Timeless themes resonate as Lentfest opens

Archbishop Conti, right, a budding violinist in his youth, and Lentfest players at St Charles in Kelvinside Picture: Stuart Maxwell

Ash Wednesday at St Charles Borromeo in North Kelvinside was the venue for the launch of Lentfest 2010, an annual celebration of faith through art which is organised by the Archdiocese of Glasgow Arts Project (AGAP).
Festival patron Mario Conti, Archbishop of Glasgow, visited St Charles – home to 14 world-famous sculptures by Benno Schotz depicting the Stations of the Cross – to meet some of the performers, composers and writers whose music and words will be heard across Greater Glasgow over the six weeks of Lent.
They include composer James MacMillan, who has written new work for a Laetare Sunday concert in St Columba’s Church, Woodside, on March 14.
Festival director Stephen Callaghan has written a play on the life of St Jean Marie Vanney, the patron saint of priests, which will be performed by AGAP Theatre at 10 venues.
With service a theme of Lentfest, Stephen’s play is a quirky telling of the saint’s life set in Glasgow and narrated by the Devil, using humour and contemporary music to examine the issues faced by those serving in the priesthood today.
Archbishop Conti said: ‘My interest in art goes back to my family and I also had a great privilege of being in Rome as a student. There was so much artistically to inspire me and it always seemed in the best tradition of the church that art was engaged. Much of Western art had its origin in the church and the liturgy of the church, so it’s not us getting onto a bandwagon, it’s us being faithful to our past.
‘It seems to me this (Lentfest) is very pastoral because those who are in the arts are expressing their feelings, their faith. I’m very comfortable with the way this is developing – it’s in its third year now – and there’s a lot of interest from within the Catholic community, where we’ve got a lot of talented people, but also from outside the community, which is what we want to happen.’
Amid the festival’s more conventional musical and choral events, poetry and readings, Lentfest will also stage the UK premier of Dr Steve Davismoon’s sound installation, Towards The Water’s Edge.
Created with thousands of sound samples of water and played to an audience seated inside a pyramid of 16 loudspeakers situated in St Charles, the composer traces the ‘life’ of the River Arno in Tuscany as it passed from its mountain source through Florence and Pisa until it reaches the Mediterranean Sea.
Londoner Steve, a reader in the Ian Tomlin Academy of Music at Edinburgh Napier University, told LOCAL NEWS: ‘I had wanted to chart the life of a river for a variety of reasons. There are so many poetic examples, so many in music of drawing similarities between one’s life journeys and a river.’
Steve’s choice of the Arno was inspired by Guido d’Arezzo, the medieval Benedictine scholar.
‘He pretty much invented music notation for us and he worked on the banks of the Arno … the Arno flows through Florence, which is the birthplace of opera. So, for me it was not just the chance to chart the life of a river but to chart music history.’
Lentfest events run until Sunday, March 28. www.lentfest.co.uk

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