Arp Schnitger is buried in the Hamburg-Neuenfelde Church, and it is in this uniquely preserved sacred structure from the High Baroque that we find the largest instrument from his workshop, an organ with a R?ckpositiv and two manuals. Hilger Kespohl is now presenting this exquisite instrument for the first time after the magnificent restoration of this historical monument, and his program features the music of another famous Baroque Hamburg resident: Matthias Weckmann, who like no other composer between Sch?tz and Bach succeeded in drawing on the immense variety of European musical styles in order to develop his very own tonal idiom. In their time Heinrich Schutz and Johann Jacob Froberger, Weckmann’s teachers, had brought the canzone with them from Italy. Girolamo Frescobaldi was the undisputed master in this field, and what Weckmann was able to develop afresh in this tradition enthused the Prince Elector of Saxony as well as Froberger so much that even a hundred years later Johann Mattheson continued to rave about his dazzling performance in Dresden. Weckmann moved back and forth between Hamburg and Dresden several times and in between spent some time in Nykobing in Denmark. In Hamburg he met Heinrich Scheidemann, certainly the leading personality in the Hanseatic music world, and incorporated Scheidemann’s compositional style schooled on Sweelinck into his own personal style- “with seriousness and delightfulness,” as Mattheson approvingly wrote.
