Meeting an organ for the first time, especially if it is a fine old organ, can be an experience filled with surprises, especially if it is a fine old organ with a strong personality. Such was the case in meeting the organ at Tryserum. This organ, one of the best preserved of Pehr Schiörlin’s output, speaks with a bold and distinctive voice. Other Schiörlin organs that were known to me before this encounter, most notably Gammakil, Ostra Skrukeby, and Jonsered, are of course bold and distinctive as well, but there is a quality of the organ at Tryserum that sets it apart; that quality is perhaps best described as "wildness." Whereas the famous organ at Gammalkil speaks with a melodic elegance and courteous refinement (as can be heard on my recording, Krebs: Clavier-Übung), the organ at Tryserum is by contrast brash and energetic, as if it is determined to be intense at all costs, and not necessarily compliant. Built in 1785, twenty-one years before the organ at Gammalkil, one expects it to sound older, but its "old" sound is more of the early eighteenth century than of the 1780s. No small part of the organ’s wild behavior is due to its wind system: although the behavior of the wind in the pedal division is well grounded and essentially stable, the wind in the manual division is highly active and flexible. To the player, this is both charm and challenge, but is clearly not a defect—Schiörlin knew what he was doing. For hymn playing (the organ’s primary original function) the result is perfect: the organ plays with harmonies that are breathing and alive, supported by a firm bass line in the pedal, with reed stops having almost lightning-fast speech.

For playing "concert" repertoire, the challenge may be compared to that of trying to tame a wild horse. I went to this organ intending to record, among other things, music of C. P. E. Bach and Kittel, expecting that the organ would respond to the sweet galanterie of this music in a way similar to the later organ at Gammalkil. But at Tryserum the organ was to have none of that, and music of Böhm and Walther was quickly substituted. Walther’s partita on Jesu, meine Freude makes no extraordinary demands on the wind, and the organ was happy to oblige with a lively, melodious pipe-speech, regardless of the choice of stops. But the Böhm pieces on this CD are more demanding of the wind, and here the organ’s innate behavior meets the composer head-on. As a result, we hear—as one can hear with only a few instruments in my experience—how Böhm’s skillful use of thick textures and quick shifts of register create an effect of intense activity of sound. The wind, along with the sensitive action of the organ, gives certain ornaments the effect of bending the pitch slightly, and here and there one hears a distinct melodic portamento, with an effect that can be as moving as the portamento of a fine singer. One begins to suspect that Böhm’s music itself is rather wild, perhaps more so than most extant old instruments allow it to be. In the midst of all this somewhat eccentric behavior, one begins to hear how expressively this organ can sing. When one speaks of an instrument as being able to sing, it is in recognition that the instrument somehow transcends the normal limitations of machinery, and is able to create the impression that the music is being sounded by a living organism. The particular ways in which this organ sings are of course the result of the normal and well-conceived working processes of Pehr Schiörlin, openly observable and available to all to learn from; the music it makes is of a quality that makes a player want to keep playing, a quality that can convey both astonishment and delight to player and listener alike.