Music to End the Day Sunday, 9 May 2021

Hello everyone

Our worship this weekend continues to focus on inspirational words from John, chapter 15:

‘As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Dwell in my love. … You did not choose me: I chose you. I appointed you to go on and bear fruit, fruit that will last. … This is my commandment: love one another.’

We begin this sequence with ‘The love of God comes close’,
a lovely hymn from the Iona community, written by John Bell and Graham Maule in 1988,
and published in one of their earliest song collections, Enemy of Apathy, the following year.
The hymn invites us to identify with those in need of God’s love, peace, joy and grace. –
Perhaps we recognise our own need for these attributes?
Then in the final verse we discover that these are embodied in Jesus,
who comes close to us and ‘is here to stay, embracing those who walk his way’.

The hymn is sometimes sung to the Welsh tune ‘Rhosmedre’ or to John Ireland’s ‘Love Unknown’,
but I sing it here using John Bell’s original melody ‘Melanie’.

Many of the great pianists who are naturally right-handed have spent much time developing the agility and fluency of their left hand.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several composers wrote pieces specifically for the left hand.
Among these was Russian Felix Blumenfeld, a pupil of Rimsky Korsakov, and teacher of Vladimir Horowitz and Simon Barere.
Blumenfeld wrote his Étude for the Left Hand in 1905. It became famous when Barere recorded it for HMV thirty years later.
The pianist Raymond Lewenthal later described the work as ‘one of the most euphonious and useful works of all left-hand compositions!
Our pianist in this recording for Cornerstone is John Fisher. John has been a student of mine for more than twenty-five years.
A couple of years ago, he was chosen to perform on BBC Radio 3 as part of a showcase for outstanding amateur pianists, and played this piece.

We conclude with my setting of words from John Chapter 15.
I wrote it in the Autumn of 1999 as a wedding present for my dear wife Jill on the occasion of our marriage on 16 October 1999.
The text was suggested by the wonderful Canon David Goldie, who conducted our marriage at Cornerstone.
Somehow we managed to keep Jill away from rehearsals (not quite sure how!), so the first time she heard the work was in the service itself.
I was ‘permitted’ to step away from her side for a few minutes to conduct the work!
This recording was made more recently, on the occasion of the marriage of two long-standing choir members, Jo and Peter Anderton,
using the same soloists as in the original 1999 performance: Clare Morris (soprano) and Abigail Burrows (flute).

Good night, everyone.

Adrian Boynton