Oxford Chamber Music Festival 2021

The Oxford Chamber Music Festival 2021 takes flight with two of the greatest song-cycles of all, separated by Arvo Pärt’s remarkable setting of Robbie Burns: so ‘simple’, yet haunting and unforgettable.

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A transcendental flight of the imagination around the world, in which great improvising musicians welcome singer Nicki Wells, with her amazing global array of vocal techniques and styles, and Adrian Freedman on the Japanese shakuhachi, to connect far-flung peoples and cultures, and celebrate our common humanity.

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Even two hundred years on, Beethoven’s late piano sonatas are still unique portraits of the human spirit in all its facets: childlike, earthy, ecstatic, comical, suffering, and surviving, as at the end of op110. Stephen Kovacevich is one of their greatest interpreters.

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This workshop will encourage participants to create new ‘experimental readings’ of Emily Dickinson’s work by merging fragments of selected poems with lyrics from various songs found in her piano bench. Followed by a c. 30-minute performance featuring musical performance and video projection.

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Here is music that attempts to reconcile different spiritual worldviews – from the Hebraic chants used by Ravel and Bloch, to the impassioned fervour of a Russian mystic in Silouan’s Song, the childlike simplicity of Janacek’s carol – and to build a bridge to an all-encompassing spirituality in the Beatles’ late, great song.

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This is the compelling story of the growth of a great mind, in three snapshots from Beethoven’s epoch-making series of string quartets. The young man’s passionate adagio, based on Romeo and Juliet, is overtaken just eight years later by a revolutionary genius leaving his contemporaries far behind, exploring the mysterious spaces between harmonies.

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Six different musical routes to free your mind from everyday concerns: Beethoven’s famous hypnotic triplets; Arvo Pärt mirroring Beethoven’s ripples; Pēteris Vasks reaching towards heaven; Pablo Casals communing with nature; Olivier Messiaen’s ecstatic contemplation of the ‘end of time’; and Johann Sebastian Bach’s unsurpassable masterpiece.

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At the end of his life, like Bach with his transcendent Goldberg variations, Beethoven wrote his own ultimate piano masterwork to rival the Goldbergs. Unlike Bach with his heartstopping Aria, Beethoven took on the challenge of turning the ridiculous into the sublime.

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This Triple concerto requires three great soloists, so it is rarely played – but for a festival like Oxford Chamber Music Festival 2021, with its community of artists, it’s a treat for players and audience alike, and a fitting climax to the week.

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