The focus of our 2010 season is on individual players from the Orchestra.
We began the new year with a traditional Viennese-style concert in the Town Hall featuring works by the Strauss family. This was the first time OP put on a concert reminiscent of those we all enjoy around this time of the year at Vienna’s Musikverein.
LADYBIRDS and bumblebees flew into Oxford Town Hall for a celebration of musical fun.
A creepy-crawly concert entitled Bugs was staged by Oxford Philomusica, the city’s professional symphony orchestra, yesterday.
Numbers included the Ugly Bug Ball by the Sherman Brothers, which featured in the 1963 Disney animation Summer Magic, and The Flight of the Bumble Bee by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
Hundreds of children dressed as bugs tapped their feet to the well-known tunes during the show presented by Alasdair Malloy.
While the musicians were warming up, children had their faces painted and perfected their costumes with insect antennae.
Oxford Philomusica’s teaming of works by Mahler and Mendelssohn with a modern piece by St Anne’s undergraduate Eldon Fayers seemed at first to defy explanation or logic.
But what binds these three together is their youthfulness; Fayers, clearly, needs no further explanation, but the other two were captured here in their formative years, in pieces that spoke volumes about their burgeoning genius and of the fact that greatness lay just around the corner. Mendelssohn was but 16 when he penned his delightful Octet in E flat, while the seeds for Mahler’s first symphony were sown when the composer was 24.
Oxford Philomusica wants to hear from you.
Write about your experience of a performance to win FREE concert tickets.
OP on Twitter
