[Dixielandjazz] World's Largest Playable Organ?

[Stephen G Barbone]

Caveat: Not OKOM, but possibly relevant to a prior thread about pipe  
organs. If you ever visit Philadelphia, be sure and stop at Macy's in  
center city during the noon hour to hear it's more than 28,000 pipes  
being played.
Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

NY TIMES - September 29, 2008 - By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER


Amid Shoes and Jewels, a Mighty, Mighty Sound

PHILADELPHIA — The organist Virgil Fox once compared playing the  
Wanamaker organ, said to be the largest playable instrument in the  
world, to being a child in a toy store. “You have to have many arms,  
many hands and many brains,” he said.
The Wanamaker’s golden pipes cascade across a second-floor wall of the  
ornate Grand Court of Macy’s Center City here, hovering like a giant  
wingspan above a first-floor statue of an eagle. On Saturday, with an  
audience tucked between displays of shoes and jewelry, Rossen Milanov  
conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra and the organist Peter Richard  
Conte in Joseph Jongen’s “Symphonie Concertante,” a performance  
postponed for 80 years.

The concert was presented by Macy’s and the Friends of the Wanamaker  
Organ, which has a repair shop in the building. Built for the St.  
Louis International Exposition in 1904, the organ was bought by John  
Wanamaker in 1909 for his new Philadelphia store and inaugurated in  
the seven-story atrium of the Grand Court in 1911. It has been played  
every business day since, with customers serenaded at lunchtime by  
organ music instead of Muzak.

The more than 10,000 pipes it had originally were deemed insufficient  
for the atrium, so thousands were added over the years. (There are now  
28,482.) But as the store changed hands over the last century, the  
organ fell into disrepair. In the mid-1990s only about 20 percent of  
the pipes and two of the six keyboards were usable. It is now fully  
functioning. Jongen’s “Symphonie” was commissioned in 1926 to showcase  
the enlarged instrument, but delays in its expansion, the Great  
Depression and the unexpected death of John Wanamaker’s son caused  
repeated postponements of the Philadelphia premiere, first scheduled  
for 1928. Saturday’s performance was the first time the work was  
performed on the organ it was intended for.

Jongen absorbed eclectic influences; his “Symphonie” blends Straussian  
orchestral writing with an organ part that reflects César Franck and  
Olivier Messiaen. The combined forces of the Wanamaker behemoth and  
the Philadelphia Orchestra produced a mighty sound, with swirls of  
color and surging climaxes in the virtuosic Toccata finale thundering  
through the atrium. The reverberant acoustics invariably muddied the  
texture and details.

The program opened with the transcription of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue  
by Leopold Stokowski, a former music director of the Philadelphia  
Orchestra. It also included Marcel Dupré’s “Cortege and Litany” in a  
version for organ and orchestra commissioned in the 1920s by Alexander  
Russell, music director of the Wanamaker stores. The work builds in  
intensity from a gentle beginning to a fiery climax that evokes  
pealing bells.

The exuberant “Fanfare” by Howard Shore, whose opera “The Fly”  
recently had its American premiere in Los Angeles, featured Wagnerian  
brass writing and a virtuoso solo part. Commissioned to honor Macy’s  
150th anniversary this year, the piece received its premiere here. As  
encores, Mr. Milanov conducted Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” March  
and “Happy Birthday,” complete with flashing lights and colorful  
streamers falling from the high ceiling.

Organ concerts often have video screens relaying images of the  
organist, whose console is usually hidden from view. A screen would  
have been welcome here so the audience could have enjoyed a glimpse of  
Mr. Conte’s virtuosity on the complex Wanamaker instrument, whose  
hundreds of stops surround six keyboards like multicolored dominoes.

The huge symphonic sound produced by this organ is so striking it  
seems as if it could shatter the glass jewelry cases, reflecting Fox’s  
observation that there is no place on earth where one musician can be  
seated at an instrument and have so much power.










Steve Barbone

www.barbonestreet.com
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband