The organ record of the year, maybe the most interesting of the last several.

From 1870 to 1930, the music played on most organ recitals was pretty much evenly divided between original organ compositions (with plenty of J. S. Bach, however inauthentically played) and transcriptions of big orchestral works (heavily weighted toward bleeding chunks of Wagner). From the 1930s onward, the trend toward the revival of classical organ-building principles inevitably led to a sort of political correctness in the music that should be played on the organ: If it was written for it, fine; if transcribed, was not one attempting to transform the instrument into something that it was not?

In recent years, common sense has made a comeback, and, led by Thomas Murray of Yale, organists now feel free to program the often fiendishly difficult transcriptions made by their ancestors, the great civic organists like W.T. Best and Edwin Lemare - if they have the technique to manage stops, pistons, and swell boxes while playing torrents of notes on two manuals while reaching up or down to a third manual with alternating thumbs to bring out an inner voice. One understands why crowds packed auditoriums to watch a single musician bring forth a Rossini overture as though he were an entire orchestra.

The Planets, certainly one of the century's great crowd-pleasers, came along too late in the game to earn an organ arrangement, and it was not until recently that a transcription was undertaken using the rules that applied five or six generations ago at the height of the late romantic organ: to make an arrangement idiomatic to the instrument, not a feeble imitation of an orchestra, but as the composer had conceived the work in terms of the organ. It is altogether amazing that the bold arranger (and performer) should be Peter Sykes, a distinguished scholar-performer of early music. Victoria Wagner, his wife, lends a hand here and there where one performer is inadequate to the task, but Sykes manages most of it himself, and becoming a persuasive Holst orchestra as a soloist is quite an undertaking. In making the arrangement, Sykes worked both from the full score and Holst's own two-piano arrangement, which has been recorded and is a fascinating perspective on the score in its own right.

A few observations: Organs, because of their fixed and unlimited wind supplies, are very good at obsessive movements like Mars and Saturn, in the latter case, maybe better than the orchestra itself. Venus and Mercury, the warmer movements, may actually gain from the cold impersonality of the organ. Percussion instruments, so important in the score of the Planets, are dispensable even in Saturn if their emotional freight can be conveyed otherwise. Jupiter and Uranus don't suffer excessively, orchestral strengths in joviality or magic being offset by sheer power. And for Neptune even Holst had to bring in a wordless female chorus for effects beyond what the orchestra could convey, where Sykes' complex reduction conveys nearly as much remoteness and cosmic indecision.

The Girard College organ is uniquely suited for this kind of music. Jonathan Ambrosino's informative notes refer to the "attractively ponderous qualities necessary for a true romantic roar," and that tilt toward the bottom of the sonic spectrum is a definite characteristic of this magnificent old Skinner. Sonic image localizers will be disappointed, because the Girard organ speaks from a diffused location overhead, and there is a kind of disembodied imminence to most of the voices of this instrument that would be a big handicap to playing counterpoint in Bach but makes a lot of sense for Holst.

It should be noted that aside from the bottom-octave contribution of some 32' ranks of enormous scale, the recording also captures a good deal of the low-frequency noise involved in supplying wind to a large pipe organ in a resonant environment. I think that owners of maximum seismic subwoofers will need to exercise some restraint. The rest of us should enjoy.