This rare event commemorating 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 scholar and musician Madeline Goold after years of painstaking research.
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.
"A number hand-written in a neglected square piano leads Madeleine 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."
So reads the flyleaf to Ms Goold's fascinating narrative.
What is particularly interesting about this book is the insights it gives, not just 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.
The writer's own journey begins in a sale room in Worcester, and leads her to the recently-catalogued archives of world-famed piano builders John Broadwood in Surrey, introduces her to the Early Keyboard Agency in Oxfordshire (who supplied the present writer's harpsichord), and to our own Robert Deegan, the early instrument maker on Lancaster's quayside.

Ms Goold made an urbane and witty hostess; 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.

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.


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