Updates for December 2025
31 December 2025The Updates to The Pipe Organ in China Project for December 2025:
The Project understands that progress has been made on the installation of a concert hall organ in Wuxi, but we are still waiting for confirmation of the builder and other details about the new Concert Hall.
Installation work on the long-delayed four-manual Casavant (Op. 2935) for the Cathedral in Macau is progressing, but is not yet finished and no date for a dedication has been announced. MAC2025a at St. Lawrence Church will be dedicated on 21 January 2026 as the Padre Áureo Castro Memorial Pipe Organ. Due to the continuing delays with the Cathedral organ, the St. Lawrence organ will probably be renumbered in the coming year as simply MAC2025.
This month the Project received some interesting information in response to an April 2019 post on this Website, concerning “Two Mystery Organs in Beijing” http://organcn.org/blog/two-mystery-organs-in-beijing/
After posting the photos of these instruments, we quickly received a message telling us that the second organ was an Oberlinger, installed in 2004 in a TSPM seminary in Haidan in the north of Beijing. Earlier this year we finally received new photos and the specs of this instrument, and were able to create a page for the installation (PEK2004b).
The first of the two ‘mystery organs’ has, however, remained a mystery … until now. While we still cannot confirm its location, we can now reveal that this “German Organ in Beijing” (as it was described to us in a 2010 email), is actually a 1727 Hausorgel made in Switzerland and restored in 1977 for a private owner. It was sold in 2007 at an auction in Switzerland, with an estimated sale price between 40,000 and 70,000 CHF. We do not yet know for how much the organ was sold, who bought it, or where it currently is, but we are looking into this after the New Year’s holidays. The specs of the instrument (picture below, sent by our informant) are: Coppel 8′, Flöte 4′, Principal 2′, Octave 1′. We are grateful to our correspondent for this data. Stay tuned!
We wish all of our friends and visitors
a Happy New Year of 2026! 新年快樂!
Photo of the Month: 1727 four rank, lavishly painted chamber organ, made in eastern Switzerland, and reported (2010) to be in Beijing.
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