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Details
Oxford Town Hall
Saint Aldate's
Oxford
Oxfordshire
OX1 1BX
England
Programme
Johannes Brahms – Schicksalslied, Op.54
Bedřich Smetana – Ma Vlast: Vysehrad
~ Interval ~
Edward Elgar – The Music Makers, Op.69
Performers
Jess Dandy – contralto
Robert Secret – Conductor
Oxford Harmonic Choir
Orchestra of Stowe Opera
Other concerts in this Series (+)
Programme Note
Our spring concert consists of two highly expressive choral works, together with Smetana’s well-known symphonic poem Vyšehrad . The Music Makers is a setting of Ode by the Victorian poet Arthur O’Shaughnessy. It is intensely personal: Elgar wrote ‘I have written out my soul … I have shown myself’, and he includes quotations from earlier works, including the famous theme from Nimrod. The work moves between triumph and melancholy, ending quietly with the opening words; ‘We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.’ Brahms was responding to a poem by the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, ‘Schicksalslied’, which contrasts the everlasting bliss of the immortals with the suffering of humanity, both wonderfully evoked in Brahms’s music. We will be joined by contralto Jess Dandy.
