Name: Tosca
Start: 2026-09-26T19:00:00
Location: New Theatre Oxford

Colin Judson

Carmen Giannattasio

Bryn Terfel

Blaise Malaba

Saimir Pirgu

Marios Papadopoulos

Jamie Woollard

Robert Winslade Anderson

Fabio Previati

Misha Gerko

Anthony Lamble

P Burton-Morgan

Mark Jonathan

Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra

Join the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra alongside international opera stars for the brand-new, fully-staged production of Oxford International Opera, where we will bring Puccini’s Tosca to the stage of the New Theatre in Oxford. Featuring internationally renowned opera singers such as Sir Bryn Terfel, Carmen Giannattasio and Saimir Pirgu, the Oxford Philharmonic will be the fourth protagonist and extra voice on the stage.

Tosca

New Theatre Oxford

No country’s music embodies a pastoral spirit quite like England’s, and no piece quite enshrines that idea like Vaughan Williams’s image of countryside serenity rendered in the most lyrical music imaginable, The Lark Ascending. Doyen of English music and former Music Director of English National Opera, Martyn Brabbins opens our symphonic season at the Sheldonian Theatre with works that portray dark clouds above green fields, including deeply moving music by composers killed at the front during the First World War. A concert that speaks of tragedy but also of comradeship includes Roderick Williams’s flute concerto, written for his childhood friend and our own Solo Flute, Anthony Robb.

English Melodies

University of Oxford

It’s Halloween! Disguise yourself in a spooky manner and come along to join our Master of the Ghostly Revels, Alasdair Malloy, who will introduce music guaranteed to give you goosebumps. You will hear the spooktacular Oxford Philharmonic perform mysterious music about witches, ghosts, vampires, ghouls and gnomes and you will go dancing with the Devil in a special story version of Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre. We will need help from the Ghostbusters!

FUNomusica Family Concert: Halloween Spooktacular

St Edward's School

An evening of music framed by Elgar, the composer who has captured the essence of England in music more resonantly than any other. Elgar’s Sospiri is a love-sick Adagio while his Symphony No. 1 appears to carry the hopes of a troubled nation in music of deep longing and optimism. As the composer who has inherited Elgar’s mantle in England, Thomas Adès also conducts his own Dawn – an intense meditation on cycles of time, light and renewal and a masterpiece in miniature. In this concert, it forms the missing link before Kurtág’s Movement for Viola and Orchestra – a grippingly physical opening to a full concerto, the rest of which was scrapped.

Thomas Adès conducts

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

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.