Introduction
and History
The
instrument is located in a historical
village church in East Germany near
Dresden, based on a church of the 13th
century, which was reconstructed and
extended during the following centuries,
last in 1742. The church acoustics is
dry and clear because of the large
amount of wooden installations. The
original reverberation time is up
to 1.8 seconds and is captured precisely
within this project.
The
organ was built in 1729-31 by Gottfried
Silbermann of Frauenstein/Sachsen,
Germany. Gottfried Silbermann organ
types can be divided into different
architecture
classes. This instrument represents
a typical Silbermann middle-sized church
organ and was one of the favourite instruments
of Helmut Walcha and Herbert Collum/Kreuzkirche of Dresden.
Typical
Gottfried Silbermann organ features are strong
and sharp aliquote stops, such as the
1 1/2', 2' and 3', rich
and warm 8' Principal stops and bright
superoctave stops, such as the 4', 2'
and 1'. There are very characteristic
basic stops such as the Rohrflöte 8' and Quintadena
8'. The resulting sound is bright,
clear and sonorous. The organist
doesn't need many stops to achieve a
rich plenum registration.
The organ is tuned to the so-called
historical "Chorton" (a1=465
Hz).
Nearly
all pipes are original, especially
the frontpipes (Principal 8') , whereas
most historical organs lost them during
world war I, because of increasing
needs for weapon metals. Nevertheless,
the
instrument had to bear several modifications
in 1852 (equal tuning (thereby shortening
the pipes!), voicing modifications
due to changing sound preferences, installation of a pedal coupler) and
in late romantic period 1909, extension by
a Salicional 8'
with pneumatic tracking (!). In 1953,
the wind pressure was strongly reduced
from 94 mm to 70 mm and severe voicing
changes were made, resulting in an extremely
instable wind and totally altered weak
sound
characteristic with noticeable wind
sag (listen to a small sound
example of a Herbert Collums recording
from 1965). In 1997, Kristian Wegscheider,
organ workshop of Dresden, was entrusted
with the historical reconstruction and
renovation of
the original wind system and pipe voicing.
The wind pressure was again set to 94
mm. Because of the loss of original
tuning, it was changed to a historical
Silbermann like tuning system, which
specially enables the accompanying of
baroque chamber music, resulting in
very clear basic keys.
The
instrument has two manuals and a pedal
with missing C#, mechanical tracker
action, a manual shift coupler, a pedal
coupler since 1852 (fixed coupling to
the Hauptwerk before) and is
fully playable and in excellent shape.
Recording technique
The organ was recorded and processed with 44.1 kHz, 24 bit, 6 channels in
May 2003 originally for Hauptwerk
V1 and reprocessed and redesigned for
HW2 in 2006.
Thanks
I
would like to thank very much the rectory
and parish of Reinhardtsgrimma
for enabling and supporting this project. Special
thanks to Kristian Wegscheider for a
lot of helpful information and organ
builder Herzog for his endless patience
while fine tuning especially the mixtures .
