The 2025 season of Stockbridge Music concerts burst into life on Friday 7 March, when a packed St Peter’s Church relished a programme of music played on an eighteenth-century square piano by David Owen Norris. The instrument and the music were chosen with an eye to the Jane Austen celebrations of this year. The instrument itself dates from 1781, and so from the author’s childhood, and the focus of the music played was late eighteenth century: Johann Christian Bach (a son of), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Matthias Holst (a great-grandfather of), and a set of variations by George Kiallmark—a composer less well-known, but whose variations follow the Irish melody ‘Robin Adair’, the one piece of music specifically referenced and performed in Jane Austen’s novels.
This outline does not convey the special interest of the evening. David Owen Norris, introducing the instrument and the pieces played, was scholarly, lively, well-informed and witty, and his playing fluent and persuasive. The square piano sits in history between the harpsichord and the early Broadwood piano, essentially the instrument we are now familiar with. David Owen Norris demonstrated the ingenious features of the square piano which allowed the player control over volume, and so the facility to play both forte and piano, hence ‘fortepiano’. The experimental mechanisms that were developed during the eighteenth century were displayed and employed in performance. The explanations and demonstrations opened the audience’s eyes and ears to the performance practices of the early square piano players: fascinating insights.
Perhaps the most intriguing item of the programme was a sonata by an unknown composer which has survived in the Austen family’s music books. These run into eighteen volumes or six hundred pieces: some printed scores, some copied by hand by family members, including Jane Austen herself. In one of her letters we find her looking forward excitedly to the purchase of ‘a Pianoforte as good a one as can be got for 30 Guineas’. A family memoir records that ‘Aunt Jane began her day with music’ and ‘practised regularly every morning’. The music manuscript of the anonymous Sonata in E flat played at Stockbridge is written in Jane Austen’s hand: so neat and correct ‘that it was as easy to read as print’. The excellent programme for the evening reproduced the lively sketched portrait which precedes the music in the album. The seductive speculation that the portrait and the sonata are both Jane’s is hard to resist! The audience was probably sufficiently impressed that she was able to keep up the performance level for such a piece, what with the novels she had to write.
David Owen Norris brings with him an established reputation as composer, scholar, historian and performer. He is also a natural communicator and great enthusiast, and his Stockbridge audience responded with what in another context would be credited as ‘multiple curtain calls’.
Roger Lowman
