Brinkburn Priory – 5 July 2014 – Brinkburn Music Festival – United Kingdom

The sound of a trumpet ringing out through the Priory Church will lend a martial air to the first concert on Saturday. Acclaimed Iranian-born harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani leads a programme which celebrates the 300th anniversary of the birth of C. P.E. Bach. We will hear his dramatic solo harpsichord sonatas, punctuated with duets for trumpet and soprano by Alessandro Scarlatti. Scarlatti’s arias, at times heroic and triumphal, capture the militarist splendour of the courts of early eighteenth-century Italy and are famous for the virtuosic vocal writing which was then in vogue.