Luogo e data di registrazione		St. Jacobi Kirche, Hamburg (Germany) - 18/20 Settembre 1994
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Recording Supervisor		Wolf Erichson
	Recording Engineer		Markus Heiland
	Tape Editor / Mastering		Markus Heiland
	Prima Edizione LP		Nessuna
	Edizione CD		Sony "Vivarte" | LC 6868 | SK 66 262 | 1 CD - durata 73' 26" | (c) 1996 | DDD
	Original Cover		"View of Hamburg", 1681 by Joachim Luhn (c.1640-1717).
	Note		-

THE ARP SCHNITGER ORGAN IN THE ST. JACOBI CHURCH AT HAMBURG Most attempts to modernize, restore, or conserve are fraught with error and controversy, with good intentions gone awry. Those who have sought to improve upon, rebuild or restore musical instruments have had their share of glory or shame. The story of the organ at the Jacobi Church in Hamburg restored to approximate the one finished by Arp Schnitger in 1693, encapsulates those travails. This restoration is of particular interest due to the fact that Schnitger‘s instruments became the standard by which North German Baroque organs were judged. The first of the Jacobi Church’s organs to be described in detail in contemporary records was built between 1512 and 1516 by Jacob Iversand and Harmen Stüven, and was later enlarged, rebuilt or repaired by Jacob Scherer (from 1546), Dirck Hoyer (1577/78), Hans Bokelmann (1591), Hans Scherer the Elder (1588-1592) and finally by Scherer’s sons (1605-1607). By this stage in its history, the instrument had 53 stops divided over three manuals and a pedal. Its specification is described by Michael Praetorius in his “Syntagma musicum”. The instrument was rebuilt in 1635 by Gottfried Fritzsche, who modernized it along standardized lines, extending its compass to four octaves and adding a further manual and new Rückpositiv. When Matthias Weckmann arrived at the Jacobi Church in 1655, one of his first acts was to invite Fritzsche’s nephew, Hans Christoph, to subject the organ to a thorough overhaul. By now the instrument was becoming increasingly in need of repair. In the 1680s the woodwork was found to be suffering from live attack, and so it was decided to build a new instrument. The task of building a new organ was entrusted to Arp Schnitger, who had already made a name for himself as the leading organ builder of his age with his pioneering 67-stop instrument for the city‘s Nikolai Church. Schnitger designed a new four-manual organ using the valuable old pipework, which he skilfully incorporated into his new 60-stop instrument. The case, windchests, bellows, wind conductors, action and some 35 stops, including all 15 reed stops, were all new and made, moreover, of the finest materials. The old instrument was dismantled in August 1689, and by Easter 1690 part of the new organ was already operational, although it was not until Easter 1693 that the instrument was finally completed. Against the advice of the organist of the Katharinen Church, Johann Adam Reincken, who acted as consultant, a 32’ Principal was added to the pedal, thus opening up the way for a monumental type of North German instrument that remains the largest of all Arp Schnitger‘s surviving organs. Few repairs and only a handful of minor alterations were undertaken in the course of the eighteenth century. New manuals were installed by Johann Paul Geycke in 1774/75, a few adjustments were made and two new stops were added by Johann Jakob Lehnert, but these changes did little to alter the instrument's overall character. An even more cautious spirit obtained in the nineteenth century, when the Jacobi Church organ was spared the sort of treatment meted out to comparable instruments, whereby older stops no longer in tune with the times were replaced by new ones and the instruments brought into line with contemporary taste, a process of alignment that generally involved the sacrifice of all the original materials. The twentieth century has left an ambiguous impression: while two world wars resulted in the greatest material losses to the instrument in the whole of its lengthy history, this period also witnessed the establishment of what has proved to be the organs lasting international reputation. During the First World War the case pipes were melted down as part of the war effort, resulting in an appalling loss that could only partially be made good in the course of the repairs carried out between 1926 and 1930. Nonetheless, the Jacobi Church organ became a symbol of the Organ Revival of the 1920s. It was Hans Henny Jahnn who proved the most eloquent advocate of its preservation and the father of its renewed reputation. At Jahnn‘s invitation, Günther Ramin, then the organist at St. Thomas’s in Leipzig, gave a series of 24 concerts for the Ugrino Society, whom he regaled with a repertory specially designed to show off the instrument. The Jacobi Church organ played a considerable and far-reaching role in the rediscovery of early organ music and in the way that that music was interpreted. The restorations undertaken by Karl Kemper in 1926 and 1928-1930 were carried out with particular care, and for the next twelve years the restored instrument was able to lead an untroubled existence. In 1942 the church authorities decided to build a shelter beneath the church tower in which to store not only the church’s artistic treasures but also the pipes, windchests and wooden carvings from the case front, with the result that all these objects survived the air raid in June 1944 that reduced the church itself to a heap of rubble. The rebuilding of the Jacobi Church organ after the Second World War - first on a temporary site in the south nave and, between 1959 and 1961, in its original location - proved to be problematical. Needless changes were made to the windchests and pipework and, in the case of missing parts such as the case and action, different measurements were used, the wrong materials employed and the whole reconstruction based on techniques alien to the original instrument. Experts from the world of organ building were not slow to voice their criticisms of the quality of this work, and although the aura of the Jacobi Church organ remained largely unaffected, the obvious discrepancies between the immense value of the surviving original materials and their inadequate presentation were plain for all to see. This contradiction was not resolved until the 1980s and 1990s. The timetable for restoring the Arp Schnitget organ to its original state was drawn up by an international symposium in 1983; the church authorities resolved to proceed with the restoration in 1984 and duly appointed a committee of experts. Between 1985 and 1987 the Dutch organ scholar Cor H. Edskes documented the instrument's current state, and in 1986 the firm of Jürgen Ahrend of Leer in East Friesland was commissioned with the task of restoring the Jacobi Church organ. In 1990 work began on dismantling the original parts and restoring them at Leer. In the meantime, extensive building work in the church itself, involving the renovation of six pillars and repainting the interior of the building, meant that it was finally possible to remove the huge concrete gallery erected in 1960 that had hitherto prevented the organ from being rebuilt at its original height. The concrete gallery was replaced by a wooden one, some four metres less deep, that also takes account of the requirements for sacred music at services in the church. Following completion of this rebuilding programme, it was finally possible to reuse the main nave of the church for the first time on Palm Sunday 1992. During this period the old pipework was thoroughly restored at Leer, the shortened pipes were lengthened and the windchests, which had suffered badly from the passage of time, were carefully refurbished. The wood carvings were similarly in a poor state of repair - some had been cut up completely - and were restored or remade and then regilded. The case was rebuilt in oak on the basis of old photographs and contemporary specifications, as were the bellows, console and action. New pipes were made to replace the case pipes lost in 1917, including the 32' Principal. Part of the organ was set up in the workshop at Leer, where the pipework was voiced and tuned. The question of which system of tuning to adopt is one that exercised the committee of experts and church authorities for some time. They weighed the importance of historical fidelity against the demands that would be placed on such an outstanding instrument in terms of its likely repertory and decided in favour of 1/5-comma mean-tone temperament of a kind used in Arp Schnitger’s workshop during the builder's lifetime. The chosen temperament involves relatively pure major thirds and, as such, is particularly well suited to seventeenth-century music, which achieves a far more brilliant tone in consequence. The price that must be paid for this is a noticeable harshness in peripheral keys such as F-sharp and C-sharp major. Most of the works included in the present recording date from the century when the organ was built and are thus ideally suited to it: Sweelinck and the school associated with him, together with those composers such as Buxtehude, Bruhns, Böhm and the early Johann Sebastian Bach who represent the heyday of the North German tradition, find their finest imaginable advocate in the Jacobi Church organ. As a result ofsuch careful preliminary work, it was possible to install the organ in the church within the space of six weeks in November and December 1992. Work on voicing and tuning was planned for the following months. The whole process was completed by February 1993. On Easter Day (April 11) 1993, three hundred years after Arp Schnitger completed work on the instrument, the organ was officially handed over to the Jacobi Church’s congregation and to the wider community of organ lovers throughout the rest of the world. Rudolf Kelber Translation © 1996 Stewart Spencer