2023 – 2024 Season
Edward Elgar The Music Makers
Johannes Brahms The Song of Destiny
Bedřich Smetana Vyšehrad
Jess Dandy Contralto
Conductor Robert Secret
The Orchestra of Stowe Opera
Saturday 23 March 2024, Oxford Town Hall
Our spring concert consists of two highly expressive choral works, together with Smetana’s well-known symphonic poem Vyšehrad . The Music Makers is a setting of Ode by the Victorian poet Arthur O’Shaughnessy. It is intensely personal: Elgar wrote ‘I have written out my soul … I have shown myself’, and he includes quotations from earlier works, including the famous theme from Nimrod. The work moves between triumph and melancholy, ending quietly with the opening words; ‘We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.’ Brahms was responding to a poem by the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, ‘Schicksalslied’, which contrasts the everlasting bliss of the immortals with the suffering of humanity, both wonderfully evoked in Brahms’s music.
“The stunning young contralto Jess Dandy…offered sumptuous tone and beautiful legato. She’s a name to watch”
NEIL FISHER, THE TIMES
Franz Joseph Haydn Nelson Mass; Felix Mendelssohn Lauda Sion
Conductor Robert Secret
The Orchestra of Stowe Opera
Saturday 29 June 2024, Oxford Town Hall
The magnificent Nelson Mass is one of Haydn’s six late great masses and, according to H.C. Robbins Landon, ‘arguably Haydn’s greatest single composition’. From the dramatic opening Kyrie, with the soaring soprano solo line, to the exuberant Dona Nobis Pacem, the music pulsates with energy and unflagging vitality. There are many shifts of mood and tone but the final effect is celebratory. It is the work of a composer at the height of his powers. Mendelssohn’s uplifting and lovely Lauda Sion, written to celebrate the 600th anniversary of the Feast of Corpus Christi, for the Church of St Martin in Liège, completes the programme. Not to be missed!
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.
