Organ music that transcends the boundaries of time and space

Instead of the announced Polish organist Bogusław Grabowski, the Estonian-Danish church musician Viola Chiekezi played the organ of St. Martin's parish church in Baar on Sunday evening as part of the "International Zug Organ Days".

The organisers Olivier Eisenmann and Verena Steffen had to master a special challenge for the fifth concert of their 41st organ cycle: the scheduled organist Bogusław Grabowski had to cancel at short notice due to passport problems. His programme would have included mainly little-known musical gems from old Polish tablatures of the 16th and 17th centuries, a Bach piece of course, and short works by the 20th century Frenchman Jehan Alain.

"We are very glad that Viola Chiekezi could step in: she had already taken part in our 2021 cycle," Olivier Eisenmann informed the small audience, which seemed almost a little lost in the large baroque space of the parish church of St. Martin in Baar. But the mighty organ was the main character for 75 minutes, under the hands of a small young woman in a beautiful African tunic. And just as she herself,manages an international professional balancing act as an organist, harpsichordist and pianist in her home country Estonia and in Denmark, her place of training, the concert was also proof of the instrument's timelessness and spacelessness.

Everywhere, at all times
It began with a famous baroque master from France: the hymn "Veni Creator Spiritus" by Nicolas de Grigny (1672-1703) consisted of five parts in which Chiekezi could already pull out all the stops. A sustained sequence of powerful chords was followed by a canon-like interwoven fugue in which five voices chased each other. And while the third, two-part piece "Duo" was reminiscent of a dance, the fourth, "Récit de Cromorne", attracted attention with its almost modern dissonances, which Chiekezi reinforced with an oblique registration. The last part, "Dialogue sur les grands Jeux", however, was at first triumphant fanfare music, only to be driven forward dance-like - in ever new approaches and changing registrations - and to end in a radiant chord.

The Estonian-Danish organist Viola Chiekezi stood in for Bogusław Grabowski, who was unable to attend at short notice.
The organist contributed her own composition                     Photos: Maria Schmid

Chiekezi played two pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach: First, a very well-known piece, Prelude and Fugue BWV 532, from which she elicited completely new colours through her idiosyncratic choice of registers. The Sonata in D major BWV 963, however, was not even known to OlivierEisenmann as an organ piece, "because it was actually composed for some keyboard instrument, which was very common in the Baroque. Especially in winter, the Bach sons didn't practise their pieces in the cold organ loft, but in the warm parlour on harpsichords, which had pedals at the time." The fifth part of the sonata, "all imitatio gallina Cuccu", in which a pointed organ part repeatedly played the characteristic cuckoo interval, was particularly exciting and funny to hear.

Organ programme
This led to two small works by the Norwegian composer Mons Leidvin Takle (*1942), in which traditional folk song elements were fused with modern rhythms, creating an effect of surprising freshness: "Med Jesus vil eg fara" (With Jesus I will travel) evoked images of wanderlust, "I himmelen" with its puppet-dance-like six-four time was somewhat reminiscent of the lyre music at old fairs.

The piece "Kom, regn fra det høje" (Come, rain from on high) by the Danish composer Christian Praestholm proved that organ music can function completely programmatically: raindrops as a symbol for the Pentecostal spirit falling from heaven trickled through the room as organ notes, to then become running rain and finally fade out again drop by drop.

Chiekezi added a special note to the concert with his own composition: "Khudaya teri Rooh thon mein" (You have searched for me, Lord, and you know me, Psalm 139), a melody of the Pakistani church in Denmark, let oriental-like melodic ornaments rise above a low lying tone and sink down again, up and down and always back to a basic tone - like the dance of a snake to a flute at an Asian bazaar.

The last two concerts in the series will take place on Sunday, 11 June, at 7 pm in the Walchwil parish church and on Sunday, 25 June, 7 pm in the Bruder Klaus Oberwil parish church.