Notre-Dame Basilica - Fribourg (Switzerland)

As the case is concerned, it was decided to copy the Jean-André Silbermann organ of Ste-Aurélie - Strasbourg (67) and add an Echo. We are particularly pleased that the wishes of the clients have joined our own vision of an ideal organ.

A very summary - and necessarily schematic - overview of the history of the organ in Alsace and of the Silbermanns, is the start of our reflexion. The great number of musicians and composers in Strasbourg at the end of the 17th and throughout the 18th century , and the constant features and enrichments that can be observed, can be taken into account for the construction of an organ in the 21th century. This instrument is certainly not an "all-purpose" one, yet it is endowed with a somewhat  universal character. The infinite colours of the Parisian organ (Andreas Silbermann went to Paris to be "trained in the French taste") and its polyphonic virtues can be combined with the ingredients of accompanied singing and their mix of stops as established in the last third of the 17th and in the 18th century. 

With keyboard/pedal ranges up to D, and the very versatile temperament found on the Silbermann Positive of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg, such an organ may be closed to the performance of certain styles (symphonic or romantic, for example), but it is open to almost all the European schools from the 1620s onwards, and, by extension, to the whole of the 17th and 18th centuries (not excluding Couperin, Grigny, or Balbastre...). It is especially adapted to the German schools around Buxtehude and Bach, but does not exclude at all many contemporary works and may be an incentive for the composition of future works or improvisation.