The Russian Gnessins’ Academy of Music, Moscow, was the site of the Second International Organ Symposium March 21–25. Some 60 enthusiasts from around the globe gathered. Alexander Fiseisky, editor and performer, professor of organ at Gnessins, organized this most interesting symposium. With bright sun and temperatures in the mid-50s, the conference opened on Bach’s birthday at the Mikhail Glinka Museum of Music Culture in Moscow. This fascinating museum houses a large collection of important instruments, including several organs. Concerts are regularly a part of the programs offered here—given in a dedicated hall with two Steinway Ds and a Schuke II/24, 1976. Our introduction included opportunities to try various instruments.
The Guest House of the Lithuanian Embassy is just across a plaza from the Academy, and with participants from Austria, Belarus, Britain, France, Germany, Holland, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the U.S., no accommodations could have been more appropriate. Wednesday evening, the group assembled in Moscow’s handsomely restored and exquisitely lit Roman Catholic Cathedral. Professor Wolfgang Baumgratz performed, to a standing room only audience, pairings of works by Buxtehude and Bach on the four-manual Kuhn.
On Thursday morning, the lectures of the symposium opened in the chamber music auditorium on the top floor of the academy, the main conference room for the next two days. We were welcomed by the Rector of the Academy, Professor Mikhail Sayamov. Similar to many academic conferences, formal lectures then occupied most of each day, in 20-minute intervals. These covered repertoire from tablature to modern and organs from antiquity to the present. Speakers were required to submit their talks several weeks in advance, so that students of the academy and others could translate them into other languages for projection onto a pair of screens. The polyglot Europeans were given German versions of the lectures delivered in Russian, and (sometimes) English versions alongside Russian of those given in German.
Thursday evening in the academy’s organ hall, Andrew McCrea, Director of Academic Development of the Royal College of Organists, gave a lecture-demonstration of British organ music, using its perfectly appropriate early 20th-century English mechanical-action organ. This was followed by a party in the organ hall.
Friday evening’s concert was again in the organ hall, a recital of vocal and organ music performed by the excellent students of the academy. Later that night, we made an excursion to the Moscow Baptist Church to see its early 20th-century three-manual tubular-pneumatic E. Roever organ.
Saturday morning began with a visit to the marvelous Sauer organ at SS. Peter and Paul Lutheran Church, carefully restored recently by Reinhard and Johannes Huefken. In the early afternoon, organ students of the academy performed in the main auditorium and in the evening, we again visited the Catholic Cathedral for a thrilling performance by Professor Edgar Krapp. We were all happy to have reserved seats as participants of the conference, because the steps outside were mobbed with those seeking tickets, and many were turned away.
Early-risers on Sunday (departure from the hotel was 7:15 am) were rewarded by a private tour of the stunning new Moscow International House of Music. The round auditorium is home to a new four-manual Klais with an imposing façade, as shown in the accompanying photographs. In the afternoon, we returned to the Glinka Museum organ hall for a recital by Ronald Ebrecht, and in the evening walked to Tchaikovsky Hall for the closing recital, a performance by the conference’s organizer and director, Alexander Fiseisky, on the four-manual Rieger-Kloss.
Professor Fiseisky deserves hearty congratulations for organizing a splendid symposium of the highest scholarly merit. Moscow shined for him, and his participants beamed their approval and thanks in return.
