinist Byung Kook-Kwak tackled Camille Saint-Saëns’ thrilling “Havanaise.”

The historic 1894 auditorium is located just a seashell’s throw from the Ocean Grove boardwalk and flanked by quaint, tent revival cottages. Full of charming, original features, it runs low on modern conveniences (e.g., climate control), which made for a steamy, sultry evening.

QUINTON TRAMM

Gordon Turk plays the organ at The Great Auditorium in Ocean Grove.

Turk, Tramm and Naldi took it in stride. The longstanding trio is at the heart of the summer classical concert series presented by the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association to coincide with its annual camp meeting week. Both Naldi and Turk are in their 51st season on the OGCMA music team, and Tramm is celebrating 18 seasons as director of music.

The organ, installed in 1907 with chambers built by Robert Hope-Jones, has been Turk’s throne since joining OGCMA in 1974. He calls it “the heartbeat of the church” and it is linked to the entire culture of Ocean Grove, which was founded in 1869 as a small religious community. Thanks to extensive restorations over the decades — the most recent taking place last year, and involving more than 4,000 pipes — the instrument can handle repertoire from Baroque to modern, and every shade of tonality and expression.

Turk put the organ’s versatility and power to task, beginning with the East Coast premiere of Callahan’s “Mosaics,” a symphonic work in four movements for organ and orchestra.

After its 2016 premiere at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, it was never played again. Its rediscovery and resurrection made for an exciting story, as told by Turk in his opening comments. Callahan, an organist and a prolific composer for the instrument, passed away last year at 72, and after reading about “Mosaics” in Callahan’s obituary, Turk, an acquaintance of his, began digging around for the score. No one could seem to find it, but the search finally ended with the help of John Romeri, the organist who had played the work’s premiere (and who attended this concert).

Romeri produced a copy of the full conductor’s score, but there were no parts for the individual musicians nor the organ. Turk reached out to Callahan’s music publisher, who agreed to deconstruct the main score into a series of parts for all the individual players, and to generate one for the organ. The final printing was completed in June and July.

It was a tight deadline to learn the new music, but Tramm’s large orchestra of musicians from his MidAtlantic Artistic Productions company (where he serves as artistic director and principal conductor) was up to the challenge.

In some ways the work comes across as a reconstruction. Phrasing within the four traditional movements is not always seamless or well-balanced. Thematic material is adventurous and concise, and sometimes melodramatic.

In the Allegro, the horns play an early music motif modeled after the first three notes of the “Te Deum laudamus,” an ancient church hymn. While Gregorian musical motifs are often meditative and pure, Callahan’s orchestral language was more in the realm of an epic fantasy adventure soundtrack.

Tramm gave Callahan’s novelties plenty of zest, and captured the excitement of the work’s rediscovery. Kwak brought out some subtle shading in a melancholy, plaintive solo in the long, lyric Andante. Powerful organ writing makes up for what the work lacks in finesse. The instrument is unleashed in massive, towering fields of sound and color; Turk pulled out all the stops with tremendous, floor-shaking wind pressures.

The Parker selection allowed Turk to delve into the instrument’s more dynamic, tonal subtleties, and benefited from his delicate control of its tremendous sonority. The lesser-known late 19th century American composer is mainly remembered as Charles Ives’ teacher at Yale School of Music, where he taught music theory and later served as dean.

Parker was a skillful composer whose style was greatly influenced by the conservative icons he studied as a student in Europe. His Opus 55 organ concert shows off masterly writing with a superb sense of balance and construction, and a Wagnerian musical sensibility — intense and extended.

The “Allegro moderato” opens with a tutti, and the organ cedes to dark and rich orchestral color contrasted by celestial woodwinds. A solo by Kwak was hopeful and searching. In the third movement, the organ picks up a Bachian fugue form that contrasts exquisitely with the Romantic tonalities of the orchestra, and multilayered textures build to a majestic finale. Turk’s colorful solo in the playful Allegretto matched the bubbling humor of the pizzicato strings. Tramm led with mindful tension and tempos.

In Saint-Saëns’ iconic “Havanaise,” Tramm drew colorful orchestral sound and showed a keen sense of the work’s habanera rhythms; inspired by Afro-Cuban melodies, the Romantic French composer (and organist) dedicated the short but electrifying 1887 work to Cuban violinist Rafael Díaz Albertini.

The single movement is divided into multiple sections of various tempos with plenty of virtuosic moments for the violin soloist. Kwak, on an instrument of bright color and wide projection, brought all the technique to sail through its scintillating slides and jumps. Though his passagework was light and nimble, he focused more on the work’s sensitive lyricism and romance, digging into the slower sections with captivating expression and phrasing.

QUINTON TRAMM

Ronald Naldi sings, with Jason Tramm conducting, at The Great Auditorium in Ocean Grove.

Naldi, dapper in a white jacket despite the sweltering heat, brought old school charm through Puccini’s heroic and popular tenor roles: Calaf in “Turandot” and Dick Johnson in “La fanciulla del West.” The Bound Brook native and lyric tenor made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 1983. Though his voice shows some of the limitations, in terms of agility and projection, that come naturally with age, the beautiful, sweet core remains and he can still ascend to that exciting high C terrain.

In “Nessun dorma,” from the final act of “Turandot,” he hit all the sustained notes through the “Vincerò! Vincerò!” fanfare with elegance and poise. “Ch’ella mi creda,” from act three of “Fanciulla,” was equally stylish and passionate.

The harp soloist added some sweetness to the crowd-pleasing selection, Youmans’ 1929 “Without a Song,” which received a standing ovation.

While the program offered new and old works, the audience seemed to be more enthralled by the familiar favorites.