I am sure that many of you will have seen (and heard) some of the less-obvious Dutch organs that would make excellent photographic subjects. From June 20th I am spending four days in possibly the Rotterdam and Amsterdam area (but elsewhere can be arranged - am driving). Any suggestions, or contacts I could get in touch with? Hearing them of course would be a bonus but this time round the visuals are what I am looking for. Feel free to PM me or send me an e-mail - always enjoy hearing from listers anyway.

An aside: I was trawling through that remarkable tome,"Organ CDs - a place-name index" by Jo Huddleston (ISSN 0960-488x). If you haven't got a copy, steal one. My edition is 1991 and I don't THINK there is a successor, but is no doubt the only book of its kind to begin with the words "Tiddley pom". And continues in much the same vein but with a huge wealth of information about organs that have been recorded (up until 1991 of course). He also comments alongside the Freiberg Silbermann "Who's a pretty boy, then?" . Full of joyous exploration and the only database of organs that makes compulsive reading

Churchmouse

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I shall have a cyber-prowl.......

I know Rotterdam well, and Amsterdam, and Zwolle, and Haarlem, and Groningen, and Appeldoorn, and Leiden and.........you get the idea.....I KNOW the Netherlands.

Trouble is Jenny, they're ALL pretty organs, apart from the hideous and mercifully rare 19th century pipe-racks in a few places.

Of course, if you go to Haarlem, you can find THE Bavo, the other Bavo, the Cavaille-Coll at the Concertegebouw, a gorgeous little organ-case in another church, (I'll look that up), a very historic little organ in the Frans Hal Museum (in addition to a few "quite well done" paintings) , a Compton cinema organ and a shed-load of street organs in the organ-museum.

From what I've seen of the Netherlands, they just don't do ugly as well as we do here in the UK.

I'll get back to you on this.

MM


PS: Just remembered, their stately-homes are rubbish compared to ours.

I might have known you'd be the guru to ask, MM!!! St Bavo will be a kind of pilgrimage - but as for the rest, yes, I'm sure the photogenic factor is very high there!
My main problem (isn't it always?) will be getting access. And places that don't have a huge dangling light fixture bang in the middle that I then have to spend 2 hours photos hopping out!
But these are rare..

BTW, are modern organ cases very common in the Netherlands?
Thanks so much for your help MM - invaluable.

Hello,


do you know the following site? If not it could be worth to look at for selecting some impressive dutch organ cases.
http://www.orgelsite.nl/

Cheers
tiratutti

Many thanks tiratutti ! That's an excellent one - I'll add it to my links page as well :-)
Much trawling still to be done before I go. . .

An other site is this one:

http://www.orgbase.nl/

The combined search doesn't seem to work, so you will need a map at the ready to see if a town is in the region you want to visit.

Probably all historic Dutch organs are (already AND|OR very well) documented, see: http://www.nationaalinstituutorgelkunst.nl...1&Itemid=60

Thanks to both Octave and Heva for their suggested sites - both new to me and will add those as well to the links page...
These are a great help.

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The easiest way to find any place in the world, it to use Google Earth.

You get the map, the rail links, places of interest, road network and all sorts of useful information which can then be printed out.

It can be downloaded for free.

Having seen the sites forwarded by others, this would seem to provide the information Jenny requires, which means that I can rest instead.

The nice thing about the Netherlands, is the fact that they have very few poor organs; most being rather good to utterly wonderful. Should anyone get bored with them, there's a Bevington, a Harrison & Harrison and a splendid Thos.Hill, as well as a couple of Compton theatre-organs lurking around.


MM

Oh well, that's too much honour. I can show you lots of rubbish here...

Dick

Hi Churchmouse,

Two organs I can think of:

St. Nicholas, Amsterdam (nr. Central Station):
The organ is splendid to hear but the church is well worth a look. Instrument by Wilhelm Sauer from 1889, opus 505. I have been to Sunday services here when in Amsterdam. A useful tip is that the director of music here is an Englishman (ex. Newcastle Cathedral and Guildhall School of Music). They have Choral Evensong here at 5pm every Saturday from September to June. More information: http://www.muziekindenicolaas.nl/english.html

Grote of OLV Kerk (Church of our Lady), Breda: Splendid church that was restored during the best part of more than 50 years in the 1900s. Very well worth a look. Organ contains various parts from various ages. Too much information to post here though: feel free to give me a PM if you want more information.

Cheers,

Dave