The pipes, the pipes are calling

Attending organ concerts can feel like an audience with the pope. Such things don't happen every day, or on your schedule: You go to them.

Once there, the inexorable wall of sound is like nothing else. In a world of conformist experiences, no two organs are quite alike; each comes with so many options that any given organ takes its sound from whoever plays it.

Especially this week.

You might think the Kimmel Center's stately 7,000-pipe Fred J. Cooper Memorial Organ, known affectionately as "Fred," is having an extravagant nervous breakdown during Leos Janacek's feverish Glagolitic Mass. The Thursday-through-Saturday performances, conducted by Alan Gilbert, are the first in the Philadelphia Orchestra's Art of the Pipe Organ series - but they also are part of a perfect storm happening here that might not be possible in many other cities.

From the Kimmel Center to Girard College, from Longwood Gardens to the Wanamaker organ at Macy's, and including the new digital touring organ of iconoclastic keyboard wizard Cameron Carpenter, organists aren't just busier than usual, they're highly visible.

Though Kimmel organ recitals have decreased, organ partnerships with the likes of the Canadian Brass and Mendelssohn Club choir are rising.

"We realized when we were doing straight organ recitals it brought out the aficionados, but the larger community didn't have an appreciation," said Kimmel CEO Anne Ewers.

It's a cycle Carpenter sees all over: Concert halls are fitted with huge new organs - and then? "These instruments have a lifespan of one to three years," he said in a phone interview. "They're installed and then they fade as misplaced expectations reveal themselves as being unsustainable."

The difference in Philadelphia is that something is being done about it, with encouragement from the Wyncote Foundation, a regular contributor to the Kimmel Center. First, the Cooper instrument - the nation's largest mechanical-action concert-hall organ - received an improved acoustical shell in 2010. Then, guest stars were brought in. (The Mendelssohn Club, for one, would have had to blow its budget to afford a Verizon Hall rental, but as a guest of "Fred," that wasn't necessary.)

With luck, the actual performances also may improve. Philadelphia Orchestra organist Michael Stairs said guest organists tend - literally - to pull out too many stops: "In the wrong hands, this instrument can be lethal."

Another force in the organ surge is the orchestra's music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who began his professional life as an organ-centric Montreal church musician. "When I first heard this instrument live at Kimmel, I thought, 'OK, you need to organize things around it.' "

His contribution: Programming rarely heard concertos by Joseph Jongen, Alexandre Guilmant, and Stephen Paulus on Nov. 6, 7, and 8 to show there's more to the repertoire than Poulenc's popular Concerto for Organ, Timpani and Strings.

"If I have to play the Poulenc one more time, I'll scream," said Curtis Institute faculty organist Alan Morrison. Luckily, he has a world premiere later this season: the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, another past "Fred" guest, returns with a new organ concerto by music director Dirk Brossé.

Meanwhile, Longwood Gardens recently refurbished its 10,000-pipe, 1929 Aeolian organ and in 2013 held its first international organ competition, with a $40,000 first prize; the second is set for 2016. It has committed to concerts appealing to many demographics. "Organ is the cornerstone of that programming," said executive director Paul B. Redman. Already, Longwood is considered a major resumé item for organists.

A documentary on the competition will air on WHYY-TV in 2015. "I'm in it," says Stairs, "having a fight with another judge."

Was mud slung?

"Oh, yes! I wonder if they edited it."

Organists aren't prone to consensus opinions. The more visible the organist, the more controversial, and none more so than Carpenter. Though he'll play the Kimmel organ in his concert here in January, for other tour dates he'll use his new portable digital organ, heard on his new Sony Classical disc, If You Could Read My Mind. Nearly a decade of planning and fund-raising went into the instrument, much of the money coming from his own concert fees and talent for frugal living. Now it fits into a series of suitcases transportable by a single truck. He believes it marks a new chapter in organ history.

To Curtis' Morrison, it's a blind alley: The experience's totality must include the room to which the organ is uniquely crafted. Carpenter offers mobility and quality control that will also make the experience more uniform: In theory, he can create the same effects anywhere, allowing certain wild cards for the heat of performance.

In contrast, the Glagolitic Mass at Kimmel is being rethought in ways that won't resemble past performances or recordings - or what the Czech composer was used to.

"I've played a couple of Polish and Czech organs, and they're pitiful, whiny little things - not beautiful at all," said Stairs. "I'm using the reed tone on this organ. That will be the main sound. And it's going to have some beef."