Organ Hall
Moldova's national academic music centre, in a former city bank, built around a Rieger-Kloss organ.
The hall occupies one of the most ornate buildings on Chișinău's main boulevard, put up for the municipal bank after a design competition held in 1902 and won by the engineer Mihail Cekerul-Cuș. Work ran through the following decade and produced a heavily modelled façade of paired columns, sculptural groups and a corner dome, classical in its bones but romantic in its detail. Financial institutions, including the republican bank, used the building until the 1970s.
Between 1975 and 1978 the interior was rebuilt as a concert hall under the architect Y. L. Leonchenko, and a Rieger-Kloss organ from Krnov in Czechoslovakia was installed, with roughly four thousand pipes across fifty-six registers. The instrument was first played in public on 15 September 1978. Today the building houses the National Centre of Academic Music, which programmes organ recitals, chamber concerts, choral galas and festivals devoted to Bach and to the Bessarabian art song.
Highlights
- Rieger-Kloss organ of about 4,000 pipes, first played in 1978
- Built in the 1900s as Chișinău's municipal bank
- Sculpted façade with paired columns and a corner dome
- Home of Moldova's National Centre of Academic Music
