The Schureck Collection

The Collection consists of over thirty antique keyboard instruments in full playing condition. Those from before 1780, including a range of harpsichords and a two-manual neoclassical organ by Ronald Sharp, builder of the Sydney Opera House organ, are accurate copies. The remainder are fully restored, museum-quality originals: an English bureau organ (c.1800), an English parish church organ (1845-1890) by William Hill, builder of the Sydney Town hall organ, and a series of English and continental fortepianos (1778-1865). The collection is the largest of concert quality early keyboard instruments in Australia.

The instruments have been selected not only for their intrinsic beauty and antiquarian interest, but also to allow for performance of the complete keyboard repertoire in the style of the appropriate national school and era. The fortepianos comprise a selection, at about 20-year intervals, of concert and domestic instruments, covering the whole period during which pianos evolved from their earliest to almost their modern form; this allows performance of the whole piano literature to 1870 (by when the modern piano had become well established) on instruments constructed within ten years of composition date.

The collection is housed in four large rooms designed for concert and recording use, in a house which overlooks local sandstone escarpments and eucalypt bushland at Berowra Waters, west of the Pacific Highway, at the northern extremities of the Sydney metropolis. These venues allow both for the effective display of the Collection, and for performance conditions which resemble closely those pertaining when the instruments were built. There is also a collection of scores, music literature and recordings.

As a privately maintained collection, these rare, irreplaceable instruments are at present made accessible to the public only through an annual concert series, begun in 1987, to which entry is limited by virtue of space restrictions and the wish to recreate listening conditions approximating those envisaged by composers before the appearance of large public concert halls.

Performances by specialist professionals on authentic instruments (which require a technique different in many ways from their modern counterparts), appropriate listening conditions, availability of refreshments and the beauties of the Australian bush landscape combine to create ideal conditions for the enjoyment of the greatest works of the keyboard and ensemble repertoires.