Connections Across Time: The Oxford Lieder Festival is live but on-line for 2020 with over 40 events

This year's Oxford Lieder Festival is something different. Running from 10 to 17 October 2020, the festival is presenting over 40 events, all performed live without an audience and streamed live, with venues ranging from the Holywell Music Room, the Radcliffe Observatory, and the Huxley Room of the Museum of Natural History to Broughton Castle and Rycote Chapel, both just outside Oxford.

Each evening recital will begin with a short group of Schubert songs performed by singers who have arguably been hardest hit by the current crisis – artists who are already forging careers but not yet at a stage where they can view the current crisis as only a temporary setback.

Artists to look forward to include James Gilchrist and Elizabeth Kenny in Dowland, Sarah Connolly and Eugene Asti in Schumann and Mahler, Robin Tritschler and Graham Johnson in Songs of the Zodiac, Lucy Crowe and Anna Tilbrook in Britten, Strauss and French song, Carolyn Sampson and Joseph Middleton, The Hermes Experiment, Benjamin Appl and Sholto Kynoch, Kitty Whately and Simon Lepper in From the Pens of Women, Ashley Riches and Sholto Kynoch in Die schöne Müllerin, Lotte Betts Dean and Sean Shibe, and the festival closes with Christoph Prégardien & Michael Gees.

Lectures and themes running during the day include Brahms' Circle and the Musical Past, Elias Ashmole and the Ashmolean Museum, Hafez and Persian Poetry which includes settings of Hafez performed by Michael Mofidian and Jâms Coleman, and Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake in settings of Eastern-inspired poetry by Schubert, Mahler and Wolf, Mendelssohn and the Jewish Enlightenment, and Voltaire, Rousseau and the Enlightenment.

Full details from the festival website.