Embark on a remarkable journey through time with the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra as they celebrate the timeless legacies of Bach, Mendelssohn, and beyond. This eclectic series of events spans scholarly discussions, dynamic performances, and enchanting concerts, all designed to captivate the hearts and minds of classical music enthusiasts. From the insightful exploration of Bach and Mendelssohn's profound connections to the evocative performances of Bach's Magnificat and Mendelssohn's Elijah, this celebration of classical genius offers an unmatched experience for music aficionados. Join us as we delve deep into these musical masterpieces, with contributions from world-renowned artists and scholars.

A Symphony of Legacy: From Bach to Rutter with the Oxford Philharmonic

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

The Sheldonian Theatre

Sir John Rutter returns to Oxford for another Christmas celebration in the company of the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra, Merton College Choir and the Choristers of Winchester Cathedral. Sir John's musical fable Brother Heinrich's Christmas forms the centrepiece of a programme that features carols and Christmas music old and new including some of Sir John's own carols, and as ever the audience has the opportunity to sing along with the choir and orchestra in classic Christmas hymns.

Christmas with Sir John Rutter

The performance lasts 30 minutes with a 30 minute Q&A. Víkingur Ólafsson’s recording of original works and piano transcriptions of music by Johann Sebastian Bach was one of the most lauded releases of 2019 and won BBC Music Magazine’s Recording of the Year award. The Icelandic pianist has spent decades finding his own way of playing – and indeed owning – Bach, putting his superlative sense of articulation and evenness of touch in service of the poetry of Bach famous and lesser-known, grand and unassuming. Now the pianist with the colossal following comes to the Sheldonian Theatre presenting his Bach transcriptions that delicately balance the old and new, the familiar and the unexpected.

‘An Hour with Bach’ Conversation with Víkingur Ólafsson

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

The Academy of Ancient Music visit from Cambridge – gleaming trumpets and Music Director Laurence Cummings in tow – joining the Oxford Philharmonic Choir and its soloists for this portrait of Bach both vocal and instrumental, excitable and reflective. We hear music from the festive season 1723/24, including the exuberant Magnificat Bach wrote for Christmas Day and the energetic Cantata he wrote for New Years’ Day. There’s rest for the trumpets in Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3, though here they underpin textures more than tracing the music’s outline. The concert opens with Bach’s motet Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf – almost a concerto for florid eight-part choir.

Bach Magnificat

Explore the fascinating links between two great creative geniuses in this insight day of talks, music and debate. Leading scholars of J.S. Bach and Felix Mendelssohn come together to discuss the links between the composers, their families, and the growing interest in the music of the past. Mendelssohn’s famous revival of Bach’s St Matthew Passion is but one aspect of a compelling story of rediscovery and renewal. The day will include an exclusive presentation of the unique Mendelssohn collection of Bach materials in the Bodleian Library and an opportunity to view the recently acquired autograph of Bach’s Cantata for Ascension Day on display at the Weston Library. Keynote speakers include leading scholars Christoph Wolff, Thomas Schmidt and Benedict Taylor, Michael Maul of the Leipzig Bach Festival, and cultural historians Astrid Köhler, Leanne Langley, and Susan Wollenberg. Bodley librarian Martin Holmes will present the Mendelssohn material. Malcolm Bruno will introduce his newly published edition of the Mendelssohn/Bach St Matthew Passion, with commentary by Peter Ward Jones and Stephen Roe. Pianist-scholar Kenneth Hamilton and Monika Hennemann will illustrate Mendelssohn’s arrangements and travels, and the day will end with a debate about early music performance today. Chaired by Sir Nicholas Kenyon and Katy Hamilton.

Insight Day: From Bach to Mendelssohn

Magdalen College

Explore the fascinating links between two great creative geniuses in this insight day of talks, music and debate. Leading scholars of J.S. Bach and Felix Mendelssohn come together to discuss the links between the composers, their families, and the growing interest in the music of the past. Mendelssohn’s famous revival of Bach’s St Matthew Passion is but one aspect of a compelling story of rediscovery and renewal. The day will include an exclusive presentation of the unique Mendelssohn collection of Bach materials in the Bodleian Library and an opportunity to view the recently acquired autograph of Bach’s Cantata for Ascension Day on display at the Weston Library.

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

On the mighty Dobson organ at Merton College, Bath Abbey organist Huw Williams orients his recital around the last of Bach’s sublime Trio Sonatas – with its Italianate striding Vivace, rocking Lento and rambunctious final Allegro – and the Lutheran chorale Vater unser im Himmelreich, which forms the basis of the last of Mendelssohn’s mighty organ sonatas and Bach’s own canon from the Clavierübung. Completing the programme is Mendelssohn’s Prelude and Fugue in C minor, in which the composer, directly inspired by his hero Bach, laid out his vision for a new contrapuntal music

Huw Williams Organ Recital

Merton College

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

Desperate to find a new job in 1721, Bach wrote a set of instrumental concertos and sent them off to the Margrave of Brandenburg in the hope of getting an offer. Had the Margrave so much as glanced at the score for Six Concertos With Several Instruments Bach had sent him, he might have sensed that the composer had delivered something superlative – the high-point of the composer’s project to expand the language of ensemble instrumental music and to assimilate varied European styles into his own, bettering them in the process. Charismatic harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani is our guide through the delectable smorgasbord that is Bach’s Brandenburgs.

The Brandenburg Concertos

 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

A meteorological musical marvel! Whatever the weather is outside, we have music to match as the Oxford Philharmonic and weather man Alasdair Malloy lead us through sun, rain, wind, snow and storms in search of a harmonious climate. We’ll explore the Colours of the Wind, go Singing in the Rain, and find ourselves well and truly Frozen before we find Another Day of Sun!

FUNomusica Family Concert: Whatever the Weather

Oxford Town Hall

Associate Concertmaster of the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra, Adrian Adlam, joins the orchestra’s Solo Clarinet Laura Ruiz Ferreres and pianist Thomas Hell for a programme of chamber music taking in the serene, the exotic, the groovy and the pugnacious. Both Delius and Schumann appear to search for peace and seclusion in their works for violin and clarinet while Piazzolla turns up the heat in the most grandiose of his tangos. Alexis Ciesla explores the sound of Asian music in his Balinese Moods while all three instruments are united for Bartók’s folk dances in disguise and Milhaud’s sassy reimagining of music originally written for the 1936 film Voyageur sans bagages.

Contrasts

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

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

Mozart’s first concerto, dated 14 April 1773, was for the violin. That charming piece was already broadening the horizons of the form before the composer followed with more during the course of 1775, all filled with the character, comedy, pacing and emotional breadth Mozart was soon to bring to the opera stage. Frequent collaborator of the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra, Maxim Vengerov, comes to the stunning Olivier Hall of St Edward’s School for the joy and melancholy of Mozart’s first three Violin Concertos. He is joined by OPO Concertmaster Carmine Lauri, for a rare chance to hear Mozart’s Concertone for two violins, a fascinating developmental work fusing the baroque concerto grosso style with the latest fashions in symphony and concerto form.

Maxim Vengerov

St Edward's School

The remarkably talented participants of the Oxford Piano Festival receive masterclasses from some of the world’s leading authorities on piano. The repertoire list for the masterclasses will be available to view from 20 July 2024 on our website.

Kathryn Stott Masterclass

St Hilda's College

A true great of the British piano scene makes one last appearance at the Oxford Piano Festival before her well-deserved retirement from the concert stage. Kathryn Stott’s personal programme of Musical Postcards immortalises some of this stalwart pianist’s most treasured relationships – including those with Nadia Boulanger, Carl Vine and Graham Fitkin. In bidding farewell, Kathryn will herself introduce a programme ranging from Bach to Caroline Shaw from the stage. A not-to-be-missed opportunity to hear a uniquely communicative and uncommonly broadminded pianist in recital one last time.

Kathryn Stott

Christ Church Cathedral of Oxford

Stephen Kovacevich Masterclass

Generations of musicians have responded unusually yet fiercely to Domenico Scarlatti’s strangely enigmatic yet crystal-clear piano sonatas – micro-dramas in which musical motifs form the characters, from the villainous and heroic to the lonely and lost. Poulenc described them as ‘my favourite Brut Champagne’. A young colleague of the composer’s talked of Scarlatti’s ‘ingenious jesting with art’. Kevin Chen launches his recital at the University Church with a selection of these intriguing works in the fine company of repertoire staples by Chopin and Schumann, and the most affectionate of Ignaz Moscheles’s vivid set of Étude caractéristique.

Kevin Chen 

University Church of St Mary the Virgin

Marilyn Engle Masterclass

The Festival’s participants take to the stage with fresh guidance from the world’s most esteemed pianists echoing in their ears. Be sure not to miss this showcase of outstanding talent from rising stars of the piano world.

Participant's Recital

Ian Jones Masterclass

Rustem Hayroudinoff Masterclass

Barry Douglas Masterclass

Marios Papadopoulos Masterclass: Directing from the keyboard

Expect ‘playing that verges on the peerless’ (Music Web International) from Armenian-American pianist Sergei Babayan, whose recital at the Holywell Music Room presents a delectable menu of songs without words. Traversing his own transcriptions and those of Rachmaninov, Keith Jarrett and more, Babayan will lead us through the worlds of lieder (Schubert, Hindemith), chanson (Hahn, Bizet) and romance (Rachmaninov, Kreisler) to the Great American Songbook (Gershwin) — all with the apparently effortless lyrical style with which Babayan has made himself indispensable.

Sergei Babayan

Marios Papadopoulos Masterclass

When the power of a solo piano meets the force of a string quartet, the results are truly irresistible. In the atmospheric surroundings of the University Church of St Mary, Barry Douglas and the Carducci Quartet present two of the greatest piano quintets in the repertoire. After Shostakovich in unusually carefree and charming mode comes Brahms’s great chamber music epic. A sense of adventure is hard-wired into the German composer’s F minor Piano Quintet, a work of many faces and tremendous scope, filled with the composer’s characteristic rhythmic verve and thematic sweep.

Barry Douglas and the Carducci Quartet

Ian Fountain Masterclass

William Fong Masterclass

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

Colin Stone Masterclass

Krzysztof Jablonski Masterclass

As ‘the ideal Romantic pianist’ (Limelight), Jayson Gillham is perfectly placed to launch 2024’s Festival with a programme of works by the Romantic pianist–composer par-excellence, Frédéric Chopin. Chopin’s elegance and poetry will be on full display in a menu that pivots on two sets of the composer’s Études. Were these works – lyrical and attention grabbing, impassioned and miraculous – designed to test finger technique or enchant listeners? They do both, as do the big beasts that bookend Gillham’s recital: the pure virtuosity of the composer’s breathless E flat Rondo and the grand heroism and pianistic panache of his A flat Polonaise.

Jayson Gillham

The Oxford Philharmonic returns to St Martin-in-the-Fields for music gleaming and glinting with baroque splendour. The Orchestra’s Solo Horn Radek Baborák leads the Orchestra in some of Handel’s most stately ceremonial works – including both his Water and Fireworks music – and exquisite works by Telemann and Bach.

Handel Fireworks

St Martin-in-the-Fields

Concertmaster Tamás András and members of the Oxford Philharmonic bring you captivating jewels from the musical baroque. From the contemplative beauty of Pachelbel’s Canon and Albinoni’s Adagio, to Vivaldi's exuberant bassoon concerto played by OPO Solo Bassoon Bence Bogányi, to the energetic bustle of music by Vivaldi and Bach in which everyone is a soloist. Be swept away by music which is equal parts passion and precision.

Baroque Jewelry

Love courses through this programme of chamber music delicacies played by two principal string players from the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra, joined by the eminent American pianist Russell Hirshfield. When Shostakovich wrote his first piano trio, he was smitten; his longing for a fellow student peers out from behind the trio’s yearning melodies. ‘You won’t have heard such a beautiful trio from me,’ wrote Brahms to his publisher of his own C major trio, a work that could easily sweep you off your feet. Reena Esmail wrote her own piano trio Saans as a wedding gift for a close friend, while the sublime slowness of Schubert’s nocturne for piano trio could easily accompany a tryst. No less beauteous is Jennifer Higdon’s trio exploring whether colours and their shades can be reflected in music.

Piano Trio Rarities

Alasdair always loves travelling from Scotland to join his friends in the Oxford Philharmonic but this time things don’t go quite to plan and he ends up having the most Incredible Journey! Instead of flying direct, he ends up having a riotous ride on boats, broomsticks, cars, carpets, roads, rails, spaceships, shoes, hooves and a yellow submarine! Fortunately, he has help from classical composers including Rossini, Saint-Saëns and Grieg, and the music from films such as Aladdin, Harry Potter, Moana and Star Wars, but will he get here on time? Don’t miss this exciting adventure in music and motion!

FUNomusica Family Concert: The Incredible Voyage of Alasdair Malloy

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

It was Bach’s six suites for solo cello that alerted twentieth-century ears to the wonders of the composer’s work. This music of the most inward concentration and outward consolation has traversed cultures and genres, forming the subjects of books, films and even animations. Peter Adams, Solo Cello of the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra and the youngest ever professor in the history of London’s Royal Academy of Music, comes to the Holywell Music Room for this traversal of the odd-numbered suites, beginning with the well-known G major Prelude.

Bach Cello Suites Part I

At the stunning new Herman Eule organ in Magdalen College’s chapel, the college’s Informator Choristarum presents a recital exploring the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and its legacy in the works of Mendelssohn. Surrounding the three stern Kyrie preludes from Bach’s Clavierübung, Mark Williams combines the composer’s magnificent A minor Prelude and Fugue and its flurry of pedal solos with the organ music by Mendelssohn that carried forward Bach’s tradition: the third of the Preludes and Fugues with which he set out his stall as an organ composer and the third of his imposing organ sonatas, based on the Lutheran chorale Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir.

Mark Williams Organ Recital

Mats Lidström, Solo Cello of the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra and an internationally known pedagogue and virtuoso, picks up the mantle from his colleague Peter Adams at the Holywell Music Room, completing our traversal of Bach’s solo cello suites with the even-numbered suites. The bouncing Gigue of No. 2 contains the most extended two-part writing of the six, while No. 4 is noted for its pair of almost skeletal Bourrées. The fiendishly difficult sixth and final suite was written for an instrument of five strings and demands extensive hopping across strings as it urges itself forward from a propulsive Prelude.

Bach Cello Suites Part II

On 11 April 1727, Bach’s day-to-day industry delivered what many consider to be his masterpiece: his ‘great passion’ after St Matthew’s Gospel. Bach didn’t generally write for posterity, but even he sensed this piece might outlive him, making special efforts to make his musical telling of Christ’s final days on earth sing with divinity and speak with humanity. The choir of The Queen’s College, Oxford and the boy choristers of Radley College join the Orchestra and handpicked soloists for this performance under Owen Rees of the composition able, in the words of Sir Nicholas Kenyon, ‘to reach beyond sectarianism and even beyond religious observance, to say something to the whole of humanity'.

St Matthew Passion

‘One of the miracles of nineteenth-century music’ is how the music critic Conrad Wilson described Mendelssohn’s Octet for Strings – the vivacious, brilliant and nigh-on perfect work of the 16-year-old composer who had no models to draw on. Soloists of the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra join distinguished alumni from the Morningside Music Bridge Festival for this performance of Mendelssohn’s joyous score, following the second of the composer’s piano trios, which finds the composer at his most impassioned and rhapsodic. *Morningside Music Bridge brings together the finest emerging artists to perform on an international stage and measure themselves against the very best young performers globally.

Mendelssohn Octet

Sir András Schiff has made the music of Bach his own. In a career spanning five decades, the great Hungarian pianist has focused on the music of the composer whom he describes as a ‘great scientist who systematically set new challenges for himself, which he then solved at the highest level possible.’ One such challenge was The Art of Fugue – Bach’s big project to lift the fugal form to new heights just as it was falling from fashion. The result is a work of immense richness, imagination and possibility that a great friend of Oxford, Schiff, will perform at the Sheldonian Theatre.

Sir András Schiff

Recent organ scholar at The Queen’s College, Oxford and one of the instrument’s fast-rising talents, Luke Mitchell wraps up our organ recital series with an all-Bach programme including the three Gloria settings from the composer’s Clavierübung III.

Luke Mitchell ORgan Recital

The Queen’s College Chapel

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

Two things inspired Mendelssohn more than anything else: travel and literature. This concert under Christoph Eschenbach celebrates both, opening with all the magic and mystery of the composer’s overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the play by Shakespeare for which he wrote extensive incidental music, and concluding with the boundless exhilaration and joy of his Italian Symphony, which overflows with the composer’s unique brand of perfected spontaneity. Between them comes the Violin Concerto in E minor from Mendelssohn’s other great love: Bach.

Christoph Eschenbach conducts Bach and Mendelssohn

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

In the summer of 1782, just before marrying, Mozart began work on his Great but incomplete Mass in C minor. Having encountered the masterpieces of Bach and Handel, Mozart began to reappraise his values as a composer. The result was the dark and otherworldly music Mozart completed as the torso of his score—a setting of the Ordinary of the Mass more profound in substance and grand in scale than any he had written before. Sir John Rutter conducts Mozart's monumental Great Mass in C minor, the culmination of a programme that includes the composer’s playful symphony composed during a brief stay in Linz and the Regina coeli, which comprises some of the most sublime music Mozart wrote for the church.

Mozart Great Mass in C Minor

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

It’s all fun and games today as the musicians of the Oxford Philharmonic and Alasdair Malloy open up their tuneful toybox and play music to match the contents. They’ll be bringing favourite toys to life with music and counting down the top ten toys of all time as they go! What do you think they will find in there?

FUNomusica Family Concert: The Tuneful Toy Box

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

Tchaikovsky described his Symphony No. 6 as ‘the best thing I have ever composed or will compose.’ It presents the culmination of the composer’s thoughts on life and love, subjects on which this tortured individual had plenty to say, while leading a symphony orchestra to bear its soul and casting a spell on audiences like no other symphony of its era. Andrew Litton conducts this pivotal symphony, having navigated the stormy waters of Wagner’s Prelude to The Flying Dutchman, and is joined by the Orchestra’s Solo Cello Mats Lidström in the performance of his own concerto marking the centenary of the birth of Robert F Kennedy.

Tchaikovsky Pathétique

One of Britain’s genuine musical heroes, John Lubbock leads the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra in a celebration of the genius of a composer with close links to the city and university, Joseph Haydn. Bookending the programme are the Austrian composer’s unremitting symphony on Christ’s passion and the celebratory work he conducted himself at the Sheldonian Theatre on receiving his honorary doctorate here, the ‘Oxford’ Symphony. Alongside the composer’s gleaming trumpet concerto, we hear John’s own arrangements of intriguing salutes to Haydn by composers from another time and territory: Debussy and Ravel.

Haydn ‘Oxford’ Symphony

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.

Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra

Jan 11, 2025

Piano Trio Rarities

Jan 19, 2025

FUNomusica Family Concert: The Incredible Voyage of Alasdair Malloy

Jan 25, 2025

Verdi Requiem

23 - 24 Feb, 2025

Martha Argerich

Feb 28, 2025

Bach Cello Suites Part I

Dec 20, 2024

Happy Birthday Marios

Dec 12, 2024

Christmas with Sir John Rutter

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