at Peake's House

I went into Colchester this afternoon, for another instalment of the Roman River Music Festival, a clavichord recital in Peake's House.  No, I had never heard of Peake's House until I got my copy of the 2014 Festival brochure.  It is a fourteenth century timbered townhouse which was bequeathed (by a Mr Peake) to Colchester Borough Council in 1946, on the condition that it be used for social and cultural purposes.  It is now leased to The Landmark Trust, and can be yours for four nights from £229.  Sleeps four.  Well, I suppose that staying in a house with a couple of mates counts as a social purpose, of sorts, though I'm not convinced that's what Mr Peake had in mind when he made his bequest.  Presumably Colchester Borough Council doesn't feel it can afford to maintain Peake's House, let alone stage cultural events in it, any more than it could continue to run Tymperleys as a clock museum.  Though you can gain access to that ancient building for no more than the price of a cup of tea, since it is now leased out as a tea shop.  (The service when I went there was quite extraordinarily bad, so who knows how long the arrangement will last.  Colchester is not exactly short of cafes.)

What I saw of Peake's House was delightful, and if I wanted accommodation for four people in the middle of Colchester (which I don't) I'd have no qualms about booking it.  Possibly not in the middle of winter, since those timbered walls looked cold to me.  I don't know whether the infill under the plaster is wattle and daub, or antique single skinned bricks, but either way I guess it has thermal properties not much better than a garden shed.  The door from the street opens into a large room which is now a kitchen, and the organiser let us go and see the upstairs rooms after the concert, two large high ceilinged bedrooms going up into the roof space.  The stairs are steep and narrow, and the drawing room where the recital was held was reached up another steep half flight.  Not a house for tenants with bad knees.

The clavichord was almost new, a 2008 copy of an eighteenth century German instrument. Clavichords are tiny.  I knew it would be, based on those Dutch Golden Age portraits of ladies seated at the virginals, but even so I wasn't quite prepared for the neat little rectangular box, plain and unadorned, made out of what I learnt afterwards was cherry wood with a spruce sounding board, standing on tapered square legs.  The clavichord player (clavichordist?) was Julian Perkins, who has appeared at Sydney Opera House and the Wigmore Hall, so playing to twenty five people in a side street in Colchester is rather off his usual beat.  Originally there was just going to be one performance, and he very sportingly agreed to add two more to meet demand, so as I type this he will be taking a rest before seating himself at his tiny keyboard for the third performance of the day.

He warned us before he began that at first the clavichord would sound very quiet.  It was a domestic instrument, designed for rooms such as the one we were in, smaller and less flashy than the harpsichord and not nearly as loud.  The late Christopher Hogwood had once given a clavichord recital at a school, and after the first suite a hand in the front row had shot up, and a childish voice warned him that please, Mr Hogwood, the clavichord isn't switched on.  Julian Perkins promised us that as our ears adjusted to the lack of volume, it would sound louder, and he was right, it did.

The action of a clavichord is unlike that of a piano or harpsichord, in that the hammer remains in contact with the string through the duration of the note.  I can't really visualise how that works, and even when I'd had a good peer into the top of the instrument after the concert, I didn't understand it, but being a scrupulously polite person I didn't like to start tapping keys uninvited to see what would happen.  It is thus the only keyed instrument (apart from, he thought, the accordion) that is capable of vibrato.  He demonstrated this, and it was impressive.

The programme was Bach French suites, progressing from minor to major, allegedly written as a wedding present to Bach's second wife, though I'm not sure how the supposed eulogy to his first wife fits into that narrative, which were beautiful in a soft, mellowly tinkly, mathematical way. Everybody sat in attentive silence, even a very small girl who can't have been more than six years old, while the elderly woman next to her in the front row was reading from a copy of the score as Julian Perkins played.  Nobody coughed.  In fact, it was the most impeccably behaved audience I've seen for ages, and a very civilized way of spending the second half of Wednesday afternoon.