Life with Stretch and Slim: Musical Friends, Part One

After our trip to Buxtehude, Jim and I took the train back to Hamburg and met up with our friend Gwen Toth, a specialist in historic keyboard instruments and the director of the New York-based early music ensemble ARTEK.

Gwen was a woman on a mission, and Jim and I were privileged to be along for the ride! Here's the story:

In 2013, a brand new organ was inaugurated in one of Hamburg's five primary churches: St. Catherine's. It was built by Flentrop Orgelbouw, which is based in the Netherlands. I used to pass their facility in Zaandam nearly every day in the train when I lived in upper Noord-Holland and studied in Amsterdam.

Gwen is a multi-facetted instrumentalist, but her favorite music was composed by early Baroque composer Heinrich Scheidemann.

Scheidemann lived from circa 1595 to 1663, was the son of an organist, and studied with the man they called the 'Maker of German Organists', Jan-Pieterszoon Sweelinck, in Amsterdam. Scheidemann was the organist at St. Catherine's in Hamburg for more than thirty years.

Katharinenkirche Hamburg

When I asked Gwen what she especially likes about Scheidemann's music in an interview a couple of years ago, she said it was the unique mixture of sweetness and severity, which I thought was a great description.

Flentrop Orgelbouw sought to recreate the instrument Scheidemann would have known, which like so many others, was destroyed in World War II. But this newborn organ also contains some 'DNA' from its parent in the form of several hundred original pipes!

As a self-professed 'organ nerd', I was delighted to observe Gwen's process of discovery and document it with pictures.

She played Scheidemann's setting of 'Vater unser im Himmelreich' and his teacher Sweelinck's Hexachord Fantasia, both of which sounded fantastic to me!