Sunday, August 7, 2016

Organ Recital in Hamburg

On Chrystal Tsang's suggestion, I attended a free organ recital at the Jacobikirche in Hamburg where her daughter Lisa works as a pastor.  The Jacobikirche is the only medieval church in Hamburg to survive the 1842 fire and the Second World War, though just barely and not without extensive damage.
These are all my pictures.






An 18th century door reminding us that life is short.




A side altar from the 15th century with an officious looking Saint Luke painting the Virgin and Child with Saints.  Note his apprentice behind him busily grinding pigment.














The Jacobikirche houses the largest Baroque organ in northern Europe, the Arp Schnitger organ of 1693 with 60 registers and 4000 pipes according to Wikipedia.  To get an idea of how large this is, look on the center left of the organ loft and you can see the very small looking console.  The featured organist was but a tiny presence before this massive instrument.




The audience for the half hour concert.


This was the featured piece at the concert.  Alas I did not keep the program and I don't remember who the organist was, but his performance was very much superior to this.










1 comment:

JCF said...

I've never seen a Memento Mori arch like that before. That's kinda cool.

From my abbreviated teaching career: I was teaching a (something like) Themes of Western Religion course, and to deal w/ Death, I brought a life-like model skull (that my brother made from a kit years ago).

Launching into examples of Memento Mori, I took the skull out of a bag.

A woman SCREAMED! Like, for 5-10 seconds!

I should have known I was not cut out for teaching... }-X