PREVIOUS CONCERTS

Concert posters from recent years are shown below. If you would like to know which works Oxford Harmonic Choir is performing this season, visit the Concerts page.

For a complete list of works performed since 1921, please click here.

2024-2025 Season

Mendelssohn St Paul

Jeni Bern – soprano
Olivia Ray – mezzo soprano
Christopher Lemmings – tenor
David John Pike – baritone

Conductor Robert Secret
The Orchestra of Stowe Opera

Saturday 23 November 2024, 7.30pm
Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford

St. Paul is the first of two oratorios completed by Felix Mendelssohn in his lifetime, the second being the well-known Elijah. St. Paul is just as dramatic and tuneful as its successor. It is a very moving portrait of an influential (and widely misunderstood) figure in early Christianity, with Paul’s conversion and martyrdom as its main points of focus. It displays the composer’s debt to the Baroque era (particularly Bach) much more openly than Elijah does, and at least two of the hymn tunes Mendelssohn quotes in the process are still in popular use today!

Rossini Stabat Mater
Mozart Coronation Mass

Susan Young – soprano
Valerie Reid – mezzo
Austin Gunn – tenor
James Cleverton – baritone

Conductor Robert Secret
The Orchestra of Stowe Opera

Sunday 23 March 2025, 7.30pm
Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford

The Stabat Mater is a 13th-century meditation on the anguish the Virgin Mary would have felt on witnessing Jesus Christ’s crucifixion. This text has inspired some of the most memorable and imaginative choral music ever written, from the Renaissance into the present day. Rossini’s 1841 setting is no exception. It is cut from the same cloth as the later Verdi Requiem, in that it lays the text’s raw emotion bare using Italian opera techniques. It also makes extraordinary demands on the soloists, which is probably why it is rarely performed!

Mozart’s Coronation Mass is one of his most popular settings of the Mass. Composed in Salzburg after he was appointed court organist and composer at Salzburg Cathedral, it is celebratory throughout. The soprano solo Agnus Dei bears a striking resemblance to the Countess’s aria Dove Sono from Figaro.

2023 – 2024 Season

George Frederic Handel Solomon

Conductor Robert Secret
The Orchestra of Stowe Opera

Sunday 26 November 2023, Oxford Town Hall

Susan Young – soprano
Lucy Cox – soprano
Austin Gunn – tenor
Quentin Hayes – baritone

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’, and the choral masque in praise of music.

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.

Franz Joseph Haydn Nelson Mass; Felix Mendelssohn Lauda Sion

Natasha Day – Soprano
Heather Jill Burns – Mezzo
Austin Gunn – Tenor
Andri Björn Róbertsson – Bass baritone

Conductor Robert Secret
The Orchestra of Stowe Opera

Saturday 29 June 2024, 7.30pm
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 600^th anniversary of the Feast of Corpus Christi, for the Church of St Martin in Liège, completes the programme. Not to be missed!

2022-23 Season

Bach Christmas Oratorio

26 November 2022, 7.30 pm, Oxford Town Hall

Susanna Fairbairn – soprano
Joanna Harries – mezzo soprano
Robyn Lyn Evans – tenor
Timothy Nelson – bass

Oxford Harmonic Choir’s new season opens with a seasonal classic: J.S. Bach’s much-loved Christmas Oratorio. The work is made up of six cantatas, each focusing on one aspect of the Christmas story, originally performed on separate days over the Christmas period. We will perform part 1, The birth of Jesus; part 3, The adoration of the shepherds; part 5, The journey of the magi; part 6, The adoration of the magi. The opening words of part 1 ‘Jauchzet, frohlocket’ ‘Rejoice, exult’, set the tone of the whole sequence. This is Bach at his most joyful and celebratory, especially in the splendid choruses that open each part.

Mendelssohn Elijah

1 April 2023, 7.30 pm, Oxford Town Hall

Katherine Crompton – soprano
Arlene Rolph – mezzo soprano
Simon Ashmead – tenor
Thomas Humphreys – baritone

For our spring concert, we will perform another huge favourite with audiences and singers alike: Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah. First performed in Birmingham Town Hall in 1846, it contains some of the composer’s greatest music, with magnificent choruses, beautiful arias and imaginative orchestration. The story from the Old Testament, containing many natural phenomena – drought, fire, rain, and earthquake – offers much scope for expressive writing, and the work combines many moments of high drama with more lyrical passages of the kind normally associated with the composer. Together with Handel’s Messiah and Haydn’s Creation, Elijah forms a trio of the most popular oratorios in the choral repertoire.

Duruflé & Fauré Requiems

10 June 2023, 7.30 pm, Oxford Town Hall

Susan Young – soprano
Camilla Seale – mezzo
Philip Smith – baritone

Our summer concert offers a wonderful opportunity to enjoy and compare the two requiems of Fauré (first performed 1888 and revised for performances in 1893 and 1900) and Duruflé (written 1947, revised 1948 and 1961). Both composers chose a similar set of texts (omitting most of the terrifying Dies Irae and adding in the final hopeful In Paradisum) and both adopted an intimate, reflective approach to these texts. Both, too, took inspiration from plainsong. The Fauré is famously lyrical and serene, while the Duruflé moves between tranquillity and anguished drama. Comments posted by listeners on performances that can be heard on YouTube testify to the emotional power of both.