Like love and faith, benign enchantment by music and poetry calms the breath. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor insists that art is no mere treat or diversion. “I may prefer vanilla ice cream to strawberry”, he says, “but I must have air to breathe. Is listening to Beethoven more like preferring vanilla ice cream or more like needing to breathe?”

This concert’s composers and poets created sounds and words capable of enchantment. Anxiety ends up on the ropes in their wake. Music and poetry move the mountains of thought we condemn ourselves to climb. Each of our composers and poets stepped up to the plate, outstared the nightmare, wrestled with their fear, and wrote it all down.

When we were first thinking about Reflecting Deeply, Robin Rubenstein wrote: “I love the idea of exploring the response of writers and composers to the “big stuff”: change, uncertainty, war, exile, and its relevance to our present plight”.

The result, I think, can certainly help to de-plight it. It already did at its premiere performance in Primrose Hill, North London on 23 November 2024, to go by the audience’s response on the night and below.

I put up W H Auden, John Donne, Dante’s Inferno, Adrienne Rich, Emily Dickinson, Anna Akhmatova, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Guillaume Apollinaire, Matthew Arnold, and Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament. Robin came up with Chopin, Byrd, Beethoven, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Bartok, Georges Antheil and late Schubert. Then we paired them.

PROGRAMME (music and poem titles will be revealed on the night)

Matthew Arnold

Frederic Chopin

W H Auden

Dante Alighieri

Bela Bartok

Louis MacNeice

Adrienne Rich

Sergei Prokofiev

Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven

INTERVAL

John Donne

William Byrd

Anna Akhmatova

Dmitri Shostakovich

Guillaume Apollinaire              

Georges Antheil      

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Matthew Arnold

Emily Dickinson

Franz Schubert

I am an American pianist, long resident in London, and this autumn Graham spent two months in New York and Nebraska where he experienced the build up and aftermath of the US Election”.

Robin Rubenstein

Robin Rubenstein was born in Los Angeles, California. After receiving her BA in Music from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, she trained at the Royal College of Music, London, with pianists John Lill and Bernard Roberts and harpsichordist Ruth Dyson. She has performed as solo pianist and chamber musician in Europe and the US including broadcasts on BBC Radio 3 and KPFA Radio in San Francisco. Over the years she has specialised in the piano duet and 2-piano repertoire and is one half of the Rubenstein Hartung Duo along with fellow pianist Victoria Hartung.  She taught in the Royal Academy and Royal College of Music Junior Departments and has given piano and Alexander Technique workshops at the Royal College of Music. Robin lives in North London and combines her career as a pianist with that of teaching the Alexander Technique and Lam Style T’ai Chi and Chi Kung.

Graham Fawcett

Click on the About Graham tab at the top of the page to the right.

“Worry often gives a small thing a big shadow.” (Swedish proverb)

TESTIMONIALS 

“Saturday’s concert has been resonating throughout the week. You and Robin combined forces – and particularly sensibilities – to create a thought-provoking and beautifully crafted programme of words and music, immaculately timed and delivered, and a bit of perspective, a chance to reflect in these distracted times on what matters.  The Schubert movement at the end was like prayer. And left us – as in this text from Christopher Smart which I embroidered for Peter many years ago – with “a remarkable stillness and serenity of soul”. Thank you both so very much. (Romee Day, London)

I so enjoyed it all.  It was clear that huge thought and passion had gone into the choices both of the music and the poetry.    The microphone was still not quite powerful enough I thought, but he read beautifully and without exaggeration.  I shall look up all sorts of things and read and listen again. I seriously thought it would make a fabulous Radio 3 programme.  I would happily try to promote it as an idea.  And the Schubert was so special.  Thank you so much. (Georgina Hardie, London)

Your concert was wonderful. I hadn’t realised how much I needed it!  I think you should take it on tour! It was too good to be just a one-off. (Susan Roebuck, London)

TESTIMONIAL IN ADVANCE

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“Everything you say resonates massively with me and I congratulate you and Robin for putting on an evening and a programme that is so deeply meaningful. I don’t want to miss it”. (Irena Hill, Greenwich)