Singing Words - Oxford Lieder Festival 2015

Having explored all of Schubert's songs last year, the Oxford Lieder Festival and artistic directer Sholto Kynoch are exploring Singing Words: Poets and their Songs in the 2015 festival which runs from Friday 16 October to Saturday 31 October. There are lots of concerts and this can only be the merest selection. Things open with a one day symposium on Words into music: Poets, Composers & Song at Wadham College and a recital from Sarah Connolly and Graham Johnson at the Sheldonian Theatre in the evening with songs by Schubert, Brahms and Wolf. And the festival closes with Christoph Pregardien and Roger Vignoles in settings of Heinrich Heine by Schumann and Schubert.

Sarah Fox, Anna Huntley, Victor Sicard, Geraldine McGreevy, Benjamin Hulett, Stephanie Marshall, Johnny Herford, Gary Matthewman, and Graham Johnson explore the songs of Faure. Louise MacDonald and Ingrid Sawyers pair Schumann's Mary Stuart settings with newly commissioned works by Judith Bingham, Dee Isaacs and Eddie McGuire inspired by the Scots Queen's poetry and letters, and there is a study event too. There is a study day on Berlioz with an evening recital of Berlioz's songs from Dorottya Lang, James Gilchrist and Julius Drake, and another on Song in Translation which concludes with a recital by Toby Spence and Christopher Glynn of Schubert's Die schone Mullerin in a new English translation by Jeremy Sams.

Other concerts are given by an amazing list of performers including Katarina Karneus, James Ghilchrist, Gillian Keith, Matthew Hargreaves, Lucy Hall, Wolfgang Holzmair, Robert Holl, Roderick Williams, Alison Rose, Victoria Newlyn, Elizabeth Watts, Anna Stephany, Nick Pritchard, Robert Murray, Mark Stone, Gareth Brynmor John, Anna Tilbrook, Simon Lepper, Gavin Roberts, Imogen Cooper, Roger Vignoles, Iain Burnside, Sholto Kynoch, and Finnegan Downie Dear.

Full information from the Oxford Lieder Festival website. And you can see a film about the festival, after the the break.