Rare, entertaining event looking at Lancaster's past (From Lancaster And Morecambe Citizen)

Rare, entertaining event looking at Lancaster's past

10:08am Wednesday 16th April 2008

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A RARE event in Lancaster commemorated one of Lancaster's unsung musical heroes who, along with the newly-restored square piano once in his possession, is the focus of a new book just published by the lawyer, sculptor, scholar and musician Madeline Goold after years of painstaking research, writes Michael Nunn.

John Langshaw was the Organist of Lancaster Priory from 1798 until his death in 1832. He was also an organ builder and a composer, and a prolific correspondent, not least with the Wesley family of Methodism fame. As one of the great and good' of the City, he knew the Gillow family and other local luminaries.

The fly leaf of the book reads A number hand-written in a neglected square piano leads Madeline Goold on a request to uncover the identities of the generations of people who owned and played it. This biography of a now almost-forgotten instrument, which once held pride of place in drawing rooms throughout Britain and its Empire, is a journey through two centuries of musical lives'.

This book gives insights into the journeys the instrument makes but also into the life of the Langshaw family and into life in Lancaster in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Ms Goold made an urbane and witty hostess last Thursday; she is equally stylish and assured as a writer. The book reads like a scholarly detective story, and is difficult to put down once you've started. We observe the two John Langshaws, father and son, on the upper crust of the London social scene, and at a then relatively-enlightened Lancaster Grammar School in the days when it was behind the Castle.

We see them giving music lessons to the bourgeois families of the prosperous Port of Lancaster, and playing the organ for the Priory services week in, week out, father and son between them, for sixty years.

Among Ms Goold's entertaining and fascinating discourse on late Georgian life, music and manners, the evening included contributions from The Gladly Solemn Sound. This is a local choir, which specialises in sacred and secular music mainly, from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their twenty or so members sang with clarity and with enthusiasm under their passionate and erudite Director, Paul Guppy.

A number of their aptly-chosen pieces were of local origin: we heard an anonymous psalm setting called Abbeystead' from a Dophinholme manuscript, and another psalm setting by John Langshaw himself, entitled Lancaster'. No food miles' here Readings from contemporary letters and journals (don't ask about the one dealing with the bear and the beehive) were balanced by instrumental musical offerings from the period, performed by the Langshaws' present-day successor, Ian Pattinson. He played with a fitting elegance and marked sensitivity to the styles of the different periods.

These included extracts from a Handel organ concerto, a CPE Bach fortepiano sonata, pieces by Langshaw's friend Samuel Wesley, and sonatas by Haydn and Beethoven. All these pieces would have been familiar listening - certainly in the metropolis and even in remote Lancaster. And particularly as the organ in St John's Church was actually built by John LANGSHAW (father) himself in 1784, shortly after the church was opened.

This was an illuminating, informative and entertaining evening. And all the more so for being composed, built and performed in Lancaster by a goodly number of local people.

"Mr Langshaw's Square Piano", 364pp hardback, is published by Corvo Books Ltd, and is priced £11.99. It is available from Waterstone's Bookshops.

For further information about the piano and its history, and about the author, see: mrlangshawssquarepiano.co.uk

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