To open the 60th Pinner Music Festival we combine our usual lunchtime seminar with a clavichord concert by Julian Perkins. Petroc Trelawny returns to chair a panel including composer Marco Galvani, and organist Paul Greally. Petroc is one of the best-known voices on BBC Radio Three - where after fourteen years presenting the daily Breakfast programme, he now hosts In Tune.
Pinner favourite Julian Perkins - dubbed ‘‘The Indiana Jones of Early Music’’ by BBC Radio 3 - then presents Bach’s Attick, exploring the musical lineage from the composer’s predecessors through Bach to his offspring, with the intimacy of the clavichord.
As a boy, it is said that Johann Sebastian Bach would creep into his elder brother’s study ‘on moonlit nights’ to copy a music book that he had been banned from seeing. The music that he copied includes composers featured in today’s programme, all of whom had a profound effect on him. Julian likes to imagine Bach playing this music on what was reputedly his favourite keyboard instrument – the clavichord.