Another St. Pauls

Today, fittingly on a Sunday, the Crowden kids played at the Deutsche Evangelisch-Lutherische St.-Pauls-Kirche in New York. Founded in 1841, it is now the last of the German-speaking churches in New York, which at one time numbered more than 20. The current neo-gothic church building was built in 1897 with 5 beautiful stained glass panels surrounding the apse and altar, a tall vaulted ceiling and a magnificently decorated pipe organ in the back balcony.

The acoustics were wonderful and the sound of the strings easily breathed into the naves and vaults of the church and thanks to the more residential setting, lacked the distracting downtown Manhattan roar of buses and jackhammers that accompanied yesterday's performance at St. Pauls Chapel. Listen to the difference between the performances of the Bloch Concerto Grosso (in the next couple of postings) and pay particular attenton to the brief moments of silence between the attacks of this stormy piece and you'll hear the deadness of the recording studio compared to the livelyness of church, allowing the sound a few more milliseconds of life before it tapers off. Seems that this dark piece of music is a little more at home in a neo-gothic church than a recording studio!

We ended the day with a balmy evening cruise down the East River, around lower Manhattan and up the Hudson to take in the incredible New York City skyline as well as Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, a symbol trite and timeworn as sometimes seems, when you see it in real life and think about it's meaning, you have to wonder if some of the people running this country forgot.