In celebration of Jane Austen's "Very Pretty Tunes" for 250th anniversary

Penelope will be performing on a historic square-piano at 3pm on April 5 at St Andrew’s Church, Tangmere, with readings, followed by tea and cake. Tickets can be booked from [email protected]

Penelope, who lives in Tangmere, explains that “very pretty tunes” was the way Jane Austen's niece described her aunt’s playing: “She is the source that told us that Jane Austen practised every morning before breakfast. It's very interesting. If she practised every day then the likelihood is that she was a perfectly capable pianist. But she was very self-deprecating so I'm not sure that she wouldn’t have thought that she was any good herself. But she was certainly good enough to play for her nieces and nephews to dance, and what she would play would be the popular music of the day. You're not going to find Mozart. You're not going to find Haydn. She is not playing what we would call high classical music. It's music from the times, music from the theatre. It is absolutely standard repertoire for people from the gentry but probably mainly the elite. You had to have money to have an instrument and the teaching and the manuscripts in the first place. It was fascinating to research. I started by going to the cottage where she lived in Chawton.”

As for the significance of this being a square piano, Penelope explains: “The first thing you should say perhaps is that it is not square at all. It is rectangular. Sadly many of these square pianos have been turned into dressing tables. I noticed that there was one for sale at the moment and I got quite excited and then I saw that it was completely empty! Mine is 1795 and it's a Broadwood which was a hugely famous name among piano builders from the 1700s.

“It is very different from how you would play a modern piano or a harpsichord which is what I play mostly – though certainly I think playing the harpsichord is helpful. I think with the square piano you have to have a more precise, more gentle touch. It is not very loud but it was the early days of piano playing and it was exactly the instrument that Jane Austen rented and later owned. It is a modest piano. If you lived in a huge country house, you would have had a grand piano downstairs and then you would have had one of these in your bedroom because it would have been too cold to practise downstairs!”

Penelope has given solo recitals in the Purcell Room, Wigmore Hall and many concerts and festivals throughout Britain and in Andorra, Spain, France Italy, and the Netherlands. She has recorded for Hyperion Records with the Camerata of London, given solo broadcasts for Belgian Radio, Classic FM and BBC Radio 3. Her CD, From Lisbon to Madrid, featuring Scarlatti sonatas, received five stars from the BBC Music magazine, among other accolades. She also performs on the early piano and has recorded for BBC Persia, appeared in the film, Crazy about Jane, and given solo and lecture-recitals on historic instruments

including her own Broadwood square piano of 1795 and eighteenth and early nineteenth-century grands at National Trust properties including Hatchlands, Blickling, Tatton Park and Killerton, St Cecilia’s Hall Edinburgh, the Universities of St Andrews, Leeds, Cardiff, Oxford, the Turner Sims Concert Hall (Southampton University), Chawton House, the Guildhall School of Music and, most recently, Amerongen Castle, Holland.