Gerhard Grenzing

* 1942 in Insterburg; German organ builder with a workshop in Catalonia; he learned the craft of organ building from Rudolf von Beckerath in Hamburg. From 1967 to 1972 he devoted himself to the restoration of historic organs on Mallorca; in 1972 he founded his own workshop in El Papiol near Barcelona, where he trained a staff of twenty. With his team he has carried out more than two hundred and twenty new instruments and restorations for cathedrals, churches, palaces, concert halls and conservatoires, among them instruments of Mexico City Cathedral and of the Royal Palace in Madrid. In 1991 he received the Silver Medal for Artistic Merit from the Spanish Ministry of Culture, and in 2004 the Catalan government conferred on him the title of Master Craftsman; he is an elected member of the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in Barcelona and Seville, was named organ builder of the year by the journal Organ in 2006 and an honorary member of the Alliance Francophone in 2007, and from 2006 to 2010 served as president of the International Society of Organ Builders. He has published several studies on the royal organ builder Jordi Bosch. In the Cybele catalogue his work can be heard on six albums. The six-volume Mallorca Edition Historic Organs (2017) with Martin Schmeding was recorded on three historic instruments of the island; two of them were restored by Grenzing: the great Jordi Bosch organ (1762) of Sant Andreu in Santanyi, whose restoration was carried out in three stages between 1982 and 2002, and the Gabriel Thomàs organ (1823) of the former monastery church of Sant Francesc de Paula in Campos. On the sixth volume he talks with Mirjam Wiesemann in his workshop at El Papiol about his career and about the instruments of the edition.