It's funny how things work out. One of my favourite places on earth is Bath; and one of my favourite pastimes is walking its streets and feeling the almost tangible presence of its history. Walk around the Circus, and you'll pass Thomas Gainsborough's house:
(It's one of those behind the trees.) I like to linger outside his door - it's easy to imagine it opening, and him striding out, perhaps to walk along the Royal Crescent just a minute or two away:
He did that walk a lot, because he would call to see his friends the Linleys, who lived at no. 11 Royal Crescent: there was Thomas Sr, a prominent musician about town; his daughter Elizabeth - a soprano of renown and stunningly beautiful, who scandalously eloped with Richard Sheridan; and (among others) Thomas Junior - who met Mozart in 1770, in Italy, and the two lads got on famously. Sadly, Thomas's promising musical career was brought to an untimely end at the age of 22 in a fatal boating accident.
Now I've walked this walk, following in the footsteps of Gainsborough and the Linleys, many times, but it never occurred to me till now to wonder about what Thomas's music was like. And recently I discovered that Hyperion, bless 'em, have done him proud. So I've been listening to these bargain price CDs on the Helios label:
And I must say, I'm finding them truly delightful. There are a couple of duets on the Moses disc, for instance, that Julia Gooding and Sophie Daneman sing exquisitely well. The music for
The Tempest is gorgeous. Linley was talked about as potentially 'the English Mozart', and there's a vitality in these works that makes such a comment understandable. Most particularly, though, I'm aware of how much my affection for these pieces must be governed by extra-musical concerns. I've seen what Tom saw every day; walked the same flagstones, breathed the same elevated air, high above the grassy slopes of the park. And it makes a difference. I feel as if I'm listening to music composed by someone I know. If this music had been written by John Smith of Birmingham, would I feel such an affinity for it? I don't know; probably not.
Not that I care much. I love it when all these things come together and produce this kind of multidimensional experience.
