Hailed as a successor to Kissin and Sokolov, Dmitry Ishkhanov comes to the Oxford Piano Festival bringing with him the Russian repertoire with which he is rapidly making his name around the world. Taking on the firepower and character of the symphony orchestra in Rachmaninov’s fiendish Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, he is sure to set out his stall in style. Marios Papadopoulos and the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra complete the programme with sparkling Rossini and Tchaikovsky’s most heart-on-sleeve symphony.

Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini

The Sheldonian Theatre

Emerging talent from the University of Oxford is to the fore in this concert showcasing the winner of the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra’s Senior Concerto Competition and the world premiere of a piece presented in our 2024 Composers' Workshop. Alessandro MacKinnon-Botti is both composer and soloist in his Voice-Leading for beatboxer and orchestra, while Isobel Neary-Adams plays Walton’s dark, excitable, lyrical and quick-witted viola concerto. Having opened with Glinka’s sprightly Ruslan and Ludmilla Overture, joined by a cohort of Side-by-Side alumni, the concert concludes with Tchaikovsky’s symphonic expression of hope in the face of adversity, his luminous Symphony No. 5 Supported by the University of Oxford in celebration of the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra’s Silver Jubilee.

Tchaikovsky Five

Music would never be the same after Igor Stravinsky unleashed The Firebird in 1910 – a ballet score that would herald the pictorial powers with which the composer would shock and enchant generations of theatregoers. Stravinsky found the perfect subject matter in the collision of the evil magician Kaschchei with the just and irrepressible Firebird. The suite of music from the ballet ends in an infernal dance ripe for Stravinsky’s own brand of violent syncopation. Marios Papadopoulos conducts it here, alongside wickedly entertaining music from Saint-Saëns, and an atmospheric mountain climb from Mussorgsky. The concert is complete with the virtuosic and lyrical concerto for violin and viola by Alexey Shor, our Composer-in-Residence, highlighting the instruments’ poetic qualities while seamlessly blending their technical brilliance and emotional depth.

The Firebird

 and Choir at the Sheldonian Theatre for a performance of Bach’s monumental Mass in B minor. In the late 1740s, Bach returned to two movements of the Latin Mass written a decade and a half earlier, expanding them into what many consider his towering achievement. The B minor Mass would prove the culmination of the composer’s work in sacred music, establishing new ways of organising sounds, words, harmonies and keys while creating the most epic of journeys in faith and music.

Bach Mass in B Minor

It was Felix Mendelssohn who brought Bach back into currency in nineteenth-century Germany. In addition to reviving countless works by his Leipzig forebear, Mendelssohn made his own arrangements, including his expanding of the poised calligraphy of Bach’s Partitas for solo violin. This performance of two of Mendelssohn’s most effective transcriptions is capped by the composer’s own Piano Trio No. 1, a joyous conversation for violin, cello and piano in which the thunderously dramatic alternates with the gently elegiac.

Mendelssohn Piano Trio

Wadham College

Wandering the streets of Edinburgh and rambling the hillsides of the Hebrides in 1829, Mendelssohn was overcome. Nothing, apparently, had prepared him for the impact of the dramatic Caledonian coastline and imposing capital. Mendelssohn’s splendid symphonic souvenir of Scotland moves from dark standing stones to Scottish folk tunes across forty minutes of free-flowing, rugged musical brilliance. Marios Papadopoulos conducts it here after the sea-spray of the composer’s Hebrides Overture and the passionate G minor Piano Concerto under the agile fingers of Nuron Mukumi, alumnus of the Oxford Piano Festival.

Mendelssohn Scottish Symphony

Premiered in Birmingham, a German oratorio with a Christian soul composed by a practicing Lutheran from a famously Jewish family, Elijah is the consummate work of bridge-building, understanding and reconciliation. ‘I was able to sway at will the enormous mass of orchestra, choir and organ’ wrote Mendelssohn from the West Midlands back to Leipzig as he reported on preparations for the oratorio examining the Old Testament figure of Elijah, a ground-shaking and inspiring monument to the nobility of faith. Sir Bryn Terfel is Elijah in this performance at the Sheldonian Theatre uniting soloists, the Crouch End Festival Chorus and the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestr

Mendelssohn's Elijah

Music Director Marios Papadopoulos" class="css-u850">Marios Papadopoulos celebrates a landmark occasion as soloist in Brahms’s Piano Concerto in B flat major and conductor in the same composer’s Symphony No. 4. Brahms wrote the second of his concertos at the ripest moment of his productivity, apparently able to animate any possible musical idea and to blend beauty with ferocity and drama with intimacy. Rising star Michael Papadopoulos, makes his debut as conductor with the Oxford Philharmonic to provide an accompaniment of symphonic proportions to this, the grandest of piano concertos of the Romantic era. After the interval, Marios Papadopoulos steps on the podium to conduct Brahms’s Apollonian final symphony – a work conceived as a retreat from the world that reflects on the composer’s lifelong servitude and his luminous acceptance of the end of his creative and mortal lives.

Happy Birthday Marios

There is no more dramatic setting of the Requiem Mass in the repertory than Giuseppe Verdi’s, written to commemorate friends but giving full voice to the composer’s theatrical instincts and vivid response to religious imagery and poetry. World-class soloists and the massed voices of the Crouch End Festival Chorus gather at the Sheldonian Theatre for this performance of Verdi’s soul-stirring work of awe and redemption, often referred to as ‘an opera in disguise’, with the full force of the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra and its Music Director, Marios Papadopoulos.


Verdi Requiem

The great Martha Argerich returns to the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra as a concerto soloist, in Beethoven's Second Piano Concerto, surrounded surrounded in this programme by orchestral music of brilliance and drama. Samuel ColeridgeTaylor’s Ballade promises a wild ride: its energy and urgency will make any audience sit up and listen. To close, Marios Papadopoulos conducts Tchaikovsky’s great symphonic tussle with fate. In his red-blooded Symphony No. 4, the composer who always wore his heart on his sleeve manages to mine the consolation of hope from the turmoil of tragedy and despair, creating a live music experience like no other.

Martha Argerich

Following sensational concerts in Oxford and Germany last season, Martha Argerich returns to perform with the Oxford Philharmonic with concerts in both Oxford and London.

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Martha Argerich with the Oxford Philharmonic

Barbican Centre

After its pious opening, Mendelssohn’s ‘Reformation’ Symphony explodes into a declaration of faith and equality – an image of the Lutheran Reformation as one of fortitude, industry, democratisation and joy, all of which permeate the composer’s best-kept symphonic secret. Before the embracing energy of Mendelssohn’s symphony comes the composer’s supremely elegant Violin Concerto in the sensitive hands of Antje Weithaas and music by Mendelssohn’s beloved Bach: the standout Orchestral Suite No. 2, with its modish flute solos.

Mendelssohn Violin Concerto

Winner of the Concerto Prize at the 2024 BBC Music Magazine Awards, Bomsori Kim brings her virtuosic storytelling to two spellbinding violin works distilled from great operas: Waxman’s famous Carmen Fantasy and Wieniawski’s wickedly entertaining fantasy on themes from Gounod’s Faust. Complementing these performances, Marios Papadopoulos conducts Humperdinck’s glowing prelude to Hänsel and Gretel and Dvořák’s thrilling Symphony No. 8, a supreme marriage of immediacy and architectural brilliance.

Dvořák Eight

Mahler’s symphonies are his spiritual autobiographies, laying out his experiences and suffering for all to hear. His strikingly confident Symphony No. 1 of 1889 is cast in two parts: first the optimism and energy of youth; then the crisis of rejection and death. Yet Mahler’s symphony powers towards an exultant conclusion, overtly popular in style and imbued with a new confidence – the confidence of life itself. Marios Papadopoulos conducts Mahler’s Titanic symphony here after the world premiere of Sisyphus by University of Oxford and OPO Composers' Workshop alumnus Marcello Palazzo and another work from our Composer-in-Residence Alexey Shor: with unexpected twists in its traditional structure, Shor’s Piano Concerto No. 1 blends nostalgia and exhilaration, and features the remarkable soloist Behzod Abduraimov.

Mahler One

Oxford Town Hall

Marios Papadopoulos takes the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra through the momentous symphonic dance that is Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, a work whose pounding, marching and pirouetting permanently realigned western music’s fundamental relationship between rhythm and harmony. Another of our own musicians, Concertmaster Carmine Lauri, is the soloist in the most lyrical and operatic violin concerto by the great guru of virtuosity, Niccolò Paganini, a work that will fill the Sheldonian Theatre with rococo elegance. To open, all the ferocity and impact of one of Beethoven’s most striking orchestral overtures, ‘Coriolan’.

Beethoven Seven

Angela Gheorghiu, one of the most glamorous and gifted opera singers of our time, returns to perform with the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra to close the season at the Sheldonian Theatre. Together, they will celebrate a composer to whom she has dedicated a lifetime: Puccini. After landmark appearances as his heroines Tosca and Madama Butterfly on the world’s greatest opera stages, Gheorghiu performs the most beloved arias from Puccini’s operas, while the orchestra brings its storytelling talents to bear in enchanting overtures and tragic intermezzos from favourite operas and operettas.

Marios Papadopoulos

Events

Upcoming events

Oct 19, 2024

Tchaikovsky Five · Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra

Oct 31, 2024

The Firebird · Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra

Nov 21, 2024

Bach Mass in B Minor · Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra

Nov 23, 2024

Mendelssohn Piano Trio · Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra

Nov 29, 2024

Mendelssohn Scottish Symphony · Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra

Past events

Jul 28, 2024

Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini · Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra

Future and recently performed repertoire

Conductor in Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini by Rachmaninoff

Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra

Conductor in Symphony No. 4 by Tchaikovsky

Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra

Conductor in Symphony No. 3 in A Minor, Scottish by

Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra

Conductor in Overture to William Tell by Rossini

Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra

Conductor in Hebrides Overture by

Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra

Conductor in Mass in B minor by

Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra

About

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