At the age of just 20, Jamie Phillips became the youngest ever assistant conductor of the Manchester-based Hallé Orchestra. Since this appointment, he has gone on to conduct orchestras across the world, recently being appointed the Dudamel Fellow of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. On Thursday 5^th November, he will conduct Oxford University Orchestra (OUO) in a performance of Mahler’s 7^th Symphony.

Are you excited about coming to Oxford?

I am indeed! I’ve been looking forward to this concert for a long time. The chance to be able to perform Mahler’s amazing 7th Symphony doesn’t come along very often, and I’m delighted to be able to debut it with OUO.

You became associated with the Hallé at a very early age, did you feel under a lot of pressure and how did you deal with being thrust into the spotlight?

 In all honesty, I wasn’t particularly aware of huge pressures. There was some media interest when I became Assistant Conductor of the Hallé, mostly due to the fact that I was the youngest person to hold the post. I’ve now been with the orchestra for over three years, and am doing some very exciting work with them, but thankfully I’m surrounded by very generous people who care greatly about using the Assistant Conductor post to educate young conductors, rather than to scare them and put them off for life! I’ve just been made Associate Conductor of the orchestra, which is a great honour.

Mahler is known for his monumental symphonies, what are the particular challenges associated with conducting his music?

 Conducting Mahler comes with many complications, but because Mahler himself was a great conductor, his scores are littered with instructions as to how to conduct the piece. Every other bar, there is a marking which says ‘not too fast here, careful not to rush’, or ‘the flutes are the most important instrument here’ – it’s like he’s left you an instruction manual for some flat-pack furniture, and you somehow have to piece it together! Of course in reality there is a great deal more interpretation to do with the music, but from the outset you undoubtedly have a very clear idea of how Mahler wants the music to sound, whereas with many other composers there is substantially more freedom to interpret. You really do feel he is sitting on your shoulder as you conduct his music.

For you, what individuates Mahler 7 from his other symphonies? 

It seems to be his least performed symphony, for reasons which are interesting to consider. The 8th symphony also doesn’t get performed very often, but that’s more for practical reasons due to the huge scale that it’s on and the vast number of performers required. The 7th symphony, however, is written for a much more conventional sized orchestra; although it does require quadruple woodwinds, it only calls for 4 horns, 3 trumpets, etc. It is very complex to play, which deters many orchestras from approaching it, and perhaps more significantly, is tricky to understand. It left the audience at the premiere more confused than anything else, with many describing it as incoherent. I think what makes this symphony stand out from Mahler’s others is that it is not always narrative. The two ‘Nachtmusik’ or ‘nightmusic’ movements (the 2nd and 4th) seem to create a mood and to trigger an emotional response, but you feel less like it’s to do with Mahler looking inwards to himself, but rather as a celebration of his compositional genius. We have come to expect Mahler’s music to be almost neurotic and triumphant in equal measure, but this symphony seems to do something quite different.

You’ve worked extensively with youth orchestras as conductor of the Hallé Youth Orchestra, what aspects of these collaborations do you particularly enjoy?

I’m very fortunate to work with some truly wonderful professional orchestras, but it has to be said that my work with young people is something that I find equally, if not more, rewarding. Performances which I do with the HYO are generally full of energy (admittedly, not perfect – what ever is?), and to see the progress which a group of non-specialist young musicians makes over the course of a year is a truly remarkable thing.

What are some of the highlights of your upcoming engagements?

I’m currently working as a Dudamel Fellow with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which is a true privilege, and is giving me some great opportunities to immerse myself in the life of a really great orchestra. I get to do some concerts of my own with the orchestra in the Spring, which I can’t wait to do. I’m very fortunate to do quite a bit of conducting in Europe, and I’m looking forward to returning to the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in Geneva, as well as the Luxembourg Philharmonic, Deutsche Radio Philharmonie, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and continuing to work with the wonderful Hallé in Manchester.

OUO performs Mahler’s 7^th Symphony at 8pm on Thursday 5^th November, at the Sheldonian Theatre.

★★★★☆

Oxford reviews tend to fall into two categories – those that attempt genuine critical appraisal, and those commissioned from friends or spouses or family members who work for student publications: these tend not to be critical at all, but are part of the publicity of the show. Of course, the latter are not worthy of your time.

In order to prove, then, that this is not an exercise in back-scratching, I begin with the negatives. At certain points, injudicious glissando jarred with the style of the music; very occasionally, the singing felt disconcertingly unconnected to the orchestra; and, as with all student productions seen by this reviewer, the acting was of variable quality, with touches of sensitivity counteracted by awkwardness elsewhere: perhaps some finer points were left under-rehearsed. (But then this was the opening night.)

The triviality of these cavils may already have induced some suspicion of my position. But now I have done my duty, I can reveal how much I enjoyed myself. My prevailing impression was of a show professionally produced and executed with acuity. Nor was the task straightforward. The show is a curious hybrid of play and opera: Purcell’s music was originally intended as incidental. The libretto (if that is the right term here) was provided by Leo Mercer, and was commissioned for this production. While never really sparkling, it was always highly competent, capably meeting the demands of the score: where  pathos or levity was required, the libretto gamely rose to the task. The conceit was strong – the story of the opera provides an opportunity for Delphine to escape the mundanity of her everyday life (one identifies): we accompany her on her fictional voyage through Ancient Rome. In the final scene we see the effect that the story has on her.

Jasmine White was convincing as the nerdy Delphine, and Danny Scarponi brought a not unwonted Gallic swagger to the role of Dioclesian. The supporting cast was generally strong, with Raphaël Millière’s mellifluous bass worthy of particular praise. The orchestra, again, was generally excellent, seldom missing a note under the magisterial baton of Matthew F. Reese.

Special praise must be reserved for the director, Dionysios Kyropoulos, who injected considerable flamboyance into what might easily have been a static, drab production – opera of this period is tricky: its fondness for long arias sets a considerable challenge for any director. The movement, the set, the costumes: all was efficient without ever trespassing into the officiousness which lamentably characterises the majority of modern opera, student and professional. The slick ideas with which the production teemed seldom obscured the action or music, and often enhanced it. Quite an accolade.

So, despite some reservations, this critic was impressed. A difficult task – ambitiously assailed – efficiently executed.

Launching onto the big screen, The Martian is Ridley Scott’s most recent foray into the sci-fi scene. Assisted by NASA experts, there’s a touch of sincerity about this presentation. Not simply your run-of-the-mill space age flick, this is a movie with a mission statement. A cautionary tale, if you will – one whose action-packed sequences are tightly wed to the risks and rewards associated with an era of exploration, of SpaceX and Elon Musk.

And, if that weren’t enough, a star-studded cast boasting Matt Damon as lead, with Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels, Sean Bean and Chiwetel Ejiofor in supporting roles, The Martian has all the makings of a cult classic.

Glitzy gizmos, sensational cinematography – a sci-fi fanatic’s delight; what’s not to love? Well, quite a lot actually. And here’s the problem: subgenre. Space odysseys tend to gravitate toward one of two categories – the cinematic and the melodramatic. Take Gravity – it’s all about the cinematic thrill, the immersive experience of dazzling special effects and their mastery, not so much the script itself. Dialogue is sparse and character development is limited, whereas Interstellar revels in melodrama – a dense, fantastical script and soppy sentimentalism. This detaches us from reality, transports us to another realm.

The Martian is in between. It suffers from being too funny to be serious, but too serious to be funny. Rather than boldly going where no director has ever gone before, the movie industry seems content to tread in circles. We have yet to see a space movie whose audiovisual effects are matched by realistic, riveting storytelling.

Opening with another day at the office on planet Mars, Wadi Rum in Jordan provides the perfect backdrop for the Red Giant. Engrossed in some “Hey, look! We’re astronauts doing our thing” banter, Ares III is suddenly swept up in a spectacular dust storm. This leads to an emergency evacuation of the crew, leaving Mark Watney (Matt Damon) mistakenly assumed dead and stranded on Mars. After a convoluted explanation of his miraculous survival – courtesy of a video log cliché – Watney gets down to business. He has 300 days of provisions and needs to figure out a way of stretching what little he has out to 1480 days, all the while trying to make contact with Earth. No pressure. Eventually spotted by NASA, it’s left to Vincent Kapoor (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Teddy Sanders (Jeff Daniels), the director, to begin piecing together a rescue plan, albeit covertly at first. After an impressive and rather liberal use of the word ‘shit’ by (American) rocket scientists, contact is made with the aid of the 1997 Pathfinder probe. The Hermes; that is, the escape vessel en route back home, makes a U-turn but will they get there in time?

Comic relief is ever present in The Martian. A running gag in the film is Mission Commander Melissa Lewis’ (Jessica Chastain) taste in music, 1970s disco – which is the only available playlist on the planet. Whether Watney is driving across the surface of Mars seated next to a decaying isotope listening to ‘Hot Stuff ’ by Donna Summer, or dismantling his launch vehicle to ‘Waterloo’ by ABBA , there’s a song for every occasion.

Reviewing this movie has not quite been analogous with watching Matt Damon farm potatoes in his own excrement for two hours and twenty minutes, but sadly it’s not far off . Watney never truly grows as a character; instead he takes everything in his stride. Likewise with the cast, despite being surrounded by “a galaxy of stars” [The Guardian], there are no breathtaking performances here. And while there were some memorable scenes, such as Damon being propelled into space ‘in a convertible,’ I fear that this movie has just been one small step for the genre, and one giant payout for 20th Century Fox.

It was a mild night late last summer that I ventured out with a couple of my mates to the dense woods which lay about twenty minutes from my house. Clad in all black get-ups, our super goth crew were in high spirits as we made our way up the path that bore us away from the safety of the street. But as the undergrowth crept in, and the lights of civilisation vanished into the inky blackness of the trees, fear descended. After several unplanned detours and a hasty run from a dog walker, we whipped out our phones for an unatmospheric check of Google Maps. Having located the forested gravesite that haunted local urban leg- end, we doubled back until a disappointingly well maintained tombstone lurched into view. We squatted before it. Out of a satchel we pulled candles, incense, photos, and aromatic foods (a minestrone Cup-a-Soup we grabbed after a last minute checklist go-over). We linked hands and began to chant. It was time for a séance.

With a grand total of zero spirits contacted and not a curse or hex on us, we left the woods about twenty minutes later hugely under- whelmed. Still maybe the dumbest scheme any of us have ever willingly participated in, we look back onto our voyage into the spirit realm with palpable disappointment and appropriate bewilderment. What possessed a group of supposedly smart youths on the wrinkly side of adolescence to head out in search of the macabre? Certainly a dislikeable amount of self-conscious irony. Perhaps a dash of morbid curiosity. Definitely a desire to have something to talk to each other about after three long months trapped in a suburb whose ghastliest offering bursts forth from a KFC drive-thru. We were also fascinated by the idea of what we thought teenagers should do, aware we were fast being forced out of adolescence by overdrafts, pension schemes and facelift consultations. But where does this link between teenagers and the occult come from? Why is it such a recurrent trope? To find out, we must venture back to the era of the scrunchie.

A ‘Satanic Panic’ broke out amongst conservative parents everywhere in the tumult of the early 1980s. Apocalyptic visions of damaged youth wafted like the scent of baked cherry pie from television sets across the suburbs. With the outsourcing of American industry, the Cold War being brought to the boil and the increasing secularisation of society, middle class suburb-dwellers needed something on which to pin their escalating fears. Thankfully, daytime television was around to provide it. Audience-hungry producers of panel shows, newscasts and infomercials determinedly hit their audience’s sweet spot, located somewhere between conservative good taste and appalling horrors experienced from a safe distance. So tale after tale of satanic priests, sacrificial victims and cult escapees came forth to titillate their viewers with stories of a secret, insidious world just outside the picket fence. Mostly relegated to syndicated talks shows in local markets, these tall tales eventually scaled the heights of a national audience. Even Oprah was not immune from rustling up some satanic scares. For the faithful, mega-church tours of “Satan survivors” sat nicely alongside the regular programme of light shows and concerts playing at their local mega-church, and exacerbated their increasing anxiety about the recession of Christian values from American public life; the youth were at risk of straying from the path of the Lord.

And stray they did. The consumer culture of the 1980s brought with it the phenomenon of the neighbourhood mall, a “cathedral of consumption,” according to a historian of the period. Here teenagers congregated away from the watchful eye of concerned guardians, speaking in a language of references and slang impenetrable to parental ears. Thus the teenager – an alienated storm of raging hormones adrift in a secular ocean – became a site of crippling anxiety for any respectable, neoconservative parent.

The rot was first located in the fantastical realms and Nordic graphic design of popular role playing game Dungeons and Dragons, after a handful of suicides and deaths amongst its young players. But it wasn’t until the rise of heavy metal bands that the mainstream of youth culture was believed to have been sucked into the Satanic void. All hell broke loose. In the 80s, where media networks had multiplied but transmitted only one way, mis and partial information could spread like wildfire.

So protest groups were founded and campaigns drawn up, all in the name of halting an epidemic that existed only on television and in the minds of those who watched it. The cultural reaction has been swift and ceaseless. The camp and ironic have found fertile ground in such a ludicrous phenomenon. We can see its tendril unfurling in the early 90s, with David Lynch’s zeitgeist-capturing Twin Peaks exploring the mysterious dark side of blonde small-town cheerleader Laura Palmer. Teen girls, forever the impenetrable canvas onto which social anxieties are projected, seem to bear the brunt of these ironic reinterpretations. It’s there from The Craft and Edward Scissorhands to Heathers (featuring the immortal exchange “You look like hell!” “Yeah? I just got back”) right through to Diablo Cody’s Jennifer’s Body, which plays as a pastiche of its ironic forbears. The obsession with teenage Satanists has transformed into a fascination with “Satanic Panic” itself, the transformation of pentagrams (alongside chintzy furnishings) into the realms of kitsch.

Today the fear of adolescent occultists is celebrated in the Kiddiepunk zine Teenage Satanists in Oklahoma, and this week sees the release of Regression, which stars Emma Watson and Ethan Hawke, and mines the idea of ‘repressed memory,’ which fuelled the 80s hysteria by promising that anyone could potentially recall being attacked by Satan’s disciples at a moment’s notice. That many of the televangelists and authors who spurred the Satanic Panics were quickly exposed as frauds really doesn’t matter. The concept of an army of teen Satanists is so ludicrous, so potent and rife, that it needn’t be ‘real’ to be endlessly fascinating and wildly entertaining. The imprint that this footnote of 80s cultural history has left in the media and the zeitgeist is inescapable – and alluring enough to send a gang of overgrown kids off into a dark wood on a summer night