Nicholas Dicker
Executive Producer
When I set up Zerga, I was adamant that its first recording would be of David M. Patrick whose artistry I had admired for years. Having devised a late French Romantic programme, the problem we encountered was finding a suitable instrument for these powerful works. Coventry Cathedral, where David had recorded his Duruflé and Widor discs, had recently suffered a fire and smoke damage necessitated the dismantling and cleaning of the instrument – no recordings were possible for several months. Paisley Abbey itself was undergoing a refurbishment and the organ was not available. Blackburn was not entirely suitable and Buckfast Abbey’s organ was apparently in poor condition. Although Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral was considered, none of the other British Cathedrals really had instruments suitable for this French repertoire. There was also the perennial problem of gaining access to instruments guarded jealously by incumbent Cathedral organists.

It was David himself who contacted the Dutch organ builders Van den Heuval, stipulating the necessity for a medium to large acoustic for this repertoire. They suggested their new organ at Katarina Church, Stockholm. Inspired by the famous instruments of the French organ builder Cavaillé-Coll, it had been installed only in 2000 at great expense to replace the old instrument destroyed in the devastating fire at Katarina Church in 1990. David flew out from his base in Norway to give the organ a try and gave it the thumbs up. Not only was it ideal for the music but additional interest would, we felt, be generated by exposure of this relatively un-recorded instrument. Dates were booked in July (a good time of year for that part of the world) and I flew out with my co-director Colin Beer to join David and engineer/producer Paul Crichton

My more well-travelled friends told me I’d love Stockholm and they were right. It is an incredibly beautiful and romantic city that embraces the Baltic Sea with a continental urbanity and architectural splendour. It is like an amalgam of Europe’s more sophisticated cities – parts reminiscent of Paris, Vienna and Prague but with a character all of its own and populated by warm, friendly, civilised people, justifiably proud of their country and its capital. Compared with London, Stockholm is not a big city. Although the public transport puts ours to shame, it is possible to walk from the centre to the various surrounding districts. Katarina Church itself sits like a mini Lutherian St Paul’s in a quiet leafy residential square in the Södermalm district, south of the city centre. The church dates from 1656 and was designed by Jean de la Vallée (1620-96) with the involvement of King Karl X Gustaf of Sweden who devised the interior to have a central nave with the altar and pulpit in the middle. The church forms a “cross” with the organ housed in a magnificent gallery over the main entrance. The acoustic is vast and the power of the new Van den Heuval instrument awesome, far in excess, one suspects, of what is needed to fulfil its ecclesiastical duties.

The church is open to the public from 10am to 5pm, so we had early mornings and evenings to complete our sessions. This left much of the day for sightseeing and leisurely lunches in the picturesque Gamla Stan, the old part of the city with its narrow streets, taverns, restaurants and shops. After evening sessions, we would reward ourselves with some beers in one of the “Irish” pubs, which in spite of the intended theme remained a reassuringly continental experience. Commercial recordings require considerable planning and hard work on the part of the artist. The crew, myself included, play a part in encouraging the artist past the first night’s sessions (invariably the most difficult) but by the third day, Saturday morning, in fact, we were ahead of schedule: David had done us proud and there was time to relax before some serious celebrating at a choice restaurant in Gamla Stan, after which I sampled the night life at the Café Opera, one of Stockholm’s top night clubs at the back of the actual Opera House, where a seething mass of femininity (all Swedish women are beautiful) gyrated to a thumping disco beat against a backdrop of Rococo ceilings and crystal chandeliers.



By 3.30am Colin and I had had enough (or not, as some wags may say) and we walked back to our hotel (adjacent to Katarina Church) across a city that was still bustling with life and upon which darkness had never totally descended. The combination of the music, the playing, the church and its magnificent instrument set in this most magical of cities was an experience to savour. We are making another recording of David at the organ of Katarina Church in July 2002. I, for one, cannot wait…