The 2015 Oxford Lieder Festival has drawn to a close following two busy weeks of concerts, readings, study days, masterclasses, and more. In contrast with last year’s ‘The Schubert Project’, which featured the performance of Schubert’s entire song output, this year’s festival theme was ‘Singing Words: Poets and their Songs’.
The festival’s opening concert was held in the Sheldonian Theatre, which has a much greater audience capacity and a very different acoustic to the more intimate Holywell Music Room, where the festival is based. Sarah Connolly’s voice certainly filled the theatre, as did her inimitable stage presence. The first half comprised popular Schubert songs such as ‘Die junge Nonne’, and was at once dramatic, subtle, and charming, and the post-interval selection of Wolf and Brahms prompted both tears and cheers from the audience.
In addition to the Sheldonian, concerts and events have been held in venues across Oxford, including the Jacqueline du Pré Building at St Hilda’s, the Oxford Martin School, Iffley Road’s St John the Evangelist, and even the Ashmolean and Blackwell’s. New College Ante-Chapel was used for a series of late-night concerts, providing a suitably atmospheric venue for both Imogen Cooper’s all-Chopin recital and a candlelit, haunting programme of contemporary music, including George Crumb’s Apparition, from the exciting young duo Sophie Junker and Deirdre Brenner—a suitably spooky occasion for late October.
Vaults and Gardens Café was also transformed into a late-night concert venue, taking on a warm and vibrant tavern-like feel to host the Schubert-folk-rock group The Erlkings. With drinks being served and a large student turnout in addition to the festival’s slightly older regular audience, the group’s clever and funny adaptations of Schubert favourites allowed for a fitting celebration of the festival’s opening weekend.
Nonetheless, the hub of the festival is the Holywell—a perfect venue for lieder recitals despite occasional sonic interruptions from motorbikes, bells, and people outside. The intensity of the atmosphere that grips the audience as they wait for a much-anticipated duo to take to the stage is difficult to capture in words. Perhaps the best example of this was Wolfgang Holzmair and Imogen Cooper’s programme of Clara Schumann, Frank Martin, and Robert Schumann on Friday 23rd. Holzmair and Cooper have been performing pieces such as Schumann’s Kerner-Lieder together for over 20 years, and their onstage dynamic did not disappoint. Such was the emotional intensity that it felt like the entire audience held their breath from the opening chords of ‘Stille Tränen’ until the end of a prolonged silence that followed the final song’s closure. The ovation they received was so enthusiastic that they couldn’t retire without offering two encores: first Clara Schumann’s ‘Liebst du um Schönheit’, a gently elegiac setting of Rückert’s meditation on love, and finally a favourite from Robert Schumann’s Liederkreis Op. 39, ‘Mondnacht’, to round off the evening.
Waiting for an encore is always exciting, and the choices from this year’s performers did not disappoint. Clara Schumann was also chosen for Sarah Connolly’s closing song—a gesture appreciated by those aware of the inevitable gender imbalance of the festival programme’s poets and composers (that said, the premiere of Rhian Samuel’s ‘Wildflower Songbook’ later in the festival marked another occasion to celebrate women composers). Elizabeth Watts and Julius Drake tied together a wonderful recital of Liszt and Debussy settings of Victor Hugo and Paul Verlaine with a short, intense Wagner number, and Joan Rodgers gave a charming introduction to her encore—Tchaikovsky’s ‘The Fearful Moment’—that encapsulated some of the evening’s poetic themes: love and fear.
Alongside song recitals, the festival has featured a number of chamber music concerts. The Doric Quartet returned this year to perform two staples of Romantic chamber repertoire: Schumann’s A minor quartet in the Oxford Martin School, and Brahms’s quintet with pianist Alasdair Beatson. Both of these concerts received a warm reception, and the Schumann was appreciated by a much wider audience as it was live-streamed on YouTube.
To complement the lunchtime performances of Fauré songs that ran throughout the festival, there were also afternoon concerts of his chamber music. The C minor piano quartet was performed by an ensemble of acclaimed younger musicians: Tom Poster (piano), Magnus Johnston (violin), Timothy Ridout (viola) and Guy Johnston (cello) sustained a remarkable level of energy in a performance that brought out the exuberance of Fauré’s chamber textures. The Phoenix Piano Trio complemented their lyrical performance of Fauré’s trio with an arrangement of JanáÄek’s first string quartet—a version that, while performed with suitable intensity, seemed jarring in its replacement of the all-important inner string parts by piano.
The festival also runs a number of study days. This year, events were focussed variously on the interaction of music and words in song, songs in translation, and Berlioz. Highlights included a paper from Wadham fellow Philip Ross Bullock on the cultural context of Sappho’s poetry in early 20th century Russian songs, and St Catz fellow Laura Tunbridge gave an engaging and amusing critical history of song performed in translation. With a very mixed audience, the study days succeeded in providing something for everyone.
Huge thanks go to Artistic Director Sholto Kynoch, Administrator Taya Smith, the festival assistants and the rest of the Lieder Festival team for facilitating such a wonderful two weeks of music; here’s to an equally successful Schumann-themed festival next year.
