Oxford International Song Festival reveals first programme following rebrand
Florence Lockheart
Tuesday, August 15, 2023
The newly renamed festival (formerly Oxford Lieder) will run from 13 to 28 October focusing on the theme of ‘Art:Song’
The Oxford International Song Festival will make its return this autumn with two weeks of events exploring the intersection of images, words and music. From 13 to 28 October 2023 the festival will present over 70 events with more than 200 singers, instrumentalists and speakers.
This year’s edition will include the festival’s annual Schubert weekend (21-22 Oct), tracing the composer’s life year by year until the Schubert bicentenary in 2028. The festival will kick off on 13 October with a recital from Dame Sarah Connolly and Dame Imogen Cooper.
Festival artistic director Sholto Kynoch said: ‘This is our 22nd festival, but the first under our new name, as we make the change from Oxford Lieder Festival. Audience members who have been coming for years will see that in many ways little has changed: as well as the great works of Schubert and Schumann, we have a huge breadth of music spanning centuries and in multiple languages, and it is this breadth that is better reflected in our new identity.’
The festival will also feature a range of premieres including The Glass Eye, a new song cycle by associate composer Alex Ho and writer Elayce Ismail; Knight’s Dream, a new work by Héloïse Werner and a new song cycle by Iranian composer Mahdis Golzar Kashani, plus Geoffrey Gordon’s At the round earth’s imagin’d corners and Roxanna Panufnik’s Gallery of Memories.
The festival’s series of Song Connections discussions and lectures will include celebrations of fashion house Yves Saint Laurent, master perfumer Christian Provenzano, and artist, musician and writer Tom Phillips as well as a focus on the Pre-Raphaelites to complement the Ashmolean Museum’s Colour Revolution and an illustrated talk from Professor Philip Ross Bullock tracing Rachmaninoff’s relationship with the Russian countryside.
Emerging talent will be nurtured throughout the festival through 15-minute Emerging Artist slots before six of the evening recitals, designed to give a platform to young professionals including tenor Guy Elliot, baritone Theodore Platt, mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean and soprano Harriet Burns. The next generation of talent will also have the opportunity to learn from Austrian baritone Wolfgang Holzmair who returns to the festival to lead the annual Mastercourse.
