{"id":16521,"date":"2023-09-12T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-09-12T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/?p=16521"},"modified":"2023-09-05T20:05:26","modified_gmt":"2023-09-05T19:05:26","slug":"oxford-chamber-music-festival-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/2023\/09\/12\/oxford-chamber-music-festival-2023\/","title":{"rendered":"OXFORD CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Events: October 4th to 7th<\/sup>  2023<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

OXFORD CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

preview by Norman Warwick<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oxford Chamber Music Festival (OCMF) acknowledges the continued support of its loyal audience members and look forward to seeing you at their concerts again next month at this year\u00b4s festival events..<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All ticket booking can be made on line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

OCMF will host a special reception on the 4th October for its Friends and Sponsors. <\/strong>If you would like to join them, please consider signing up as a Friend and being a vital part of making the festival possible<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you would like to buy a Festival Pass, please add all the individual concert tickets to your basket – the \u00a356 discount will then be automatically applied. This year as a Pass Holder you will receive priority access ahead of the individual ticket holders and be able to enter the venue first to choose your seats. We would ask you to arrive 5 minutes before door opening time (always half an hour before the concert start time) to join the Festival Pass Holder queue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

OCMF cannot wait to welcome its beloved artists to Oxford and to hear their electrifying performances! Their full biographies will be listed on the OCMF website next week, and featured in our mailings and social posts between now and the festival. musicians Aappearing will include<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Violin, <\/strong>Tetiana Lutsyk and  Priya Mitchell, with Viola played by <\/strong>Sascha Bota, whilst On Cello there are J<\/strong>ulian Arp and Claude Frochaux<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Playing Double bass will be <\/strong>Misha Mullov-Abbado and Jordi Carrasco Hjelm and at the piano will be Polina Leschenko, Heini K\u00e4rkk\u00e4inen and Julius Drake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mezzo Soprano is <\/strong>Dorottya L\u00e1ng and the singer with the violin is Alice Zawadzki. Playing the Clarinet  will be <\/strong>Reto Bieri.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prfiya Mitchell, Artistic Director of the Festival says,   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oxford is my home town and I have a deep attachment to the roots and spirit of the festival which I started here in 2000.
It has evolved and grown in to something that our loyal audiences love and cherish and where there is a real sense of musical home coming.  Each festival and celebration of chamber music has its own unique dynamic and I think OCMF\u2019s emanates just as much from the musicians as the atmosphere of Oxford\u2019s extraordinary surroundings and rich historic context.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It always surprises and sparks a collaborative creative havoc bringing together a beautiful meeting of hearts, minds and souls<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Please come and share this incomparable alchemy:
Music + Oxford!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

OCMF has previousl\u00f1y been labeled a \u201ca musical miracle\u201dby the Daily Telegraph<\/em>; It has actually been labeled \u201cworld-class by any standards\u201d Time Out<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This year\u2019s festival, under the umbredlla title of Friegeist  celebrates  the free  spirits and untamed hearts to which tghat word refers, in unpredictable music that refuses to play by the rules. Join us to journey through unique soundscapes, through extremes of heartache and ecstasy, in music of wild energy and mystical intensity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The featured artist is Julian Arp, whose photographs featured in the festival programmes. He is also performing as a cellist in the festival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

OCMF opens this year on 4th<\/sup> October with a reception and gathering  of Friends at  the Vaults And Garden Caf\u00e9 from 6.30 to 7.30 pm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Claire de Lune concert, generously sponsored by Robin Swailles will then commence at 8.00 pm in The Holywell Music Room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just as the moon influences the tides, it has long been blamed for wayward human behaviour, especially in love. Our opening concert this year reaches for the moon in glorious songs by Schumann and Schubert, thinking of distant lovers; Faur\u00e9 and Reynaldo Hahn evoking the same exquisite moonlit wood; Henry Mancini\u2019s \u2018dream maker and heart breaker\u2019; and Faur\u00e9 again, observing human fickleness under the light of the moon. The songs are framed by P\u00e4rt\u2019s meditation on the famous Moonlight sonata; Debussy\u2019s unforgettable translation of moonlight (\u2018clair de lune\u2019) into sound; and Chopin\u2019s ultimate romantic nocturne.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The following day, Thursday 5th<\/sup> October we might then experience the dark side of he moon when we take in a reciotal called Madness (left),<\/em><\/strong> again in The Holywell Room , starting at 1.00 pm. This includes Vivaldi\u2019s scorching treatment of an eighteenth-century \u2018standard\u2019 \u2013\u00a0La Folia<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 is the baroque equivalent of hot jazz, and Piazzolla\u2019s devilish and angelic tangos are marinated in the same fiery spirit. In between we have the subtle, complex jazz style of Gershwin (including the immortal\u00a0Summertime<\/em>) and Stravinsky\u2019s dry, ironic tale of a poor fiddle-playing soldier\u2019s temptation by a very suave devil.\u00a0Wealth untold! A princess bride! \u2013 if you give me your violin\u2026<\/em>\u00a0It would be madness to resist!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later the same day, at 7.30 pm in hte same venue,, a concert entitled Songs Of Freedom will be delivered. Thi is Dedicated to the memory of very dear friends and great music lovers \u2013 most generous and always steadfast in their support of the festival \u2013 Sir Oliver and Lady Phoebe Scott<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alice Zawadzki is a vocalist, violinist, songwriter and composer loosely connected to the jazz scene but described as \u201ca genuine original\u201d by The Guardian<\/em>. With bassist, improviser and composer Misha Mullov-Abbado she has recorded her latest album for new-music label ECM, and here they explore Sephardic and Mediterranean songs of freedom. Dvo\u0159\u00e1k\u2019s exuberant piano quintet, filled with life and colour, centres on a gorgeous dumka<\/em> \u2013 a form based on the epic ballads written to demand national freedom for nineteenth-century Ukraine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Friday 6th<\/sup> October  you can set free your Gypsy Heart at SJE Arts, Impulsive, flamboyant and soulful, Gypsy music and musicians have been the toast of central Europe for centuries. So addictive was their style that Haydn could not resist putting a gypsy rondo into an otherwise delicate piano trio. Later, Dvo\u0159\u00e1k\u2019s Gypsy songs \u2013 including Songs my mother taught me<\/em> \u2013 passionately declared both freedom and music to be basic human needs. In between, Brahms \u2013 who soaked up the music from his friend the gypsy violinist Remenyi \u2013 had worldwide hits with his Hungarian Dances, and took the style to incandescent heights in the wild finale of his piano quartet. Haydn and Brahms are on the programme as well as some favourite pieces of mine from Dvorak<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the evening, at 6.45 pm in the same venue you can see a oncert generously sponsored by James Malcomson.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

.Interestingly entitled Angelic, Demonic, Prophetic, this concert delivers <\/em>Three extraordinary sound-worlds collide. Schnittke\u2019s sonata (presented again by popular demand after July\u2019s launch concert) mixes deep mystery, madcap energy, brutality and beauty (and even a touch of boogie-woogie?); the Arensky, with its rich two-cello sound and its justly-famous variations on a Tchaikovsky tune, enters the incense-laden Orthodox church with its mystical chants; while Messiaen\u2019s Quartet, written in the hell of a Nazi prison camp, truly is the music of divine revelations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A littler later,\u00a0 \u00a0across the way in Convocation House in The Bodlein Library, at 9.30 pm you can hear Free Spirits (right.)<\/em><\/strong> Actually, six rare spirits will join us tonight in the seventeenth-century inner sanctum of Oxford University. Two are dedicatees of these pieces \u2013 Mozart\u2019s incomparable clarinettist Anton Stadler, and the musical philosopher (and mushroom expert) John Cage. Our 2017 composer-in-residence, the celebrated Latvian\u00a0P\u0113teris Vasks, has written that very rare thing: a great double-bass solo. Kurt\u00e1g\u2019s supremely distilled music is unlike anyone else\u2019s; Berio wrote much of the most vivid, original, yet approachable music of the late twentieth century. And for emotional insight and intensity, Mozart\u2019s quintet has few peers in any century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At 1.00 pm on Saturday 7th<\/sup> October, we are once again in the Holywell Room, to feel The Power of Love. Whether or not Wagner and Mathilde Wesendonck had an affair under the noses of their respective spouses, there was certainly a raging mutual attraction. The songs he made from her poems led directly to the explosive passion of his masterpiece, Tristan and Isolde<\/em>. Around the songs, we hear two more utterly unmistakeable voices: Poulenc, in his moving and dazzling tribute to fellow-composer Honegger; and Rachmaninov, in the epic cello sonata he wrote immediately after his second piano concerto conquered the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At 7.30 pm you can revel in being u untamed, in that same venue. <\/em>To close OCMF for 2023 festival, we explore  startlingly vivid fantasies by three of the great romantics. Schumann\u2019s mercurial clarinet pieces swerve between melancholy, optimistic playfulness, and almost frenzied passion, ending in triumph. Beethoven\u2019s extraordinary \u2018Ghost\u2019 slow movement evokes the chilly horror of Macbeth\u2019s meeting with the witches; and the fourteen-year-old genius, Mendelssohn, mashes together Baroque habits, Beethoven\u2019s structure, and tender Romantic feeling to produce something exhilaratingly new.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That sounds like one heck of a great festival, so if you might be in the area from 4th<\/sup> to 7th<\/sup> October 2023 why not rush, right now to their on line booking sight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Each festival and celebration of chamber music has its own unique dynamic and I think OCMF\u2019s emanates just as much from the musicians as the atmosphere of Oxford\u2019s extraordinary surroundings and rich historic context.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16526,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71,45,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture-and-tradition","category-music","category-performing-arts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16521"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16527,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16521\/revisions\/16527"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}