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A Dutch Organ in a Chelsea Church

THE ORGAN AT the Church of the Holy Apostles on Ninth Avenue in Chelsea has a brief history that spans three lands: the Netherlands, Texas, and New York. Mr. Joseph Mooibroek of Fairview, Texas was born in the Netherlands but emigrated to the United States in his youth and found his fortune there. Mr. Mooibroek (whose surname is Dutch for “beautiful trousers”) and his wife wanted an organ for the great hall of the castle they built in Texas, and appropriately he chose the Dutch firm of Van den Heuvel to construct the organ in 1994. Among Van den Heuvel’s other works are the organ at Saint-Eustache in Paris (1989, the largest organ in France), and that in the Duke’s Hall of the Royal Academy of Music in London (1993).

Three years earlier, the Church of the Holy Apostles in New York suffered a devastating fire that wrecked its main organ, constructed in 1931 by Casavant Frères, master organbuilders of Québec. (Op. 1446 in the Casavant inventory). The Episcopalian parish originally contracted Rosales of Los Angeles to build a temporary instrument, but the cost of renovations after the fire proved more significant than previously imagined and the contract was cancelled.

The Mooibroeks, however, decided to sell their Fairview house in 1996, and to offer the Van den Heuvel organ for sale separately. They contacted Manuel Rosales of the Rosales firm, who suggested its purchase by the Church of the Holy Apostles. On March 3, 1997, the Van den Heuvel organ was rededicated at the Church of the Holy Apostles, Chelsea, with a brief recital by Ben van Oosten of the Grote Kerk, the Hague, in benefit of Holy Apostles’s soup kitchen.

Published at 2:53 pm on Sunday 24 May 2009. Categories: Netherlands New York Tags: , .
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