Organ Works

Hangzhou is the capital of the Chinese Province of Zhejiang and lies some 190km south-west of Shanghai. The city itself has 8 million inhabitants and stands at the mouth of the River Qiantang into the Bay of Hangzhou.

The Emperor’s Canal, an important link with Northern China, starts in Hangzhou. The city is also an important centre of Chinese silk trade and production.

Hangzhou is one of the cradles of Chinese civilisation and evidence of Liangzhu culture goes back more than 4700 years. The town’s documented history began in the year 221 BC. Hangzhou was the capital of the southern Song Dynasty (1132-1276). The China explorer Marco Polo is said to have described it as the ‘most beautiful and most magnificent in the world’. At his time, in the 13th century, the town possessed the largest harbour in the world. It is no longer a port-city, the harbour having been silted up over the centuries.

It is thought that the town may have had as many as one million inhabitants in the middle of the 13th century. The majority must have been refugees and soldiers, fleeing there in the wake of the Mongol invasion. Hangzhou must thus have been the largest medieval city in the world, before Baghdad.

The chief attraction of Hangzhou is the 500-hectare West Lake with over 60 sights to the west of the centre. This lake was copied many times in China and Japan on account of its beauty, often by means of artificial dams. There are three small pagodas in the West Lake, a symbol of the lake and which appear on the reverse if the 1 Yuan banknote.

Zhejiang Music Conservatoire

The Conservatoire is a huge complex (see photo of model below), its construction completed in less than two years in 2013-4. Today it is led by 93 full-time teachers, including 17 professors, 12 doctors and 5 overseas teachers. It provides almost every type of musical education – Dance, Singing, Piano, composition and conducting.

In future, it will also be able to offer organ studies, using two instruments to be built in our workshops for each of the two concert halls. The large hall will have a 4-manual instrument of 64 stops and the somewhat smaller hall a 2-manual romantic practice organ of 19 stops.

The Case Design

The case occupies the full height and width of the organ chamber on the back wall above the orchestra podium and accordingly determines the overall impression of hall. To achieve harmonious integration into the hall architecture, the vertical elements of the warm wood cladding to walls and boxes are continued into the organ façade, with the wooden divisions between pipe fields carried similarly upwards and downwards. The separate sections of the façade are arranged with pipes of different scales, each standing either slightly forward or backward, creating a three-dimensional surface. The front pipes are arranged in narrow groups in such a way that the opposing lines of pipe ends generate a very dynamic sense of movement, further emphasised by the golden curved lines of the pipe mouths. To maintain the effect of a unified gleaming veil of pipes, the feet are made cylindrical. Significant horizontal lines and visible subdivisions of the pipe flats are avoided, so that the overall effect of the organ is light and upward striving. The tension between flatness and liveliness of structure is thus held in balance.

The layout of the two consoles – the attached one mechanical and the mobile one electric – is ergonomically and visually identical. Lightly concave stop tablets are arranged by division on angled terraces. Restrained functionality is at the forefront and the result is a compact, no-frills design.

J. S. Bach: Fuge C-Dur BWV 564
F. Liszt: Präludium und Fuge über B-A-C-H
Report on Chinese TV