Handel Messiah
Join Marios Papadopoulos and the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir for a Yuletide celebration of celestial joy and human togetherness.
This is my archive..
Enigma Variations
When Edward Elgar started to improvise a little tune at his piano one day, considering how a group of his closest friends might play that tune, he gave birth to one of the greatest masterpieces of English music. The ‘Enigma’ variations are uplifting and resigned,…
Evgeny Kissin
Under the greatest pressure, Shostakovich delivered his most supreme masterpiece. Condemned by the Soviet powers after his satirical opera Lady Macbeth, Shostakovich was ordered to write a symphony rejoicing in Stalin’s reign of terror. The result was a score poetic, sardonic and climactic that ends with a forced smile that…
Elgar Cello Concerto
John Wilson brings his conducting wizardry to bear on some of the British music closest to his heart. Punctuated with buzzing overtures by Vaughan Williams and Sullivan, we hear orchestral pictures of Nelson’s Column, Horse Guards Parade and more from Haydn Wood; a serene interlude from Delius and Eric Coates’s…
Dvořák Eight
In his Symphony No. 8, Antonín Dvořák captured his delight to be alive − his sheer enchantment in the face of existence. Surely the most blissful symphony the Czech composer wrote, it is a work overflowing with joyous fanfares and the beauty of the natural…
Christmas with Sir John Rutter
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…
Christmas with John Rutter
John Rutter returns to Oxford for another Christmas celebration in the company of the Choir of Merton College, with soloists Susannah Hill and Jonathan Brown. Gerald Finzi’s seasonal cantata In terra pax − his last major work − forms the centrepiece of a programme that…
Brahms
Two decades in the making, the first of Johannes Brahms’s symphonies is a powerful drama of heroism and defiance whose journey to victory over torment contains as much intimacy as grandeur. This is a symphonic struggle on Brahms’s own lyrical, melancholy-tinged terms with hints of the delicate nobility that…
Beethoven Seven
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…
Beethoven’s Mass in C major
Beethoven’s primary concern in his radiant Mass in C major was ‘not God or princes, but the human being entering the church.’ A combination of spirituality and humanity can be felt in almost every bar of the piece, which treated the text and sentiments of the Mass as they had…