Opening Night: The Shadow of Angels

The opening night performances and presentations for Kim Poor's exhibition The Shadow of Angels at St Stephen Walbrook began with a speech by the exhibition's curator, the legendary art historian and critic Edward Lucie-Smith. 

He spoke about St Stephen Walbrook as an iconic setting for this exhibition which highlights the universal appeal of angels and their presence and significance in our lives. Their iconography has been a unifying force throughout time and appears in all religions and cultures. Especially in these troubled times, angels represent our need for reassurance in a very unstable world. They are our protectors, guides and spiritual messengers; a bridge between us and the Divine. Edward also spoke about the contemporary connections and ministry of St Stephen Walbrook, in particular its online ministry.

Edward's speech was followed by the musical programme for the evening, which featured an expertly curated collection of classical musicians and dancers:

NIKLAS OLDEMEIER - Piano
Prelude and Fugue in B Flat Minor BWV 867
J.S.Bach
‘Pavane' 2nd Piano Suite Opus 10
George Enescu
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
FERNANDO MONTAÑO - Soloist with The Royal Ballet, Covent Garden
YAROSLAVA TROFYMCHUK - Cello
LENA NAPRADEAN - Piano
'The Swan' Carnival des Animaux
Camille Saint-Saens
'Kol Nidrei' Opus 47
Max Bruch
Estampes - 'Pagodes'
Claude Debussy
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
SHIR VICTORIA LEVY - Violin
'Grave and Andante’ from Violin Sonata No 2 in A Minor BWV 1003.
J.S. Bach
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
KIRILL BURLOV DANCE COMPANY
'Elements' Carte Blanche
Choreography by Kirill Burlov

The exhibition, which also features an installation by Sacha Molyneux, is at St Stephen Walbrook until 29th October 2016 (weekdays 10.00am - 4.00pm, Wednesdays 11.00am - 3.00pm). Prints of 'The Good Samaritan Angel' are on sale with proceeds going to St Stephen Walbrook.

During The Shadow of Angels, the “amazing, daring and magnetic artist” Claudio Crismani will also perform. Crismani will play Etudes Australes, First Book Nos. 1-8 by John Cage and Suite from The Bluebeard Castle by Béla Bartók at St Stephen Walbrook on Tuesday 25 October at 7:00 pm. Tickets are £15.00 from the Box Office at St Martin-in-the-Fields or on the door.

American critic John Maxim concluded his review on Music Life about Claudio Crismani’s concert dedicated to Scriabin’s music with those words. The music by Russian composer Alexander Scriabin has always been at the centre of Crismani’s artistic interests.

Crismani was born in Trieste and he began studying music with Andrea Giorgi as a young boy. Between Andro and Claudio a solid, lifelong fraternal friendship was built in time.

He continued studying piano with Alessandro Costantinides and composition with Mario Bugamelli, graduating with full marks at the Bolzano Conservatory. He then perfected his technique studying with Marguerite Kazuro in Warsaw for five years. His international career began in Paris in 1979 with a recital at the “Salle Pleyel” and a series of radio and tv recordings for “France Musique”. Since then he has performed all over Europe, Russia, Israel, USA, Japan and Australia and in the most distinguished concert halls. He has worked with directors such as James Lawrence Levine, Cristoph von Dohnányi and Thomas Sanderling and performed with internationally renowned orchestras, among which: The London Philharmonic Orchestra, The Philharmonia Orchestra, The European Community Chamber Orchestra, Les Solistes de Moscou, The Osaka Philharmonic Orchestra and The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

In 1986 Claudio Crismani was invited to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Liszt’s death by performing twelve concerts in England and playing the complete “Années de Pèlerinage” and the transcriptions of Wagner’s operas. In 1987, UNESCO named him “European Artist” and invited him to perform at the “International Music Soiree” at the Palais des Congrès in Paris. That same year he was appointed “Guest Artist” of the Van Leer Foundation in Jerusalem and under this aegis he became co-founder of the Horowitz Festival. In the Nineties, he staged a three-evening performance of the complete Poems and Sonatas for piano by Scriabin, which was repeated several times in different countries. He had an exclusive record contract with RS for twelve years and won two Discographic Awards. This period was marked by an important collaboration and friendship with the great Russian pianist Lazar Berman.

His performance of Scriabin’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra together with The London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Thomas Sanderling and recorded live at the Royal Festival Hall in London, was a true publishing success story.

After a concert tour in 2002/2003 marking his thirtieth year of artistic activity (he was described as one of the major artists of his generation), Claudio Crismani decided to retire from the concert scene and devote himself exclusively to a long period of study. In 2014, he returned on the musical scene – among others – with “The Prometheus Project”, which is a transposition of Alexander Scriabin’s “Promethean” dream, designed to be a literary, artistic and (of course) musical experience. He rewrote it together with his friend Edward Lucie-Smith as a synesthetic blend, suspended between visual art and music, literature and history. Here, Pasternak and Scriabin intersect with contemporary traits, tracing a hitherto undescribed randomness of real-life moments spanning from Russia to Trieste and present and future human relations developing between Trieste and London.

In 2015, Claudio Crismani returned on the international scene at the exhibition on Boris Pasternak: “la Genesi del Sogno” (The Genesis of the Dream). The event highlighted artworks by Oleg Kudryashov, photographs by Moisei Nappelbaum and Crismani’s concert (performed strictly on a Fazioli piano) at the Teatro Verdi in Trieste, and repeated in 2016 in Cividale del Friuli with a tribute to Boulez.

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Claudio Crismani - Wehmut.

Stillness Speaks

Tim Harrold, John Espin and Michael Murphy are exhibiting in ‘Stillness Speaks’at Romford Quaker House (7 Balgores Crescent, Gidea Park RM2 6AB) from Saturday 31st October to Sunday 1st November (10.00am – 4.00pm). Their exhibition is supported by an exhibition of art from children of Quaker members. Presentations by the artists can be heard on Sunday 1st November from 12 noon.

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James Morrison - Demons.

Sophia Hubs Network Launch

We are delighted to announce the City launch of the Sophia Hubs Network and the development of another arm of Sophia Hubs support to local economies, entrepreneurs and start-up businesses, including Redbridge.

The launch will be on Tuesday 17th November 6.00 - 8.00pm, St Stephen Walbrook (by Bank station).

We are launching a ‘community share offer’ so that financial institutions and investors can support projects and start-up businesses that bring value to the area.

This launch will bring together financial investors and start-up businesses and partners of the pilot being run in Redbridge. We will have information about our partner project in South Africa, the Sophiatown Motswako Enterprise Hub.

Christine Baker of Argentis Capital will give a keynote speech focusing on the place of Sophia Hubs in the wider picture of social enterprise and social impact investing in the UK and internationally. Argentis Capital works to provide capital for innovative, scalable businesses which have a positive social and/or environmental impact in both developed and developing countries worldwide.

The programme is as follows:

• Arrival (6 – 6.30pm)
• Introduction & welcome
• Sophia Hub Redbridge & Motswako Hub Sophiatown stories
• Community Share Offer launch
• Keynote speech - Christine Baker (Argentis Capital)
• Networking / Sign-up

To book a place, please email clive.sheldon@sophiahubs.com.

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Ladysmith Black Mambazo - World in Union.

Tower of London and Baker's Hall

Thanks to Melvyn Jeremiah I was at the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula this evening for Evensong and at Baker's Hall for the Court Dinner of the Parish Clerks Company. As a result, I saw Brian Catling's memorial sculpture at the Tower of London, saw stained glass by John Piper in the Livery Hall at Baker's Hall and heard an engaging after dinner speech by Andrew Carwood, Director of Music at St Paul's Cathedral.

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William Byrd - Christ Rising Again.

Bob Dylan: Voices are measured by whether they're telling the truth

Following a recent interview in which Bob Dylan spoke extensively about his inspiration, yesterday he also made a revealing speech in accepting the 2015 MusiCares Person of the Year:

'Dylan traced the roots of some of his better-known songs to numerous traditional folk songs, noting that his work blossomed from his spending so much time playing the traditional works. "John Henry" begat "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall." Big Bill Broonzy's "Key to the Highway" led to "Highway 61 Revisited." "Roll the Cotton Down" birthed "Maggie's Farm." "The Times They Are A Changin'" is an extension of what Dylan referred as the "come all ye" songs such as "Floyd Collins." From "Deep Elm Blues," a traditional song recorded by blues artists in the 1930s, sprang "Tangled Up in Blue."

"There's nothing secret about it," Dylan said.

Dylan made a singular point about music and great songwriting, whether he was referencing the work of gospel legends the Blackwood Brothers, folk legend Roscoe Holcomb or bluesman Charley Patton. "Voices are not to measured by how pretty they are," Dylan said, quoting Sam Cooke. "They're to be measured by whether they're telling the truth."

"The Staple Singers were one of my favorite groups of all time," he said. "They were the type of artists I wanted to record my songs."'

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Bob Dylan - High Water (For Charley Patton).

Holocaust Memorial Day

Here is the speech I gave today at the Holocaust Memorial Day event in Redbridge:

Last year I was fortunate, through my sabbatical visits and through the Tour of the Holy Land organised by the East London Three Faiths Forum, to see a wide variety of artwork in churches and synagogues by the Russian Jewish artist Marc Chagall. Chagall was controversial as a Jewish artist for painting images of Christ’s crucifixion.

Chagall’s church commissions were created, ‘In the name of the freedom of all religions’ while, for him, ‘Christ ... always symbolized the true type of the Jewish martyr.’ He depicted this perception most famously in White Crucifixion painted in 1938 in response to the persecution of Jews by the Nazis, including Kristallnacht. Central to this painting, among scenes of anti-Jewish violence which included the torching of a synagogue, is Jesus on the cross with a tallit, the Jewish prayer shawl, draped around him as a loin cloth. For Chagall, ‘Jesus on the cross represented the painful predicament of all Jews, harried, branded, and violently victimized in an apparently God-forsaken world.’

A similar perception is described by Elie Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor, in his book Night. There he writes: ‘The SS hanged two Jewish men and a youth in front of the whole camp. The men died quickly, but the death throes of the youth lasted for half an hour. "Where is God? Where is he?" someone asked behind me. As the youth still hung in torment in the noose after a long time, I heard the man call again, "Where is God now?" And I heard a voice in myself answer: "Where is he? He is here. He is hanging there on the gallows.’

Seen by Elie Wiesel in the context of Judaism and of the humiliation of God in going with Israel into exile and suffering, for Christians this moving story has a striking resonance because of the crucifixion. For Jews and Christians alike, the face of desolation wears another aspect, that of the presence and providence of God.

In Christian vocabulary this could be described as the prayer of incarnation. This is a prayer of presence; a prayer which recognizes that God shares our pain, frailty and brokenness. We pray acknowledging that God suffers with us. From Christ’s life, Christians also recognise two other types of prayer: the prayer of resurrection in which we pray for a miracle; and the prayer of transfiguration where, as Samuel Wells has written, ‘we see a whole reality within and beneath and beyond what we thought we understood.’ In times of bewilderment and confusion we pray that God might reshape our reality, to give us a new and right spirit to trust that even in the midst of suffering and hardship, truth can still be experienced and shared.

At Yad Yashem, on the East London Three Faiths Forum Tour of the Holy Land, I saw examples of this prayer in the words of Aharon Appelfeld who said, ‘From among the horror grew another morality, another love, another compassion. These grew wild – no one gave them a name.’ Similarly, on the Yad Vashem website I read of survivors, ‘dazed, emaciated, bereaved beyond measure,’ who ‘gathered the remnants of their vitality and the remaining sparks of their humanity, and rebuilt.’ ‘They never meted out justice to their tormentors – for what justice could ever be achieved after such a crime? Rather, they turned to rebuilding: new families forever under the shadow of those absent; new life stories, forever warped by the wounds; new communities, forever haunted by the loss.’

I also saw pages from the illustrated Bible which self-taught artist Carol Deutsch loving crafted in 1941 in Antwerp, during the turmoil of the Second World War, as a gift for his daughter’s second birthday. Carol Deutsch and his wife Fela were informed upon and murdered in the extermination camps. However, their daughter Ingrid, who was hidden with a Catholic family in the countryside, survived, as did the Bible, which miraculously remained intact. Deutsch, who died in Buchenwald, left behind a vital estate - a stalwart resistance to everything the Nazis had attempted to obliterate.

Finally, for those who are Christians, Karen Sue Smith has noted that ‘Chagall’s genius was to use Jesus’ crucifixion to address Christians, to alert them by means of their own symbol system to the systematic cruelty taking place in the Holocaust.’ For Christians then, our response should, I think, be in line with the words of Pope Francis from an interview in 2013. There he spoke of his admiration for White Crucifixion praising Jews for keeping their faith despite the Holocaust and other “terrible trials” throughout history (by implication, including those for which the Church is cupable), reaffirmed Judaism as the “holy root” of Christianity saying that, where this understood and affirmed, a Christian should not ever be an anti-Semite because “to be a good Christian it is necessary to understand Jewish history and traditions.”

I pray that this will be so for my own faith community and that God might reshape our reality, to give us a new and right spirit to trust that even in the midst of suffering and hardship, truth can still be experienced and shared.

See here and here for reports and photographs from the Redbridge event.

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Azamra - Shuvi Nafshi.

Art is gratuitous. Art is extravagant.

Makoto Fujimura's Acceptance Speech for the 2014 American Academy of Religion Award in Religion and the Arts is 'a prayer uttered in the liminal zone between art and religion, a prayer to repair the schism between the two':

'Art is gratuitous. Art is extravagant. But so is our God. God does not need us; yet he created us out of his gratuitous love. Jesus astonished the disciples by giving Mary the highest commendation anyone receives in the pages of the Gospels:

“Leave her alone,” said Jesus. “Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me. She did what she could. She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.” (Mark 14:6 - 9)

I pray that in the days to come, this aroma will fill the air whenever the words of Gospel are spoken, that outsiders to faith will sense this extravagant air and feel it, particularly for them. I pray that when our children speak of faith, this gratuitous, intuitive aroma of the love of Christ will be made manifest in their lives.

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Patti Smith Group - Easter.

Nothing and everything

In the fertile desert
In the presence of absence
In the stillness of chatter
In the sounds of silence
In infinite simplicity
In the simplicity of the infinite
Life laid down in order to live
Leaving in order to arrive
Kenosis in incarnation
Embodiment in abandonment
Life in death
The possession of nothing
Coincidence of opposites
The first last and last first
All become One
Coinherence
Deification
One with the Son
Being fulfilled in the Word
Speech completed in silence
Unity which is nothing
and everything
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Arcade Fire - Black Mirror.

The Word of Love

Abracadabra, Open Sesame. If you’ve hired a children’s entertainer who did magic then you’re likely to have heard those words recently. They’ve been reduced to fun phrases for children but they represent something of our long-term belief in the power of words. If you’ve been watching the climax of Merlin, then you’ve seen Merlin, Morgana and Mordred muttering spells in an ancient tongue before their eyes flash and magic occurs.

Words have power. That’s what human beings believed in the past. We tend now to associate that thought with fantasy and yet it is an indication of the huge power that words actually carry. Each of us each day of our lives use words to make things happen and, while it may not be magic, it is powerful nonetheless.

The Bible teaches us much about the power of speech. Words are creative. In the beginning, God spoke the universe into being. God said, ‘Let there be …’ and life itself came into existence. Words also describe and define what has been made. In the Genesis account of creation, God divides light from dark and names light as ‘Day’ and dark as ‘Night’. Similarly he separates land from water and names the land as ‘Earth’ and the water as ‘Sea’. One of the first things he teaches human beings to do is to name what they see around them.

The creative, defining speech of God is wise. In Proverbs 8 we are told that God created Wisdom as the first of his works and that Wisdom speaks excellent words. God’s words, we are told, always accomplish what he purposes. When he sends them out into the world they never return to him void.

Yet, as Simon Small reminds us in his book ‘From the Bottom of the Pond’: “Thoughts and words are merely descriptions of reality. They can be wonderful, beautiful pointers to truth; they can evoke the experience of truth; and they can mirror the light of truth. Thoughts and words are necessary to help us open to the experience of truth. But they can never be truth itself. Thoughts and words, at best, can only be alarm clocks that wake us up to what was always present.”

Words can be helpful or unhelpful, but they are not ultimately the reality or truth which they describe. In the Prologue to John’s Gospel, Jesus is described as being God’s Word to human beings; he is in himself the message that God wants to communicate to us. This Word is a real person, not simply a description of God or a statement of the truth about God. What this means is that the truth about God is found in a relationship with Jesus and not in a set of statements or beliefs about him. Truth is not a prescription that we can swallow but a relationship in which we live.

When Jesus is described to us in the Prologue to John’s Gospel as being the Word of God, we can see then that John is bringing all these thoughts about speech and words into play. When he writes that Jesus is God’s Word, he means that Jesus is the creativity, the definition and the wisdom of God; all wrapped up and revealed in human form and flesh.

Jesus’ creativity is seen in the new way of being human that he reveals to us. In him, the divine and the human come together enabling us to see all that human beings can potentially be; all that we can potentially become. In him we see the best of humanity because in him we see God fully expressed. The Prologue to John’s Gospel says that: “No one has ever seen God. The only Son, who is the same as God and is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.”

God is love and, in Jesus, we see pure love expressed without reserve and without self-seeking: the way of compassion instead of the way of domination; the way of self-sacrifice instead of the way of selfishness; the way of powerlessness instead of the way of power; and the way of giving instead of the way of grasping.

Therefore to follow in his way is to experience divinity in our lives; to move towards the divine. When we see him call his disciples to follow him that is what occurs; they leave their old way of life behind in order to begin to experience a new and divine way of being human. As the Prologue to John’s Gospel puts it, God himself becomes their Father.

In doing so, he is also the Word of God which describes and defines us. The Prologue to John’s Gospel explains Jesus’ ability to define us in terms of light and darkness. Elsewhere in John’s Gospel Jesus says to Nicodemus (John 3. 19 - 21): “This is how the judgement works: the light has come into the world, but people love the darkness rather than the light, because their deeds are evil. Those who do evil things hate the light and will not come to the light, because they do not want their evil deeds to be shown up. But those who do what is true come to the light in order that the light may show that what they did was in obedience to God.”

In other words, the light of Christ is all about comparisons and transparency. Jesus, through his life and death, shows us the depth of love of which human beings are really capable and, on the basis of that comparison, we come up well short and are in real need of change. In the light of Jesus’ self-sacrifice, we see our inherent selfishness and recognise our need for change.

The light of Christ is also about transparency. God sees all and Jesus, in his ministry, was able to shine a light on the deepest recesses of the human heart. The Samaritan woman said of him: “Come see the man who told me everything I have ever done” (John 4. 29). With Jesus, nothing is hidden, everything is transparent; therefore we need to change if we are to truly live in the light of his presence.

In 1 John 5. 20 we read that “the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we know the true God.” He is, therefore, also the wise Word of God because, through him, we understand and know the true God as he truly is. Not only that but we see and know ourselves realistically as well.

Ultimately, the Word that God speaks to us in and through Jesus is ‘Love’. In 1 John 4. 9 – 10 we read, “God showed his love for us by sending his only Son into the world, so that we might have life through him. This is what love is: it is not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the means by which our sins are forgiven.”

Jesus came into our world as the Word of God to live a life of self-sacrificial love as a human being. He shows us what true love looks like and he shows us that human beings are capable of true love even when most of the evidence around us seems to point towards the opposite conclusion. But he did not come solely as an example or a description of love. He is love itself, the reality of love, and, therefore, as we come into relationship with him we come into a true relationship with love. This why he came, that we might receive him; that we might receive love. He is then in us and in him. Love in us and we in love.

In the beginning Love already existed; Love was with God, and Love was God. From the very beginning Love was with God. Through him God made all things; not one thing in all creation was made without him. Love was the source of life, and this life brought light to people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it out.

“God is love. And God showed his love for us by sending his only Son into the world, so that we might have life through him. This is what love is: it is not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the means by which our sins are forgiven.

Dear friends, if this is how God loved us, then we should love one another. No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in union with us, and his love is made perfect in us. (1 John 4. 8 – 12).

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The Bee Gees - Words.