Getting life organ-ized

Friday, March 31, 2006 | 7:10 a.m.

For an organist, Dorothy Riess' musical career has been quite a ride - bookends, really, on an active career in medicine.

She had her own radio show at 16, then played two years at a church in Rome, had a concert career and did several gigs at various U.S. churches before going to medical school.

Now in retirement, Riess, 74, has returned to music.

"I'm back," said Riess, who will perform a recital Sunday on the massive von Beckerath organ at UNLV's Doc Rando Recital Hall.

"I'm back and it's better musically because I have more to say. No 20-year-old has anything to say."

Yet at 20, Riess must have been saying something when she won first place in a national organ competition in 1952, which gave her $2,000 in prize money to study with Marcel Dupre in Paris.

From there she had a brief stint playing at a church in Hawaii before returning to Europe, this time to Italy, where she played services and concerts at the American Church, St. Paul's Within the Walls, Rome.

It was a gig that landed her precisely in the path of a Yale professor, who heard her play and arranged a full scholarship.

There, she completed half her master's degree before returning home to be with her ill father, a concert violinist.

When he died two months later, Riess gave up the organ and became a stenotypist. Unsettled, and determined to not be a stenotypist all her life, she went back to school, studied medicine and became an internist, setting up a practice in Pasadena, Calif.

"I played off and on," Riess said. "If anyone asked me to substitute on a Sunday, I would."

Now she's booming.

"She's thriving," said Paul Hesselink, UNLV organ teacher and board member of Southern Nevada's chapter of the American Guild of Organists. "She plays with a lot of verve, a lot of excitement and she's meticulous."

On Sunday Riess will perform works by Bach, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Cesar Franck, Pierre Du Mage and others, ending the program with Milos Sokola's "Passacaglia quasi Toccata on B-A-C-H."

The Sokola piece, she said, "is a horror to play. It is extremely difficult. I think I have my work cut out for me."

This is true, especially if you consider that returning to the organ is not like getting back on a bicycle. Each instrument is vastly different. And with the von Beckerath, there is a lot to become acquainted with.

"It's intimidating," Riess said. "There are 3,000 pipes in this instrument. You have to know how to control them.

"When I was doing this professionally, this was part of my life. Six- and eight-hour practice sessions were the norm."

Riess' musical career began at age 4 when she started playing the piano. She was competing at 8, and at 14 she performed with the Oklahoma City Symphony.

Two years later she switched to the Hammond electric organ, started playing jazz and landed her own radio show in Oklahoma City.

It was the late 1940s, she was 16 and jazz organ was a path she wanted to follow.

"I loved it," Riess said. "TV hadn't come out yet. I played Saturdays so the high school kids could listen, and during the evenings I played a half-hour of quiet music that I loved." Then she found a teacher who told her, "You play all the jazz you want, but when you come here you play Bach."

That was the end of her jazz career.

After a life dabbling in various interests, Riess returned to the organ after closing her medical practice in Pasadena and moving to Las Vegas in 2000.

At first it was a couple of jobs at local churches. Then it was the local organists guild's spring member recital in 2004, in which, Riess said, "I poured on the steam."

"I played this huge piece by Franz Liszt, got a standing ovation," she said. "I guess, as they say, the rest is history."

Earlier this year when the American Guild of Organists convened in Las Vegas, Riess performed at a concert recorded for the Minnesota Public Radio show "Pipe Dreams," which has yet to be scheduled for broadcast.

"I'm back," Riess said. "There are some pieces that are so incredibly beautiful that I want to learn for as long as I can still play."