Classical Music - Pierre Goy

A very unusual and rather beautiful event is taking place in the Thomas a Beckett Church in Cliffe this Sunday afternoon. One of ‘the world’s top four or five clavichord players’, Pierre Goy from Switzerland, is coming to town to play a concert of pieces by Mozart, Haydn and CPS Bach on an instrument made, by Karin Richter, in Lewes. “The clavichord is an earlier version of the piano,” says Judith Wardman, of the British Clavichord Society, which has arranged the concert. “It has uniquely expressive capabilities, as the player can manipulate the strings to create ‘vibrato’, just like a violinist can ‘wobble’ that instrument’s strings. It is a very quiet instrument, which suits an intimate environment. We had a concert in St Thomas in 2004 and it proved an unusually perfect setting, acoustically speaking.”

“When we hear the music of Mozart and Haydn nowadays,” she continues, “we normally hear it on the piano, which doesn’t reproduce the sound that the composers were expecting to hear when they wrote their pieces. They were written for the earlier keyboard instruments, of which the clavichord is one. The greatest ever performer on the instrument was CPE Bach, Johan Sebastian’s son, and the concert will give the audience a rare chance to hear his music on the instrument for which it was composed.” The music will be played on an instrument made by Karin Richter in her workshop in Cliffe in 1986, after a 1771 original. AL