The Organ at St James

An interview with Tjakko de Jonge

Tjakko, you are understandably delighted with the organ at St James – which was new just two years ago, in March 2023. There’s a beautiful story of love and loss behind it. Please tell us why and how you found and brought this wonderful sounding organ into the church …

It’s the story of an instrument, and behind it, well, something more personal. Let me tell you about both.

            When I first came to St James in the autumn of 2022, there was only a dated Heiligers, in need of serious repair. The church had started an Organ Appeal, to generate the money needed for a replacement. The hope was for another electronic solution, as the purchase and maintenance costs of a pipe organ would have been too high.

            There’s a remarkable software called Hauptwerk, that reproduces the sound of genuine pipe organs based on recordings of the original instrument – but the old organ was from a different generation, hence past updating to accommodate it. The breakthrough came when Dutch supplier Mixtuur offered us a model from their beautiful showroom – which was situated in an actual church – based on the Hauptwerk system, and with two huge speaker columns that could carry the music throughout the space at St James.

            The only difficulty was that there were not yet sufficient funds raised to cover its purchase and transport.

What happened next, Tjakko?

At this time, I was recovering from a great grief. My husband of 28 years had died of the long term effect of cancer – Hodgkin’s lymphoma which had spread throughout his body to his lungs – a few months before, in May 2022.

            My beloved and I had previously had a holiday house in Portugal since 2015. In November 2022, after emigrating to Portugal a month before, I bought another property, in the village of Sobral da Lagoa that is now my home, situated five miles from the sea, near Obidos. But it was in Porto where I stayed until the paperwork was completed in January 2023, and that’s how I became involved in St James … I played at the Remembrance Day service in November 2022, and knew I had to offer some of my deceased partner’s savings, and an interest-free loan – which the church repaid within a year – to realise the dream of a new church organ.

            My husband had wanted me to spend the money wisely, and I was certain he would have approved – he knew I’d loved the organ since I was a boy of nine living on my parents’ farm in the Netherlands, when they arranged for me to have a couple of years of lessons, after which I was largely self-taught. I left my parents' home, aged 16, to study and finally moved to Amsterdam in 1978. During an organ event organised by several churches, I was invited to join the team of substitute organists, with the opportunity to play on the most beautiful and historic organs in large and small churches in that romantic city.