Music at home

On Sunday, we had our tenth concert at home. A small audience of friends and family packed into our cottage ‒ using our Broadwood square piano of 1790 (the year before Mozart died).

The wonderful performers were the cellist, Katherine Sharman, and the fortepianist, Geoffrey Govier, both of whom have played for us before. Between them they gave us Bach’s Third Suite for Solo Cello, Haydn’s penultimate piano sonata (in D) and Beethoven’s early Sonata for Cello and Piano (Op 5 No 2).

The piano itself was given to us in the late 1990s by my mother-in-law, Jill Wilson. Her parents had acquired it in the 1930s from a pub in Kent, reportedly for £4. Unlike most of these instruments, it had not been gutted and turned into a cocktail cabinet, but was in completely original condition.

I had it restored by one of the great specialists in that kind of thing, Lucy Coad. Lucy told me that it was one of the most unspoiled instruments of its kind that she had seen – complete with original hammers, felts and strings.

It has a sound quite unlike a modern piano – silvery and delicate. The invention of the pianoforte (able to respond to touch, both soft and loud) was one of the great innovations of the second half of the eighteenth century.

Music at home is the most fun.

Bach as he wrote it

The wonderful cellist, Katherine Sharman, came to my house in King’s Sutton yesterday to do a private run-through of Bach’s sixth suite for solo cello. Privileged audience of three.

She’s to play it at a concert in Brighton today – and in Edinburgh on 24 March in an all-Bach programme with the London Handel Players.

The reason she wanted the run-through was that she’s recently taken delivery of a five-string cello, made for her by Mark Caudle and based on an original of 1730 by Testore. It’s a smaller instrument, about the size of a modern three-quarter cello, but with a very direct sound.

Although Kath has regularly played Bach’s other five suites (all written for the standard four-stringed instrument), she has held off playing the sixth because she knew that over recent times it’s been played mainly on the wrong instrument.

In fact, when I first encountered the sixth, some forty years ago, it was assumed, to quote a sleeve note, that “the [four-string] cello is the only possible instrument on which the suite can today be performed.”

Thank goodness for the new generation of musicians and instrument-makers, who enable us to hear great music ‒ Bach and the rest ‒ as fresh as paint.