Damin Spritzer is Associate Professor of Organ at the University of Oklahoma. Next year, Macy’s 150th anniversary, the store hopes to get the Philadelphia Orchestra to come and play Joseph Jongen’s “Symphonie Concertante,” a work for organ and orchestra commissioned by Wanamaker’s in 1928 but never performed at the store.Dr. Martine Reardon, the Macy’s national headquarters executive overseeing holiday events, including now the annual Christmas organ and light show in the Philadelphia store, said, “The Wanamaker Organ’s legacy is as legendary as the Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Fourth of July fireworks.”
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Conte sees things, is that “Macy’s gets it - it understands how to use this instrument and market it to the public.” Macy’s took it over last year.Įach of the owners recognized the unique historical value of the organ, and Lord & Taylor hired Mr.
Wanamaker’s itself was sold to Woodward & Lothrop in 1986 then it became a Hecht’s and in 1997 a Lord & Taylor store. The changes were so extensive that the instrument’s “string” section finally had more pipes than most large organs do altogether.įamous organists flocked to play it over the years, and both Marcel Dupré and Virgil Fox developed signature pieces on the organ, but when Lewis Rodman Wanamaker died, the organ’s importance faded. Until his death in 1928, Lewis Rodman Wanamaker oversaw successive expansions of the organ in the store’s own organ shop on the building’s roof. Then it languished in storage until 1909, when John Wanamaker bought it for the Philadelphia store that he was planning to open two years later. It was a smash hit at the fair, but bankrupted the company. Louis International Exposition of 1904, when the Los Angeles Art Organ Company built it along orchestral lines, rather than according to the baroque organ ideal, as Bach and Buxtehude knew it. “I love the sound of French horns and I will probably use them a lot,” he said. Conte expects to luxuriate in its liberated sounds, including three more French horn stops made by the Kimball Organ Company of Chicago. Next year a long-muffled section of 2,000 more pipes, now being cleaned and restored, will rejoin the rest in a more audible spot, and Mr. It has just about everything else imaginable - chimes and even a kitchen sink (for the curators to wash their hands) - in a forest of pipes ranging from 32 feet to less than an inch long, spread over both ends and multiple rooms and floors off the store’s Grand Court.
The Elgar sounds impressively orchestral on this organ, with its 462 sets of pipes, including stops named for orchestral violins, cellos, flutes, orchestral oboes, clarinets, French horns, tubas and trombones.
“It’s probably the most difficult piece I’ve ever done,” he said before trying out several movements at a Wednesday evening concert, his fingers slinking from keyboard to keyboard and darting restlessly over the 729 stop-control tablets as phrase seamlessly followed phrase and crescendo climaxed and faded into descrescendo. He has been working feverishly on the Elgar for weeks, with all-night practice sessions, alone in the store except for a guard.
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