The connections between the Netherlands and Italy are most easily illustrated.
Dutch musicians had a long tradtion of travel to the south, and during the whole seventeenth century the latest editions from Venice or Bologna would readily be available in Amsterdam.
And, if only during the few decades of Sweelinck’s teaching, it was throguh Amsterdam that the german organ school received decisive influences from the south.
The present CD can be seen in the light of these relations between north and south.
The music is writeen by composers from the north, who were all influenced by the south.
But the interplay of lines is more complex, and more interesting than that.
We hear Gustav Leonhardt, a mature master who, he himself a Dutchman, was one of the first in Europe to rediscover the music of Frescobaldi and his contemporaries.
Next to him plays Matteo Imbruno, a young Italian, who was attracted to the Netherlands at a very early age and to that very Dutch profession of organist.
The organ they play is an important reconstruction of a historic organ, itself the product of the mature Dutch school of organ building, in which many European lines converge.
The music of this recording centers around Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, his pupils, and the Oude Kerk, the church where Sweelinck played for more than forty years.