What is ‘Young Talent in Oxford’?
Oxfordshire’s professional symphony orchestra, Oxford Philomusica, and the Oxfordshire County Music Service have combined their skills and expertise to provide opportunities that are essential to a musician’s overall development, giving you the chance to experience high-level orchestral playing, as well as solo and chamber music performance.
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It was a fantastic week at this year’s Philomusica Piano Festival. A week that I particularly look forward to every year, as it gives me the chance to acquaint myself with the young talent emerging from our conservatoires and from amongst the most gifted around the world. There were certainly no let downs: the standard of participating students was extremely high.
Despite the flair and innate musicality shown by all of them, there is one aspect of music-making that often disappoints me and one that our conservatoires need to address urgently; that is the inability of pianists, or other instrumentalists for that matter, to play a real legato and to sustain. I often hear teachers or conductors demand, sometimes obsessively, that the music flows. Slow tempi are often regarded as preventing the flow of the music. How wrong! Instead of encouraging our musicians to “move along”, we should be encouraging them to learn to sustain and maintain the flow of the musical line by truly connecting one note to the other.
‘Schiff stands with perhaps only a handful of pianists in his total achievement of the most severe beauty,” reported the Philadelphia Inquirer after András Schiff had given a concert in the city. The description could apply to Schiff’s recital, given at the end of this year’s Oxford Philomusica International Piano Festival, of which he is the President.
But the first thing that strikes you about Schiff is how matter-of-fact he is. He walks on, bows unostentatiously, sits down, and gets on with it. There is no faffing about with adjustments to his piano stool, or his shirt cuffs. Here it was straight into a delicately poised account of the opening bars of Beethoven’s Moonlight sonata. As the first movement unfolded, however, that “severe beauty” became evident, as Schiff’s left hand brought out solemn, insistent chords. In the later two movements, scrupulous attention to clarity and tempi were particularly noticeable — no wonder Schiff’s performances of Bach’s keyboard works are so widely admired.
His hands hovering high above the keyboard rather like a hawk selecting its prey, pianist Olli Mustonen holds you in a state of suspense before he begins each movement of each piece. In this recital his hands were aloft quite frequently, for he had selected a programme of impressionistic works, each divided into several movements, and each painting a series of different pictures.
First came Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons, a comparative rarity divided into 12 individually descriptive movements, one for each month of the year. Thus January depicts a snug fireside, with the bass line suggesting gently flickering flames, while February moves outdoors for a pre-Lent carnival, its tempo suggesting that the revellers have been spiced up with good shots of vodka. Mustonen’s bright tone and sensitivity to dynamics meant that The Seasons, designed for performance at home, expanded clearly into the large, lively St Mary’s acoustic, although some passages did end up sounding a bit too steely and analytical.
Oxford Philomusica’s annual piano fest is not just for serious pianists hoping to break on to the world stage — it’s for piano lovers everywhere. This is the message organisers are hoping to get across as this year’s festival approaches.
So, even if you’ve never played a note, but love listening to the piano, then the festival is for you.
“You don’t have to be a professional musician, or a participant, or even a piano player, you can just come along to a masterclass or concert or two,” says Julie Peacock, the Oxford Philomusica’s public relations officer. “It’s for local people too — it’s not just for piano specialists.
“What we’re really keen to see is a lot of people coming to the masterclasses,” adds development officer Luke Berryman.
“We really want people to see it as more than just a piano lesson — it’s a unique opportunity to see how these professional performances are fine-tuned.”
Now in its 12th year, the piano festival regularly attracts both participants and established artists of the highest calibre, and Luke believes that this year’s line-up is one of the best yet.
Listen to In Tune on BBC Radio 3, Wednesday 4th August 18.15 to hear all about the Piano Festival with a live performance from Cristina Ortiz.
Sean Rafferty will be interviewing Music Director, Marios Papadopoulos about this year’s Oxford Philomusica International Piano Festival and Summer Academy. This will be followed by a live performance by Cristina Ortiz, who is performing at the Piano Festival the following night.
Thursday 5 August 2010 | Oxford Town Hall, 8pm
CHOPIN Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor
BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 3 in E flat ‘Eroica’
Cristina Ortiz piano | Marios Papadopoulos conductor
It is the passion, spontaneity and allure so characteristic of Cristina Ortiz’s Brazilian cultural heritage, which are central to her music-making. She returns for the fourth time to the festival to appear as soloist with Oxford Philomusica in Chopin’s unmistakably romantic Piano Concerto No. 2.
The programme will be streamed live on the BBC Radio 3 website, and will be available as ‘audio on demand’ for 7 days after the broadcast. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/
Mark Viner, student at the Royal College of Music
It was in 2005 that I first had the pleasure of attending the Oxford Philomusica Piano Festival and have attended ever since, save sadly one occasion due to a recital invitation on the continent which came as a result of friends I had made during my participation at a previous Festival. For me, perhaps the most remarkable feature of the Festival is the tremendous variety of different aspects of the piano which it has to offer – indeed, few Festivals come close. Over the course of the week’s concerts, one may hear the pianist as the virtuoso, as the chamber musician and as the conductor. Equally, the broad choice of a faculty selected from a variety of musical heritages ensures that the Festival’s versatility in terms of concerts is fully matched by the teaching it has to offer. Lastly, the wonderful sense of hospitality at the Festival fully merits mention in this modest résumé of what consistently draws me back year after year. Marios and Anthi Papadopoulos, the driving force behind the Philomusica are both as welcoming to all those who surround them as they are dedicated in their tireless pursuit of artistic excellence.
PLEASE NOTE: Andras Schiff’s masterclass has changed FROM the morning of Sunday 8th TO the afternoon of Friday 6th!
Regrettably András Schiff has had to alter the day of this masterclass at the Piano Festival. Rather than being held on Sunday 8 August it has now been exchanged with Papadopoulos’ masterclass on Friday 6 August afternoon. If you have booked tickets for the original masterclass, they can be exchanged for Schiff’s Friday masterclass or they will be valid for Papadopoulos’ masterclass on Sunday morning.
Please see schedule of events below:
If I had been told one day I would be sitting in the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building watching a piano masterclass, I would have laughed. “Me? Why? I don’t play the piano, or any instrument actually. It would be wasted on me.” Well, that was four years ago, until, to please a friend, I accepted her suggestion to walk with her to St Hilda’s and listen to a one-hour masterclass of the Oxford Philomusica International Piano Festival. When it was over, she had to leave, but I didn’t. I stayed in that room all morning, attending three master classes, and I came back in the afternoon to attend three more. And I came back, on my own, the next day, and the day after.
Ceri Owen, graduate of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and current doctoral musicology student at Oxford University
Like Clare, the enormously prestigious faculty for this year’s Piano Festival attracted me instantly, and the prospect of playing to any of the number of distinguished artists resident in Oxford during this week in August convinced me of the need to apply. Now preparing for the festival, I am working hard at a piece that is relatively new for me, Janacek’s ‘On an Overgrown Path’, a series of short pieces completed by the composer between 1900 and 1911. The challenges presented by this music are complex, and it’s a project that has led me into thinking about sound in a way that has increasingly been informing a host of other music currently in preparation (not least a Bach English Suite, which I also intend to perform during the course). The idea of a week spent immersed in playing to- and listening to a group of widely divergent and highly experienced pianists at this level is fantastic, and with the isolated world of pianism in mind, the social opportunities offered by a course like this are always attractive! But that aside, the chance meetings and hearings potentially afforded by this kind of festival are rich with promise, and while the course is a first for me this year, my sense is that the experience will inspire a level of creative thinking and playing that will reach far beyond the week spent in Oxford. That, at least, is the plan!
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