Prayer Breakfast, this Saturday 4th March, 8.15-9.30am in the Canterbury Room “When two or three gather in my name I will be there” said Jesus. God loves it when we bring our prayers to him and ask for his guidance.
Review of piano and flute recital at St Mary’s This concert was technically brilliant, very accomplished and also enormously enjoyable. The pieces were a combination of traditional and modern Japanese style compositions and French classical compositions.
Ikuko delighted us with a previous brilliant piano recital in 2022 and we were very pleased to welcome her again. Her virtuoso playing and ability to plan and execute programs which successfully span the gap between Western and Japanese Classics, requiring rapid changes of style from one to the other, is amazing. Many of the pieces were new to me and I expect probably to most of the audience, they included Cécile Chaminade’s Concertino for flute and piano, Debussy’s Prélude a l’après midi d’un faune, Jean Philippe Rameau’s Les Soupirs and La Joyeuse and Gabriel Fauré’s very well known Sicilienne. The Japanese influenced pieces were an 18th Century Honkyoko Sokkan, which opened the concert, an exercise in which the performer must lose themselves in contemplation of breath or soul until it appears in the mind’s eye, Wil Offerman’s Honami, Tore Takemitsu’s Rain tree sketch in memoriam Olivier Messaien, Michio Mayagi’s Haru No Umi and Tochio Hosokawa’s Lied for Flute and Piano. These music in these compositions all produced very strong visual images, my own favourites were the Honami in which Jean François’ flute depicted the noises made by the wind blowing over fields of full grown rice, and the Rain Tree Sketch, played by Ikuko, about a miraculous rain tree whose tiny leaves store moisture and let drops fall long after the rain as ceased.
We are asked to pray