Workshop can add another string
If you play a stringed instrument and suffer from problems, then a forthcoming workshop in Oxford could be the answer to your prayers.
View ArticleHusband and wife in harmony
GILES WOODFORDE looks forward to the appearance at Dorchester Abbey of famous flautist Sir James Galway
View ArticleReel Big Fish: O2 Academy
Do you have a multi-faceted taste in music? Enjoy live music, singing with a crowd and a bit of the ridiculous? If so, Reel Big Fish couldn’t possibly disappoint. The action begins with the latter...
View ArticleLocal author Simon Tolkien
Simon Tolkien is the grandson of the great JRR Tolkien and was born in Holywell Street, Oxford, in 1959 — his father taught at New College. He grew up and went to school and university in the city...
View ArticlePre-Raphaelites and their muses
The Pre-Raphaelites started as a group of hard-up young artists, who roamed the streets around 1848, looking for striking young women whom they politely asked to pose. Rossetti and Holman Hunt were...
View ArticleA feast of Hobbits at ready
NICOLA LISLE previews The Tolkien Society’s annual Oxonmoot
View ArticleLocal author Charlie Brooks
Racehorse trainer Charlie Brooks, husband of Rebekah Brooks (née Wade), lives in Churchill, near Chipping Norton. His new thriller Switch (Harper Collins, £7.99), is published on September 13, and...
View ArticleCan Onions Cure Earache?
If you want to reassure yourself that now is a good time to be alive, take a look at the 1769 illustrations in the Bodleian Library ’s new edition of William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine, which...
View ArticleCarpet Burns: My Life with Inspiral Carpets
The UK economy was in poor shape, with unemployment rates at an all-time high. England’s youth were rioting and out of work. Then punk arrived on the scene.
View ArticleAuthor Patrick Gale prepares for the Bloxham Festival of Faith and Literature
Patrick Gale is preparing to be received at New College for dinner, eating at High Table, fresh off the success of his Oxford alumni University Challenge win at Christmas, when we speak.
View ArticleOxford's industrial history
Think of Oxford’s history, and it’s medieval university buildings that spring to mind, but there is another story, and it is told by local historian Liz Woolley in Oxford’s Working Past.
View ArticleA Foreign Country by Charles Cumming
A Foreign Country by Charles Cumming (HarperCollins, £12.99)
View ArticleEvery Contact Leaves a Trace by Elanor Dymott
Every Contact Leaves a Trace by Elanor Dymott
View ArticleJephtha, Intermezzo and Double Bill: Buxton Festival
A number of familiar faces around me in the stalls showed that I am far from alone in journeying from Oxford to the glorious Peak District and the delights of the annual Buxton Festival. Well-judged...
View ArticleMark Padmore: Garsington Manor, Great Barn
To his many achievements, Mark Padmore can now add that of being the last professional artist to perform at Garsington Manor. With the Ingrams family poised to move out, Sunday’s recital was the third...
View ArticleWoodstock Music Society: St Mary Magdalene Church
Ah, lovely. It’s hard to imagine a more glorious rendition of Fauré’s sublime Requiem than that by Woodstock Music Society. With its emphasis on the calm, restful, tranquil aspects of death, rather...
View ArticleBattle Prom: Blenheim Palace
This open-air concert was one of those occasions that show the British people at their best. Tickets were expensive, but thousands turned up. The gates opened at 4.30pm, people began to set up their...
View ArticleHistory of Olympics: nasty, brutal and short
The Telegraph Book of the Olympics (Aurum Sport £20) is a collection of articles and readers’ letters chosen by Martin Smith, an ex-sports editor of the newspaper, starting with London 1908. The book...
View ArticleLocal author Frances Hardinge
Writer Frances Hardinge was persuaded to write her first children’s book by fellow Oxford author Rhiannon Lassiter, who then submitted it to her own editor at Macmillan publishers. The story, Fly By...
View ArticleNine sublime days of piano
Marios Papadopoulos talks about the festival which attracts the legend pianists
View ArticleFrench double bill: Bampton Opera, The Deanery Gardens, Bampton
Two evenings of perfect weather were Bampton Classical Opera’s reward for 20 years’ work unearthing 18th-century musical jewels (of various caratage), as summer finally arrived.
View ArticleOrchestra of St John's: Ashmolean Museum
After an intimate-scale performance of Walton’s Façade a month ago, conductor John Lubbock turned his attention to Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll at his latest OSJ Prom. As a programme note remarked: “The...
View ArticleThe Marriage of Figaro: Stowe Opera, Winslow hall
After a seven-year hiatus, Stowe Opera has risen phoenix-like at a new venue: the magnificent Winslow Hall, a Grade I-listed mansion situated just over the Buckinghamshire border. The house is now...
View ArticleGötterdämmerung: Longborough Festival Opera
Martin Graham styled them “the impossible-ists” — the doomy folk who claimed that Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle could never be satisfactorily presented in the little theatre fashioned from a barn beside...
View ArticleFalstaff and Yevgeny Onegin: Opera Holland Park
As with Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate, Verdi’s farewell gift to the world in the shape of his ebullient last opera Falstaff is a marked improvement on its Shakespearean original. This is chiefly because...
View ArticleSweeney Todd: Longborough Festival Opera
Stephen Sondheim succeeded Richard Wagner on Longborough’s stage last weekend. The focus was still on death and destruction, though — if that seen in Sweeney Todd was on a slightly more modest scale...
View ArticleCorona Strings: Deddington Church
Perverse: it’s a word you could use to describe a decision to found an orchestra that excludes wind and brass players. But there is plenty of varied repertoire for strings alone, as conductor Janet...
View ArticleAlexander Kobrin: Holywell Music Room
It’s straight down to business with Alexander Kobrin: there’s no exaggerated bowing to the audience or fiddling around with the piano stool. Moscow-born Kobrin was appearing as one of the recitalists...
View ArticleOxford Philomusica: Christ Church Cathedral
Saturday’s magnificent concert by the Oxford Philomusica, in the glorious setting of Christ Church Cathedral, marked both the end of the orchestra’s summer baroque series and the opening of its annual...
View ArticleOxfordshire County Youth Orchestra: Sheldonian Theatre
In the year of both the Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics, it was appropriate that the OCYO’s latest concert was an all-English affair, with music by Bax, Walton and Elgar. As always with this...
View ArticleWomad: Malmesbury, Wilshire
IT’S a Sunday evening, the sun is going down and inside an enormous blue marquee thousands of music-lovers are being treated to one of the most striking, stirring, and surreal spectacles of the summer.
View ArticleMidsomer in photographs
Midsomer, the fictional place where TV detective Insp Barnaby solved countless murders, has taken on a life of its own. It was even mentioned in reviews of the Olympics opening ceremony: “According to...
View ArticleAs Far As I Know by Roger McGough
McGough made his name as one of the “Liverpool poets”, having played in the band Scaffold with Paul McCartney’s brother. His poetry performances have always been sell-out successes, but his treatment...
View ArticlePreview of the Wilderness Festival, Cornbury Park
There was once a time when music festivals were all about . . . well, music. Try telling that to punters at this weekend’s Wilderness festival.
View ArticleThe Angry Planet: BBC Proms, Royal Albert Hall
As I walked across Hyde Park to the Royal Albert Hall on Sunday afternoon, there was a great roar of delight from inside the park’s giant Olympic video screen enclosure. Andy Murray was on his way to...
View ArticleMenahem Pressler, Oxford Philomusica Piano Festival: Sheldonian Theatre
‘Is he still alive and playing?” was the reaction when I mentioned I was going to hear Menahem Pressler.
View ArticleCream of the crop
UP to 20,000 folk-rock fans will today start arriving at the county’s longest-running festival — continuing a ritual which has continued since the hazy 1970s.
View ArticleSound reasons to celebrate
NICOLA LISLE talks to popular local pianist Jack Gibbons about his forthcoming piano series in Oxford
View ArticlePreview of charity recital by cellist Ghislaine McMullin at the Jacqueline du...
If you want to raise money for multiple sclerosis research by staging a recital, there can be no more appropriate venue than the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, named after the famous cellist who...
View ArticleProm concerts are back
After a successful launch last year, the Oxford Proms return for a second season, discovers Nicola Lisle
View ArticlePhoenix Piano Trio CD review
The Phoenix Piano Trio (Jonathan Stone, violin, Marie Macleod, cello, Sholto Kynoch, piano) is a comparatively recent creation.
View ArticleThe Grand Duke: Buxton Opera House
The Gilbert and Sullivan Opera Company made history with a rare fully-professional production of the final Savoy opera, The Grand Duke. A bold move, perhaps, as Gilbert’s storyline — involving a...
View ArticleCommunion Town by Sam Thompson
Thompson’s debut novel, longlisted for this year’s Man Booker prize, contains ten apparently unconnected stories about a constantly changing city or cities.The author teaches English at St Anne’s...
View ArticleTitian by Sheila Hale
Hale’s life of Titian, one of the world’s greatest artists, is the first biography to be published in more than 130 years. This is partly because so little is known about the painter, but Hale fills...
View ArticleLand Where I Flee by Prajwal Parajuly
Jan Lee on an ‘uncomfortable, satirical’ novel set in the Indian Himalayas
View ArticleSeasons of splendeur at Oxford Literary Festival
Maggie Hartford on a food writer who helped to transform our post-war diet
View ArticleAll sweetness and light with Candy Says and Chrysta Bell
Tim Hughes attends a jaw-dropping double bill
View ArticleLiterary tour celebrates Oxfordshire links with Dylan Thomas
THE Oxfordshire connections of legendary Welsh poet Dylan Thomas are to be celebrated with a special literary tour.
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