Song festival returns to Oxford this autumn
Upasana Rajagopalan
Thursday, June 6, 2024
The Oxford International Song Festival begins on 11 October, presenting a range of music from baroque to chamber and choral music performances focusing on the theme of ‘cities of song’
The Oxford International Song Festival is set to return in autumn for its 2024 edition. Running from 11 to 26 October, the theme of the programme is ‘cities of song’ which will pay tribute to the cities that influenced the development of song over the years. The festival also marks the anniversaries of Kafka, Fauré, Byron, Schoenberg and Yvonne Loriod.
The festival will welcome artists including include , Dame Sarah Connolly, James Gilchrist, Lucy Crowe and Nicky Spence, who will team up with pianists including Natalie Burch, Joseph Middleton, Anna Tilbrook and Oxford Song’s artistic director Sholto Kynoch. The programme will also include festival debuts from baritones Holger Falk and Will Liverman and sopranos Erika Baikoff and Heidi Stober.
This year’s festival opens with baritone Roderick Williams who is joined by pianist Natalie Burch to perform Schubert’s Schwanengesang (swan song). This is followed by a weekend of songs devoted to Franz Schubert, with Graham Johnson presenting his seminal survey of the composer’s final years and Katy Hamilton exploring Schubert’s Vienna.
Chamber music performances will be given by the Doric, Castalian and Chaos String Quartets, Ensemble 360 and Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, followed by performances by the choirs of Worcester College and Merton College.
Mimi Doulton and Dylan Perez will pay tribute to Kafka’s Prague with their performance of the world premiere of Can Bilir’s new work, Silent Song of Josefine, while Claire Booth and Tamsin Waley Cohen will team up for a performance of Kurtag’s Kafka Fragments.
Moving beyond the western classical song canon, the season will also see sitar player and history-making RPS award winner Jasdeep Singh Degun join tabla player Sanju Sahai for an evening of Indian classical music improvisations. The 2024 festival will also include the premiere of a festival commission by Indian-American composer Reena Esmail, setting Sanskrit verses from the Bhagavad Gita for the combined forces of Jess Dandy and Keval Shah.
