“Celebrate, Rejoice, Rise Up!” – Johann Sebastian Bach’s Glorious Christmas Oratorio

Wednesday 2nd December 2020

Sandy Burnett

Sandy Burnett’s close relationship with Bach’s music stretches back for decades. Between 1997 and 2010 he directed a complete cycle of Bach’s sacred cantatas in West London.

In this illustrated lecture, he will explore how Bach brings the Christmas story alive in his Weihnachtsoratorium or Christmas Oratorio, written for Lutheran congregations in 1730s Leipzig. An overview of Bach’s life and achievement will precede a close look at this magnificent work which draws on various forms ranging from recitative, arioso, aria, chorale, and instrumental sinfonia through to full-blown choruses infused with the joyous spirit of the dance.

Sandy Burnett has combined a career as a broadcaster on BBC Radio 3 and as music director for the RSC and the National Theatre with lecturing and performing as a double bassist on the London jazz scene.

This lecture was streamed online on Wednesday 2nd December 2020 at 11:00am.

Click here for our January lecture

The Day Parliament Burned Down

Wednesday 4th November 2020

Caroline Shenton

In the early evening of 16th October 1834, to the horror of bystanders, a huge ball of fire exploded through the roof of the Houses of Parliament, creating a blaze so enormous that it could be seen by the King and Queen at Windsor and from stagecoaches on top of the South Downs. In front of hundreds of thousands of witnesses, the great conflagration destroyed Parliament’s glorious old buildings and their contents. No one who witnessed the disaster would ever forget it.

This lecture will take us through the gripping hour-by-hour story of the fire through contemporary depictions of the disaster by Turner, William Heath and others.

Dr Caroline Shenton is an archivist and historian. She was formerly Director of the Parliamentary Archives in London, and before that a senior archivist at the National Archives.

Her book, The Day Parliament Burned Down, won the Political Book of the Year Award in 2013. Its sequel, Mr Barry’s War, about the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster, was a Book of the Year in 2016 for The Daily Telegraph and BBC History Magazine.

This lecture was streamed online on Wednesday 4th November 2020 at 11:00am.

Click here for our December lecture

Banned: Savitsky and the Secret Hoard of Avant-Garde Art

Wednesday 2nd September 2020

Chris Aslan Alexander

Russian Avant-Garde Art flourished during the first thirty years of the 20th Century, but as Stalin rose to power all but Socialist Realist expressions of art were banned. To own anything else was dangerous, and to start collecting it was unthinkable; yet that is exactly what Igor Savitsky did: he amassed the world’s second largest collection of Russian Avant-Garde art.

The remote location of the State Museum of Karakalpakstan, near the south shores of the Aral Sea, meant that Savitsky was able to get away with such subversive activity because even the authorities in Moscow were a little hazy as to where exactly Karakalpakstan was. Savitsky promoted Russian artists sent to Central Asia in exile as well as the first Central Asian artists to paint their own people and landscapes.

Chris spent his childhood in Turkey and in war-torn Beirut. After school he spent two years at sea before studying media and journalism at Leicester. After university he moved to Khiva, a desert oasis in Uzbekistan, where he established a UNESCO workshop reviving fifteenth century carpet designs and embroideries.

After a year in the UK writing A Carpet Ride to Khiva, he spent three years in the Pamirs in Tajikistan, training yak herders to comb their yaks for their cashmere-like down. Next came two years in Kyrgyzstan, living in the world’s largest natural walnut forest and establishing a wood-carving workshop. Chris has recently finished rowing and studying at Oxford, and a curacy at St. Barnabas in North Finchley. He is now taking two years out to focus on writing fiction. As well as lecturing for the Arts Society he leads tours to Central Asia, where a large part of his heart remains.

This lecture was streamed online on Wednesday 2nd September 2020 at 11:00am.

Just before the coronavirus lockdown in March, Chris recorded a YouTube lecture on Soviet Propaganda in Central Asian Monumental Art. This can be viewed by clicking on the following link:

Cotton Pickers and Cosmonauts

Click here for our October lecture

Great Railway Stations: Evoking the Spirit of Romance and Adventure

Wednesday 7th October 2020

Ian Swankie

When we think of St Pancras International or New York Grand Central, we imagine long romantic journeys. They are special places promising excitement and adventure. But there are dozens of other glorious stations in the UK and abroad.

In this lecture we will take a journey around some of the most evocative and splendid of them, looking not only at the magnificence of the architecture and the brilliance of the engineering, but discovering numerous artworks within the stations and examining many depictions of stations in art. These include Claude Monet’s Gare St Lazare and William Powell Frith’s Paddington.

Ian Swankie is a Londoner with a passion for art and architecture. He is a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Art Scholars, an official guide at Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Guildhall Art Gallery and St Paul’s Cathedral, and an active freelance London guide.

This lecture was streamed online on Wednesday 7th October 2020 at 11:00am.

Click here for our November lecture