Name: Víkingur Ólafsson
Start: 2025-07-28T19:30:00
Location: The Sheldonian Theatre

Delve into a rich tapestry of musical events woven by the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra in the summer of 2025. From the regal brilliance of Baroque masterpieces to modern interpretations by distinguished pianists, this festival in the heart of Oxford offers an unforgettable journey through music. Featuring celebrated artists such as Isata Kanneh-Mason and Víkingur Ólafsson, each performance, whether at St Martin-in-the-Fields or the Sheldonian Theatre, promises a deep dive into the emotional and historical narratives of classical music.

Unveiling Baroque Splendor and Pianistic Mastery in Oxford's 2025 Musical Retreat

The Oxford Piano Festival 2025 promises to be an invigorating blend of concerts and masterclasses, spotlighting the talents of world-renowned pianists like Isata Kanneh-Mason, Sophie Pacini, and Víkingur Ólafsson. From the grandeur of Prokofiev to the emotive works of Schumann, this festival offers a rich tapestry of musical experiences. Adding depth to the festival, workshops led by experts like Lydia Connolly will explore the intricacies of a musical career, making this a must-attend event for music enthusiasts and emerging talents alike.

The Oxford Piano Festival 2025: A Celebration of Virtuosity and Mastery

Víkingur Ólafsson

Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra

Marios Papadopoulos conducts his first concert of the season and brings with him one of the most riveting pieces in the history of the symphony – Tchaikovsky’s deeply personal essay on inner demons, the torment of love and the irrepressible strength of the human spirit. María Dueñas, the violinist who seems to have captured the zeitgeist in her performances like none other, joins the Orchestra for the first of Prokofiev’s violin concertos, a work mingling tenderness with biting sarcasm as only Prokofiev could. The concert opens with the breakthrough work by the 23-year-old Doreen Carwithen from 1947, her swashbuckling overture inspired by John Masefield’s novel One Damn Thing After Another.

Tchaikovsky Five

University of Oxford

Soloists of the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra come to the Holywell Music Room for flute-led chamber music that celebrates heritage while also reflecting on loss. English composer Arnold Bax sympathised profoundly with the Irish rebels who rose up against British rule in 1916 and faced terrible consequences. His Elegiac Trio reflects on all that was lost in that episode just as Guy Ropartz’s Prélude, Marine et Chansons enshrines the composer’s love for Brittany. Light and joy come courtesy of Roussel’s bright, compact and melodious Sérénade and a Flute Quartet by Mozart which demands spectacular virtuosity from every instrument.

Mozart, Debussy and Roussel

Wadham College

Not many works change the course of musical history, but Claudio Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 did. This masterpiece straddled the fault-lines separating the austerity of the Renaissance and the dramatic theatricality of the Baroque. It is a grand collection of psalms, motets and sinfonias that can feel as emotional as opera and as eternal as plainsong, while drawing extensively on both. Positioning groups of voices and instruments around its performance space, Monteverdi’s piece provides an immersive musical experience and also a rare one, given its treacherous technical and interpretative challenges. In the galleries of the Sheldonian Theatre, and then in the Basilica Papale di Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, Marios Papadopoulos marshals this most majestic and timeless of sacred works.

Monteverdi Vespers of 1610

Antonín Dvořák was expecting to miss home when he moved from Prague to New York to run America’s first conservatory. What he wasn’t expecting was to be so taken with the spirituals and plantation songs of America that he would fuse them with European traditions to form his symphonic masterpiece. In the end, any residue of sadness in Dvořák’s Symphony ‘from the New World’ is banished by its warmth, drama and spontaneity. Marios Papadopoulos conducts Dvořák’s letter from America here, preceded by Maximilian Hornung performing Alexey Shor’s Cello Concerto No. 3. *This composition was selected to be performed following the OPO’s Composers’ Workshop 2026.

Dvořák Nine

Johann Sebastian Bach was used to writing music for every celebration in the church’s calendar, but to mark Christmas in 1734, he surpassed even himself. Bach conceived an elaborate set of cantatas that would form a journey in music, from the birth of Christ to the adoration of the infant Jesus by the Magi. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio moves from frolicking trumpets, drums and choirs to touching arias, tremendous choruses, operatic ensembles and orchestral interludes. ‘There is no more life-giving, joy-enhancing experience in Bach’s music than a great performance of the Christmas Oratorio’ wrote the composer’s biographer Sir Nicholas Kenyon, words that these performances will set out to prove emphatically. Currently Kapellmeister at Vienna’s Volksoper, conductor Michael Papadopoulos joins the Orchestra with four esteemed vocal soloists and Oxford Philharmonic Choir.

Christmas Oratorio

Leonidas Kavakos joins the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra as both conductor and soloist. To open his concert at the Sheldonian Theatre, Kavakos directs the most intimate and adventurous of Mozart’s violin concertos from the violin before laying down his instrument for Brahms’s culminating work as an orchestral composer. In his final symphony, Brahms poured new wine into old glasses in the most stylish manner imaginable, creating a symphony obsessed with old musical forms that emerges as fresh, virile and emotionally authentic. Kavakos’s own expertise with the masters of classicism is bound to deliver something special in Brahms’s glowing symphony of rebirth and renewal.

Leonidas Kavakos

Benjamin Britten and Sergei Prokofiev were both exiled in America when they wrote the works performed at this concert in the TS Eliot Theatre. Far from home, the British composer produced a time-stilling string quartet of graceful, mellow and humorous pieces. If the two composers sounded guarded in those works, Reynaldo Hahn will appear to burst loose in his piano quintet – a bold, brilliant and big-boned masterpiece of chamber music that comes with an irresistible, impassioned French sweep.

Chamber Music at Merton

Merton College

Two hundred years since the death of Beethoven, there remains no composer who has changed music, art and society so profoundly. In the first of a series of concerts marking the anniversary, Marios Papadopoulos conducts the symphony that expanded the ambition and scale of orchestral music almost overnight – the unstoppable force that is Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’. To open the concert and the series, Marios takes to the piano to play and direct a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 – the piece in whose compelling rhythmic drive and unorthodox harmonic shifts Viennese audiences first sensed that this was a composer who was about to re-write the rules in music of deep humanity and shattering power.

Eroica Symphony

Welcome to The Musical Paintbox, a concert where colours come to life through music. From the gently flowing waters of the Blue Danube and the cheerful adventure of Yellow Submarine to the timeless beauty of Greensleeves, each piece adds a new shade to our musical palette. We also invite you to explore the vibrant scenes of Pictures at an Exhibition, where music paints images as vividly as any artist's brush. Together, these colourful works create a delightful journey of imagination, storytelling, and discovery for audiences of all ages.

FUNomusica Family Concert: The Musical Paintbox

St Edward's School

To mark the beginning of a weekend Symposium on the works of Beethoven, Marios Papadopoulos combines the composer’s most conciliatory piano concerto with his most idyllic symphony. In his Piano Concerto No. 4, Beethoven reimagined the relationship between soloist and orchestra – not with shock and awe, but with gentle conversation and poetic reflection. After Marios plays and directs the concerto from the piano, we hear the symphony in which Beethoven turns away from the great issues of mankind and instead takes his listeners for a restorative walk in the countryside. Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ is both a symphony and a story, and a nature-inspired masterpiece that cannot help but uplift.

Pastoral Symphony

To twenty-first-century ears, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 can feel like the most modern and daring of them all. Anticipating musical developments a hundred years away, it was the first symphonic work to build a journey primarily from rhythmic rather than melodic blocks. No work of the period can match the wild dances, insistent rhythmic propulsion and infectious joy of Beethoven’s Seventh – but one piece from the following century that certainly can, is Ravel’s jazz-infused piano concerto of 120 years later. The legendary Martha Argerich is the soloist in Ravel’s electrifyingly slick and slinky piano concerto after Annie Dutoit-Argerich narrates the greatest musical menagerie of them all, Saint-Saëns’s beastly and enchanting Carnival of the Animals.

Martha Argerich plays Ravel

Writing his Symphony No. 8, Beethoven revelled in the joy of music itself. In this most concise of his later symphonies, Beethoven celebrates all that can be achieved with rhythm, harmony, texture and a whole lot of wit and invention. This charismatic symphony is the perfect companion piece to another score in which Beethoven appears to forget the pressing personal and political issues that so often stormed in his mind. When he met the young virtuoso violinist Franz Clement in 1794, Beethoven was inspired to write a violin concerto that appears to suspend time as it delights in the lyricism of the most delightful of instruments, beautifully played. Legend among violinists Maxim Vengerov returns for this performance at the Olivier Hall at St Edward’s School.

Maxim Vengerov plays Beethoven

Join Víkingur Ólafsson, ‘the new superstar of classical piano’ (the Telegraph), as he returns to the Oxford Piano Festival performing Bach, Beethoven and Schubert. Experience the composers’ timeless genius and emotional breadth, reimagined through the lens of one of today’s most visionary pianists.

Víkingur Ólafsson

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