On Thursday 17th October, we were delighted to host Margaret Fingerhut, internationally acclaimed pianist,  at the Wesley Church Centre in Chester.

Margaret is performing across the UK to raise awareness of refugee needs and to collect funds for City of Sanctuary groups – she hopes to raise £88,000 in total, £1000 for each piano key! The concert was an enthralling combination of piano pieces interspersed with spoken interludes where Margaret told us about the composers who were refugees due to war or persecution or  who migrated for their work. She spoke of their reasons for moving, their feelings about this and of the positive contribution they made to these countries. Included were pieces by Chopin, Grieg, Handel, Haydn, Prokofiev and Rachmaninov. Margaret had also commissioned Arian, a Kurdish Syrian composer who wrote the Refugee National Anthem for the Olympic Games in 2016, and she played his beautiful piece at the concert. The composition, ‘Memories from my land’, can be downloaded, with proceeds going to the National City of Sanctuary Charity. For further information please follow the link to Margarets website:

https://www.margaretfingerhut.co.uk 

After the interval, we had two Chester based performances – firstly a viewing of ‘Walk my Journey’ a short film by a Chester based ‘Theatre in the Quarter’ and local school children, and then Nikki Bennet, previous ‘Poet in Residence’ at Chester Cathedral, read her poem ‘No-one, someone, everyone’ written after she attended this years ‘Refugee Week’ activities. You can read a copy of the poem on this website.

This concert was our first fundraising event and was a great success with 93 people attending and donations from others who unfortunately could not make the concert. We would like to thank the Wesley Centre for all their help and advise, the ‘Walk my Journey’ team, Nickki Bennett and especially Margaret Fingerhut whose passion and  drive are an inspiration.