In 2006 the British Clavichord Society‘s President (Derek Adlam) and committee marked their admiration and gratitude for the work of the distinguished collectors Rodger and Lynne Mirrey with British Clavichord Society Awards. This was a small recognition of the debt owed to Dr and Mrs Mirrey by so many professional and amateur early-keyboard enthusiasts in Britain and throughout the world. The Awards were presented at an informal ceremony after the Society‘s Annual General Meeting in London on 6 May 2006.
We now record, with sadness, that Rodger Mirrey died on 8 April 2007. The following account was posted soon after the 2006 award ceremony:
The previous recipients of British Clavichord Society Awards were Bernard Brauchli and Virginia Pleasants in 2004. The Society wished to honour the Mirreys‘ enlightened collecting, research and restoration policies, and also to thank them for their outstanding support for the Society since its foundation in 1994.
The 2006 awards also celebrated the recent gift of the Mirrey Collection to the University of Edinburgh Collection of Historic Musical Instruments at St Cecilia’s Hall, where it will be housed alongside the Raymond Russell Collection. Thanks to the Mirreys’ generous hospitality, their instruments are already widely known to generations of players, scholars and amateurs; now they will be even more widely accessible, under the care of the Edinburgh curators Darryl Martin and Arnold Myers, and with the Mirrey name still attached to them.
The photo (by Paula Woods) shows Lynne Mirrey (centre), with Garry Broughton (left) and Derek Adlam (right), the Society’s Chairman and President respectively, who presented the awards on 6 May 2006.
Among the absent friends who had sent congratulations and good wishes to the Mirreys were the two previous recipients of the awards, Virginia Pleasants and Bernard Brauchli, and many others, including John and Anna Blomfield, Bridget Cunningham, John Henry, Ed Kottick, Richard Luckett, Kenneth and Mary Mobbs, Peter Mole, Charles Mould, Priscilla Naish, Koen Vermeij, and John Weston.
The photo below (also by Paula Woods) shows the Mirreys, with their awards, at home on 27 May 2006.
updated 18 February 2009