Paris via Philadelphia via Iowa

The Dobson Organ at Verizon Hall
Olivier Latry, organ
The Philadelphia Orchestra,
Christoph Eschenbach
Ondine Records ODE 1094-5

• Barber: Toccata Festiva
• Poulenc: Organ Concerto
• Saint-Saens: Symphony No. 3 "Organ"

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On my layover walks around Philadelphia, I've run across the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts downtown a couple times. Looking like a huge, glass barrel laid on its side, it struck me at first like a futuristic hangar for a dirigible or the lab of a billionaire mad scientist. Or maybe a huge indoor greenspace. But no, it's a collection of performance spaces, including Verizon Hall, the new home of the Philadelphia Orchestra. It took me a while to figure out that Verizon Hall was only one of several spaces under the Kimmel Center's glass roof, kind of like a traditional concert hall wheeled into the middle of the glass blimp hangar, a room-within-a-room.

I tried to get a peek inside the building last time I was there, but I could only get as far as a small ticket lobby at street level. The building certainly looks spectacular. It didn't even strike me that there might be a pipe organ in the space, so I was quietly thrilled when looking thru the Organ Historical Society's recording catalog the other night to stumble upon the inaugural recording of a new Lynn Dobson instrument in Verizon Hall, featuring the redoubtable Olivier Latry at the organ, the titular organist of Notre Dame in Paris, accompanied by the Philadelphia Orchestra under the baton of Christoph Eschenbach.

An aside: I had some minimal contact with Lynn Dobson over 20 years ago when I was attending the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Out scouting for local pipe organs, I came across a then-new instrument by Mr. Dobson at the University Baptist Church in Dinkytown (the marquee said "A Liberal Church" and it turned out to be so). The instrument was a medium-small two-manual affair with tracker action and electro-mechanical stop action, and it spoke confidently into the fairly small space. I was intrigued enough to send a letter to Mr. Dobson asking if he were looking for assistance at his shop in Lake City, IA. He kindly and promptly replied that while he was not currently looking for help, he was considering moving his operations to the Minneapolis area and would keep me in mind.

So over two decades later I was surprised not to find that Mr. Dobson was still at work building organs, but that he was tackling something as ambitious as this new instrument for Verizon Hall. Billed as "the largest concert hall organ in America," the organ features four manuals, 110 stops and 7,000 pipes. It has both a mechanical action console in the organ case proper and a movable, remote electric-action console for use with the orchestra. This instrument would be a gigantic design and logistical undertaking for any organ firm, and is quite beyond the scope of what I thought Mr. Dobson would be up to.



I was quite wrong, it appears. The construction photos on both the Dobson Organ Company and the Kimmel Center sites give an indication of how involved the installation was, and at 32 tons and $3.7 million, it's a magnificent accomplishment by any standard.

The recording features three works for organ and orchestra, all recorded live during the inaugural concerts in 2006. It's hard to form a confident opinion on the instrument from a single recording, especially when the organ shares the stage with a large orchestra. But it makes all the right organ sounds, though it seems a bit dark for French music. For its size, it does not overwhelm with sound, which might be explained by many things: how it was recorded, the fact of full audiences for the performances, how Mr. Latry registered the instrument. It's certainly not a weak sound, but neither does it have that rumble-of-the-earth depth of a big Aeolian-Skinner, at least on recording. I'll be interested to hear it in a solo performance, either recorded or live, to see how much of this impression holds up.

Both orchestra and soloist give us note-perfect performances, and the Philadelphia Orchestra sounds great. This seems to constitute a bona fide trend of putting spectacular pipe organs back in concert halls, something of which I'm entirely in favor. A number of new and ambitious instruments have shown up on CD in the last few years, and here's another one. I've wrung my hands before about what the future has in store for the pipe organ, and each of these new installations makes me think the sky may not be falling after all.