Music to start the weekend: Thomas Erskine's Sinfonia a Quattro in G major

Thomas Erskine was born in Edinburgh in 1732 (37 years after the death of Henry Purcell) and ws the eldest son and heir of the 5th Earl of Kellie, who was improsoned for a time for supporting the Jacobites in the 1745 rebellion.

Many aristocrats of the 18th century were patrons to the greatest musicians of the age - but Thomas Erskine, also known as  Viscount Fentoun and Lord Pittenweem until he inherited his father's earldom in 1756 as 6th Earl of Kellie, went one better and become one of them.

By all accounts he was a superlative violinist and was sometimes known in Scotland by the nickname "Fiddler Tam".

He also became a composer and began propagating the modern Mannheim style, of which he was to become widely acknowledged as the leading British exponent.

Six of his three-movement "Overtures" (Symphonies) were published in Edinburgh in 1761. James Boswell took him on a visit to Lord Eglinton's in London, where the overture the Earl composed for the popular pastiche The Maid of the Mill (at Covent Garden in 1765) became exceptionally popular. 

In 1767 the Earl returned to Scotland, where he became a leading light of the Edinburgh Musical Society,  and directed as a violinist the concerts in St Cecillia's Hall in Niddry Street, Edinburgh.

As well as a musician he as also an active Freemason, and became in turn first Grand Master of the Ancient or Atholl grand lodge in England from 1760 to 1766, and then Grand Master Mason of the Grand Lodge of Scotland from 1763 to 1765.

Until the 1970s only a small number of his compositions was thought to survive, though the discovery in 1989 of two manuscripts containing chamber works at Kilravock Castle has doubled the number of his surviving compositions – notably with nine trio sonatas and nine string quartets.

Some of these have become quite popular and have restored Erskine in the minds of modern music experts to the status he had in his own time: as one of the most distinguished British musicians of the 18th century.

Here is his Sinfonia a Quattro in G major


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