My initial knee-jerk reaction when I received this new Raven recording for review was to cringe, immediately followed by disbelief. I thought "How can this possibly work?". The famous Piano Concerto No. 2 by Sergei Rachmaninov performed with a pipe organ playing the role of an orchestra. Well ... it does work. If you take it for what it is. You see, the Wanamaker Grand Court Organ, which resides in the seven-story atrium of Macy's department store in Philadelphia, should be considered one of the wonders of the world, or at least a unique engineering feat. With its 6 manuals, 464 ranks, 401 stops (6 pages of the CD booklet to list them all), string division, orchestral division, and percussion division, it's the closest thing to an orchestra a pipe organ can be.

Lavish construction and elegant workmanship makes the Wanamaker Organ both a tonal wonder and a monument to superb craftsmanship. The largest pipe is made of flawless Oregon sugar-pine three inches thick and more than 32 feet long, so large that a Shetland Pony was once posed inside for publicity photos. More than 8,000 pipes were added to the organ between 1911 and 1917, and from 1924 to 1930 an additional 10,000 pipes were installed, bringing the total number of pipes to 28,482. Commanding these huge resources is a massive console with six keyboards and 729 color-coded stop tablets. There are 168 piston buttons under the keyboards and 42 foot controls. The console weighs 2.5 tons; the entire instrument weighs 287 tons. {Raven}

Now here's the caveat. All this impressive and powerful sonic arsenal creates its very own problems and restrictions. When a pianist is nestled if front of an orchestra and visually in line with the conductor, synchronization is fairly straightforward. Tempos can change quickly, expressive rubato is easy to follow, and adrenaline can fuel the fire of a thrilling performance. But in a case like this one, with the organ console and piano at a distance from each other, no conductor to set the tempo changes, and worst of all, a few seconds of hall-induced reverberation delay of the organ, everything needs to slow down a bit in order to function well. (With this reverberation or echo effect, fast consecutive notes tend to become a blurry mess).

Despite all this, Jeremy Filsell's playing is passionate and Peter Richard Conte's command and registration of the organ is convincing. Let's just say that the total nervous abandon and recklessness of a live performance with piano and orchestra is missing. But like I pointed out earlier, if you take this for what it is, a sonic whiplash, it's definitely worth hearing.