A lecture recital by Jenny Nex, with Steven Devine, piano
One of our final weekend events at the Georgian House in association with the exhibition Music & Migration in Georgian Edinburgh: The Story of Felix Yaniewicz, celebrating the co-founder of the first Edinburgh music festival of 1815.
The project to celebrate Yaniewicz's legacy began with the chance discovery of a 200-year-old piano bearing his signature. Another instrument by Yaniewicz & Co has since come to light: the beautiful Apollo lyre guitar. These elegant instruments on display in the exhibition at the Georgian House have a story to tell about Yaniewicz's activity as a musical entrepreneur catering to a fashionable clientele. In this lecture-recital one of Edinburgh's experts on the history of musical instruments at St Cecilia's Hall offers an insight into domestic music-making in the Georgian period and the trade which supplied these instruments. Her talk will be illustrated with songs and piano pieces from the period, played on the Yaniewicz & Green square piano c.1810.
Jenny Nex is Curator of the University of Edinburgh's musical instruments collection at St Cecilia's Hall. She studied music at the University of Edinburgh and went on to specialise as a singer in historical performance at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. As a researcher she specialises in the design, construction and trade in historical instruments in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Steven Devine is Principal Keyboard Player with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and performs regularly with early music ensembles all over Europe. He has recorded over 30 ensemble discs, and 6 solo discs including widely acclaimed recordings of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and Goldberg Variations. As a conductor, he has directed the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment at the Proms, the Mozart Festival Orchestra, New Chamber Opera, and the English Haydn Festival
