Oxford Harmonic Choir concerts are held in major central Oxford venues:
- Oxford Town Hall
- Sheldonian Theatre
All concerts start at 7.30pm. Doors and venue box office open at 7.00pm. Join our Mailing List to hear about future concerts. See recent performances on our Previous Concerts page. .
We regret to announce that due to ongoing concerns about coronavirus, we have taken the difficult decision to cancel our concert on 27 June 2020 in the Sheldonian Theatre. We now hope to perform Handel’s Solomon on 26 June 2021 in Oxford Town Hall.
We hope to see you at one of our future concerts.
Saturday 21 November 2020
Oxford Town Hall
Torelli Christmas Concerto
Mendelssohn Die Geburt Christi
Manfredini Christmas Concerto
Fauré Cantique de Jean Racine
Rheinberger The Star of Bethlehem
Soloists: to be announced
A trio of beautiful vocal pieces is our offering for the Christmas season, to which will be joined some festive Baroque orchestral music. The concert will open with Mendelssohn’s uplifting Birth of Christ, part of his unfinished oratorio Christus. Next will be the flowing melodies of Fauré’s lovely Cantique de Jean Racine, a setting of the French tragedian’s paraphrase of a Latin hymn. The final part of the concert will be Josef Rheinberger’s Star of Bethlehem. Composed in 1894, with expressive choral and orchestral writing, this is a setting of a sequence of nine poems on the Christmas story written by the composer’s wife, Franziska.
Saturday 27 March 2021
Oxford Town Hall
Verdi Requiem
Soloists: to be announced
In its centenary year, Oxford Harmonic Choir has chosen to perform one of the great works of the choral repertoire: Verdi’s Messa da Requiem, composed as a tribute to the deceased Alessandro Manzoni, the author of I Promessi Sposi. It will be our eighth time of singing this tremendous work. The Requiem is a favourite with audiences for its powerful and emotional rendering of the text and its engagement with the drama of life and death, fear and hope, ‘day of wrath’ and ‘eternal light’. No-one ever forgets the terrifying rendering of the Dies Irae with the pounding bass drum and the descending scale, but there are many other marvellous moments.
Saturday 26 June 2021
Oxford Town Hall
Handel Solomon
Soloists: to be announced
One of Handel’s greatest oratorios, with stunning choruses, Solomon is a wonderful combination of the contemplative, the dramatic and the lyrical. Handel brings to life a picture of the Golden Age where religion, justice, nature and art are all in harmony, and, as ever, he gives expression to a wide range of human emotions. Highlights include the paean to married love in the first part, with the nightingale chorus; the dramatic music for the quarrel over the baby in part two; and in the final part the justly celebrated overture ‘The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’, the choral masque in praise of music, and the queen’s exquisite final aria, ‘When the Sun Forgets to Streak’.
