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Hatchlands Park was built over 250 years ago at East Clandon in Surrey. Today's tenant is Alec Gobbe who owns a very fine collection of paintings. The building, notable for its Robert Adam ceilings and its spacious surrounding parkland is now associated with the National Trust. A fine 'stately home' certainly but it is best known for the 'Gobbe Collection'. This comprises a very large collection of keyboard instruments many of which are associated with great composers of the past. How suitable then that it should have been selected as the venue for an evening in celebration of H C Robbins Landon.
The event took place on 6th October 2011 and commenced with a biographical survey of Landon's life, presented by John Julius Norwich. Here was the ideal person, one who had interviewed Landon many times - extensively so on television - and who became a good personal friend and had stayed with Landon in his splendid home in southern France for long periods. Of course Norwich, a skilled after dinner speaker - was entirely at home with his subject and with barely a glance at a few notes on a small piece of paper; he entertained those gathered in the beautiful hall with a very personal description of Landon's life. He stressed the enormous amount of work done in Landon's early years, the formation of the Haydn Society, the making of recordings which presented performances in authentic style for the first time ever. His tireless research throughout libraries, monasteries and universities throughout Europe took some years and this was virtually at his own expense. Indeed it seems unlikely that he received any real income from his industrious research into Haydn until he published his first major work on the subject of his musical passion. This was entitled The Symphonies of Joseph Haydn and dates from 1955. It illuminated the true nature of Haydn's life and altered contemporary thinking concerning the performance of Haydn's Symphonies. Norwich also explained the enormous value of Landon's extensive five-volume Hayan: Chronicle and...