Wanamaker organ celebrates its birthday with an orchestra as guest

The King of Instruments was lonely no more.

Normally heard from its solitary perch on the second floor of Macy's department store, the legendary Wanamaker organ had a 100th-birthday celebration with full orchestra (not so unusual in recent years) and one positioned nearer than usual on the second-floor gallery for the first time in some nine decades.

The Camden-based Symphony in C (in a reduced version) joined the organ for a concert of substantial but infrequently heard organ/orchestra works and did so with a particularly strong artistic imperative, even if the pieces were not all first-rate.

The proximity of the two entities meant that there was a greater sense of musical interaction with less energy given over to dealing with acoustical challenges. The tighter fusion of sounds - the organ's superhuman solidity next to a group of individual musicians - made sense in some surprising ways and created an experience that could only happen there.

In typical symphonic concert halls, the organ is often used as a supporting character, creating sonic heft more felt than heard. At Macy's, the tables were inevitably turned - Why else would you go to the trouble of turning a department store into a concert hall? - which means that the organ and its master, Peter Richard Conti, exercised periodic options to claim the foreground.

A problem? Not for me. Even when the orchestra was barely audible, it still acted as a counterbalance to the organ's less-ingratiating sharp edges. No matter where any given phrase stood in the shifting balance between organ and sonority, you had the best of two worlds: The organ's mechanistic majesty - quite palpable even though Conte prefers low-fat sounds with nothing extraneous - and the orchestra's humanity.

Not every conductor would be willing to share the spotlight in this way, but Symphony in C music director Rossen Milanov did so and was even game for a piece like Felix Alexandre Guilmant's 1906 Symphony No. 2 for Organ and Orchestra, which seems to have been written with a 100-pound pen. The strokes are broad and simple while orchestra and organ maintain carefully circumscribed musical territories, all suggesting that the piece is more about musical traffic management than creative fantasy.

There is nothing careful or tentative about Charles-Marie Widor's Symphony No. 6, a late-Romantic piece often marked by hectic velocity and complicated layers of textures, which are greater musical virtues when elucidated in the organ/orchestral version (as opposed to its solo organ version). The piece's 1919 U.S. premiere was in this very space; music with such a singular voice needs to be heard much more often.

More immediately appealing was Joseph Jongen's 1924 Hymne for Organ and Orchestra: Its radiant, enveloping blends of sound and chantlike melodies created an effect unlike anything I had experienced. Though part of only the second major event of Philadelphia's fall classical music season, might this piece be remembered among the best?