Organ
The Palau de la Música of Valencia is one of the few Spanish auditoriums that has a large organ, in particular an instrument of indisputable quality and precision designed and built by the German master organ-maker Gerhard Grenzing in the late 80s of the recent twentieth century. The organ that presides over the Sala Iturbi is a spectacular instrument of completely mechanical transmission that has dimensions of seven meters wide, ten meters high, three meters deep and weighs more than twenty tons. It has four manual keyboards, a complete pedal board, more than fifty registers and approximately 3,000 tubes.
Its timbral personality and most of its sound arrangement is inspired by German organs of the Baroque period, so the compositional style that particularly shines in the Palau organ is undoubtedly that of Central European keyboard music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is an excellent instrument for bringing to life the Baroque organ repertoire in general and German in particular, from the time of Johann Sebastian Bach and his predecessors.
However, the Palau organ successfully combines this marked German character with some characteristics of other schools of organ building (French classical organ; Romantic symphonic organ; and especially traditional Iberian organ, with its horizontal trumpeteria in Batalla and its Nazardos), which gives it greater versatility and allows it to successfully address the interpretation of a vast repertoire from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first century.
The instrument is used in symphonic concerts with orchestra and in the Organ Cycle, which brings together the best organists of the international scene while putting in value the national and Valencian talent. In these concerts, the audience has a large screen placed on the stage where they can see the organist live and appreciate many details of his performance, experiencing in a pedagogical way the spectacularity of the enormous technical demands faced by organists in their concerts.
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