Hey Neighbour,
If you'd told me I'd spend a Friday night in a church listening to music written two centuries ago, I'd have said you were lying. But last week, that's exactly what I did.
And spoiler: I'm glad I did.
It was the opening concert of the Islington Festival of Music and Art, now in its sixth year. This year's theme is "the words beneath the sound," a celebration of the union of two of our most human creations: music and literature. The music is drawn from poems, novels and folk tales, and they called the opening night Poems of Love and Loss.
Opening night was at St Mary's on Upper Street, a church that has stood in one form or another for a thousand years. The tower and spire you see from the pavement are Georgian, finished in 1754. The body of the church behind them is barely seventy years old. In September 1940 a bomb brought it down, the first London church destroyed in the Second World War. It was rebuilt and reopened in 1956.
Source: The spire of St Mary’s Church on Upper Street, enclosed in a wicker scaffold during repair work in 1787. © The Trustees of the British Museum via A London Inheritance website
There's a literary ghost here too. Charles Wesley, who went on to write more than six thousand hymns, was curate at St Mary's in 1739. He lasted only months. The churchwardens objected to his preaching and pushed him out. But a man who spent his life setting words to music makes a fitting ghost, if you ask me, for a festival about exactly that.
Then the music.
Oh the music.
Chausson first, a piece born from a Turgenev love story. A short Mahler fragment, the only chamber music of his that survives. Then Schubert. His fourteenth quartet, written when he knew he was dying, named after one of his own songs, about the terror and the comfort of death.
Did I know any of the music? No.
But I didn't need to. It moved me anyway.
It was like hearing a language you don't speak and understanding it anyway. You don't need the words. The ache in the Chausson, the grief in the Schubert. It arrives whether you can name it or not.
What made the night special was knowing this music was played by locals. Talented ones at that. The festival is run by two of them, Joana and Martin, and both were on stage, playing. That's the part I keep coming back to. This is not a slick production shipped in from town. It's neighbours putting on something beautiful.
The festival runs until Sunday. Still to come this weekend: Much Ado About Nothing, Elgar meeting Oscar Wilde, yoga with a live harp, a piano recital, and a Sunday finale at Christ Church Highbury that ties together Beethoven, Tolstoy and Janáček.
You don't need to know the music. I surely didn't. Just turn up, sit down, and allow yourself to feel something.
Learn more about the Islington Festival of Music and Art here.