Entertainment

Whipped up at the Meyerson, the concert hall organ craze resonates in Philadelphia's new $3.7 million instrument

08:00 PM CDT on Friday, May 19, 2006

By SCOTT CANTRELL / The Dallas Morning News

PHILADELPHIA – The city of the Liberty Bell and the cheesesteak has caught up with a trend that started in Dallas. Last weekend, Philadelphia put on quite a hoopla to inaugurate the big new pipe organ in Verizon Hall, the larger of the two performance spaces in the 4 ½-year-old Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts.

Built by Dobson Pipe Organ Builders Ltd. of Lake City, Iowa, the $3.7 million Philadelphia instrument is the latest manifestation of a craze for concert-hall organs sparked by the 14-year-old C.B. Fisk in Dallas' Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center.

The Kimmel Center and the Meyerson also share an acoustical consultant, Artec, though Verizon Hall can't hold a sonic candle to the Meyerson. You know things are bad when even the acousticians admit, as Artec did in Philadelphia, that the hall doesn't sound the way it should.

But Kimmel Center has been plagued by bad karma: a $30 million debt at its opening, a $2.2 million deficit last year, job and programming cuts. The center slapped architect Rafael Viñoly with a $23 million lawsuit for "defective and deficient design work," then settled out of court.

Barbara L. Johnston / The Philadelphia Inquirer

Organ virtuoso Cameron Carpenter, known as "the jewel of Juillard," performs during the organ recital marathon in Verizon Hall at Philadelphia's Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts.

The new Fred J. Cooper Memorial Organ was showcased in performances with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Philadelphia Singers and Mannes College of Music Orchestra, and in a five-hour marathon of solo performances by outstanding area organists.

Organ-and-orchestra selections included a newly commissioned piece by Gerald Levinson and still-fresh works by Samuel Barber and David Raskin, as well as the familiar Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony and Poulenc Concerto for organ, strings and timpani.

Its over-the-stage façade of polished tin pipes framed by crisp maple casework, the new Dobson organ certainly fills the 2,500-seat Verizon Hall. It can be played from a built-in mechanical-action console or from a movable, electric-action console with curvaceous stop terraces of Carpathian elm burl that have the look of a chic art deco dresser.

The flue stops, whose pipes are essentially whistles great and small, produce substantial and beautifully finished tones. They suggest a beefier version of the "American classic" organ sound cultivated between the 1930s and early 1950s by designer G. Donald Harrison and the extinct Boston firm of Aeolian-Skinner.

The biggest reed stops – the ones suggestive of orchestral trumpets, trombones and tubas – are stirring in a meaty, Anglo-American manner. But the popular French repertory of the last century and a half, prominent in the recital marathon, calls for more brass and fire than the main chorus reeds supply. Still, the sheer heft of the Verizon Hall instrument marks it as an offspring of the Meyerson organ.

There was an earlier craze for concert-hall organs from the 1960s to the early 1980s. Installations included Philadelphia's Academy of Music, New York's Philharmonic Hall (later rebuilt and renamed Avery Fisher Hall), Chicago's Orchestra Hall, San Francisco's Davies Hall and Washington's Kennedy Center Concert Hall.

But all these instruments were strongly influenced by the neobaroque aesthetic popular at the time, favoring brightness and clarity at the expense of depth and warmth. Next to a modern symphony orchestra, they tended to sound thin and undernourished, sometimes brash and screamy.

And all were stuck in halls eventually acknowledged to be acoustically problematic. The Philadelphia Orchestra eventually campaigned for a proper orchestra hall; the Academy of Music was really an opera house, with acoustics far too "dry" for symphonic music. All the other halls have been rebuilt in recent years, in hopes of improving their sound. Still, none would figure on a list of the world's great sonic settings for orchestral, let alone organ, music.

The Meyerson, opened in 1989, revolutionized expectations in concert-hall acoustics. With heavy masonry construction, a high ceiling but relatively narrow width and restricted seat count, it supplied a sonic sumptuousness rarely encountered since great 19th and early 20th century halls like the Vienna Musikverein, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and Boston's Symphony Hall. And vast concrete sound chambers hidden behind grilles at the front and sides of the hall allowed adding virtually cathedralesque reverberation for organ music.

The Meyerson's Fisk organ similarly had a tonal density and weight unheard since the late-romantic organs of the 1930s. It could supply authentic choruses and piquancies of 17th and 18th century German and French instruments, but also the fire and colors of 19th century French and English organs.

The new Philadelphia organ can't produce the Meyerson's death-by-chocolate intensity, and it's less boldly colored and textured. It's more of a middle-of-the-road, Anglo-American compromise – gratifying, if not the last word in sheer gut excitement.

French organist Olivier Latry, one of three organists of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, performed May 12 with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and he gave a post-concert solo recital. He's one of the organ's star performers these days, and technically and expressively he certainly lived up to his reputation.

It was good to hear the Barber Toccata festiva, a 15-minute showpiece the Dallas Symphony Orchestra ought to revive. (It was composed for the 1960 inauguration of the nasty and short-lived Aeolian-Skinner organ in the Academy of Music.)

Swarthmore College professor Gerald Levinson's 10-minute Toward Light alternated tempestuous slashings and thunderings, for both organ and orchestra, with watery string effects; the organ also got to play at almost Hindemithian neoclassicism.

Christoph Eschenbach, less popular as the Philadelphia Orchestra's music director than he was in the same job in Houston, certainly seemed to have a firm grip on everything, and the orchestra played well. He favored tempo extremes in the Poulenc concerto, and in the Saint-Saëns symphony his elaborate massaging almost remade the slow parts into Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. In an age too bereft of personality on our podiums, Mr. Eschenbach exudes it from every pore, but the effect isn't always idiomatic.

On Sunday afternoon, the Philadelphia Singers, a professional chorus in this case of about 50 voices, sounded superbly bold, clear and well-balanced in the Beethoven Missa solemnis. The group's music director, David Hayes, led an authoritative account, with fine playing from New York's Mannes College of Music Orchestra; soloists were uneven.

The organ, played by Michael Stairs, lent occasional thickening and tang to Beethoven's orchestral sauce. Mr. Stairs also joined the orchestra in the bluesy, soft-shoe Song after Sundown by the late Philadelphia-born David Raskin.

The Saturday-afternoon solo-organ marathon allocated an hour each to Marvin Mills, Alan Morrison, Cameron Carpenter, Diane Meredith Belcher and Gordon Turk. The emphasis was on late 19th and early 20th century showpieces and introspections; major Bach works were conspicuously rare.

Even with more extensive reverberance chambers than Dallas, Verizon Hall doesn't approach even the middle range of the Meyerson's adjustable reverberation. The orchestral sound is surprisingly clinical, with only a wimpy little sonic "tail" tacked onto the end. Violin tone can take on a steely edge, a surprise for an orchestra long renowned for its plush string sonorities. Philadelphians report wildly variable sound in different places in the hall.

Fixing the problems, if even possible, will be expensive. But the organ makes a jolly noise.

E-mail scantrell@dallasnews.com

Chicago: Orchestra Hall (Möller, 1981; rebuilt, Casavant, 1999)

Seattle: Benaroya Hall (Fisk, 2000)

Jacksonville, Fla.: Jacoby Concert Hall (Casavant, 1912; moved and rebuilt, Quimby, 2001)

Cleveland: Severance Hall (E.M. Skinner, 1931; rebuilt, Schantz, 2001)

Los Angeles: Disney Hall (Glatter-Götz/Rosales, 2004)

Boston: Symphony Hall (Aeolian-Skinner, 1949; rebuilt, Foley-Baker, 2004)

Madison, Wisc.: Overture Hall (Klais, 2004)

Philadelphia: Verizon Hall (Dobson, 2006)

Orange County, Calif.: Segerstrom Hall (Fisk, 2007)

San Luis Obispo, Calif.: Sidney Harman Hall (Fisk, 2007)

Nashville, Tenn.: Schermerhorn Symphony Center (Schoenstein, 2007)

Atlanta: Symphony Center (Dobson, 2009) See and hear demonstrations of the new Philadelphia organ.