November 2nd - Day 198

St Anne and St Agnes is a small, square Wren church near St Pauls, on the edge of The City. Since 1954 it has been a place of Lutheran worship. According to The Lutheran Council of Great Britain, Lutherans believe "that the Holy Scriptures are the source and norm of their doctrine and life. They proclaim the historic, ecumenical creeds of the church – the Apostles’, the Nicene and the Athanasian – which say that God is a Trinity who creates, saves and sustains us." They are named after Martin Luther, a 16th Century German priest who attempted to reform the Western Church by re-connecting it to its Biblical roots (this is all new information for my brain). More than thirty nationalities worship at St Anne and services are held in English, Amharic, Estonian, Latvian and Swahili. Once a month the church holds a Jazz Vespers service and at Christmas, Jazz Carols.

Today was the musical turn of James Woodrow (guitar) and Audrey Riley (cello) to entertain a snuffly lunchtime audience. The recital was bookended by the traditional, in the form of Bach. The music inbetween was mainly tranquil, but diverse. The most startling piece was called Calamintha for Solo Guitar by a temporary Japanese composer called Jo Kondo. It was a stop-starty staccato composition that, to my uneducated ear reminded me of Eric Morecambe's quip about playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order. My flippancy, however, does the piece, and what looked like extremely complex guitar-playing, an injustice - it stood out as something different and challenging. This is what Jo Kondo says about his music, "Each sound must have its own entity and life. What I am doing in my compositions is to create a web of intertonal relationships, while trying to safeguard the possibility of aurally perceiving the individual entity and life of every single tone in that relationship."

Both today's musicians are proficient and busy in many aspects of music, though I have to admit that it was discovering that Audrey has arranged and recorded with acts such as The Smiths, Nick Cave, The Smashing Pumpkins, The Cure, Muse and The Foo Fighters (and many others) which intrigued me the most.

More about both musicians at a-change-of-light.com