A postcard from Greece
Ourania Gassiou
Greetings from Greece, a country where organs are as scarce as hen’s teeth…
The ancestor of the organ was the hydraulis (hydravlis – or ὕδραυλις in Greek), an invention of the great engineer and inventor Ktesibius (3rd century BC) from Alexandria. This technical instrument – although it initially attracted the technical rather than the musical interest of the Hellenistic people – did not take long to develop and spread to the Roman world. Although the organ would later become inseparably associated with churches in the West, organs in Byzantium adorned the palaces of Emperors but were not used in their churches. To this day, the Eastern Orthodox church excludes the use of instruments in God’s worship.
Despite the fact that organs in Greece exist in very small numbers, there are a few organ-related festivals and concert series, mainly in churches of other denominations as well as the Athens Concert Hall, which is the home of the country’s biggest organ. Christos Paraskevopoulos, the Cantor of the German Church in Athens, has been an enthusiastic promoter of organ music in Greece. Abend Musik, inspired by the legendary concert series established by Dietrich Buxtehude in the Marienkirche in Lübeck, takes place on the last Sunday of each month after Vespers. The organ of the German church is a hybrid of the original 15 stops of the Steinmeyer organ built in 1933 and a virtual organ using Hauptwerk software. One of the series’ recent highlights was an Advent concert, with organist Eleni Keventsidou and soprano Rania Panayotou performing works by Bach, Handel, Walcha and William McVicker.
