Bienno

Ruggeri, Marco

The Italian organist Marco Ruggeri offers in this CD a compilation of pieces by various authors, chosen to enhance the acoustic qualities of the wonderful historical organ of the church of SS. Faustino and Giovita in Bienno. It dates back to around 1630. At that period, Graziadio IV Antegnati (1608-1657) created a 16-foot organ with an enharmonic keyboard, with certainly 4 and possibly 5 broken keys for the Benedictine monks running the parish. In 1750, the instrument is restored; moreover, the organ choirs are replaced with others of a typically Baroque style while the organ case is preserved. Antegnati’s organ still exists in 1822 when the scholarly Giacomo Simoni sends one of the Serassi brothers to Bienno, recommending that all recoverable Antegnati material must be preserved, yet no agreement is reached. A few years later, an unknown organ builder adds typically 19th-century stops. Finally, in 1891, according to the 1881 project, the organ builder Giovanni Manzoni of Bergamo, who had previously worked with Bossi and for a short time with Perolini brothers, restores and expands the organ. He initially works out a two-manual project; later, he reduces the instrument to a single keyboard with 47 stops and 1823 pipes. The new structure includes also the 155 Antegnati pipes scattered in different stops, as well as 18 Principale pipes in an almost perfect succession and they confirm the original division. The latter group is moved to the ‘organetti morti’ (pipes placed in the upper part of the facade). The seventeenth-century case is totally preserved. In 1943 Armando Maccarinelli from Brescia carries out an extraordinary maintenance and remixes some stops. In 1961 Emilio Piccinelli of Ponteranica - without knowing Manzoni’s project, found in the parish archive only years later - makes a radical restoration yet very respectful of the 1891 physiognomy. In 2017/2018, the Piccinelli family carries out a philological restoration bringing back the instrument to the exact conditions of 1891, on the precise indications from the Milan ‘Servizio Tutela Organi’. The intervention is completed for the larger part by rearranging the pipes, recovering the material set aside and only with the reconstruction of 12 pipes of Cello.

Price: $30.98