Gerard Bunk

Gerard Bunk (born 4 March 1888 in Rotterdam; died 13 September 1958 in Kamen) was a German-Dutch organist, pianist, harpsichordist, choirmaster and composer.

After a short stay in Hull and London (with the pianist Mark Hambourg[1]), he came to Bielefeld in 1906 to the piano teacher Hans Hermanns, whom he followed to the Hamburg Conservatory.

On 5 May 1910, Bunk stood in for Karl Straube at the first concert of the Dortmund Max-Reger-Festival and took turns with Reger at the "giant organ" of St. Reinold's Church, which had been built the previous year.

[4] Among the chamber music associations to which he belonged during his life, the "Dortmund Trio" between 1920 and 1929 with the Dutch violinist and later conductor Paul van Kempen was probably the most significant.

In 1922, the Riemann Musiklexikon lists him as a "sought-after accompanist"; in fact, Bunk assisted numerous vocal and instrumental soloists at the piano; only the baritone Heinrich Schlusnus should be mentioned here as an example.

29 influences of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and César Franck united and emphasises its "calm and plastic layout [...] in comparison with the formlessness and restlessness now in use [1910] for organ compositions".

75 on 23 November 1925 in Karlsruhe, Bunk initially restricted his composing, perhaps because of the work he had begun at St. Reinoldi, but probably also because of the general stylistic shift towards new music.

As his particular reaction to the events of the war, according to librettist Martha Heinemann allegedly "under the impression of the destruction of his home town Rotterdam" on 14 May,[9] but above all as a sign in the anti-clerical times in Germany, he began in 1940 the Oratorio Groß ist Gottes Herrlichkeit (Great is God's Glory) based on the Old Testament (Book of Sirach 43: On God's Glory in Nature), in which he made a confession of his faith in late Romantic sounds.

As early as the 1910s (probably 1914), his piano versions of Frederick Delius' Two pieces for small orchestra (On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring and Summer Night on the River) had been written.