Soprano Ella Taylor with pianist Jocelyn Freeman | Photo: Richard Longman

After London, Oxford is possibly the most musical city in the UK. Its university colleges provide nightly chamber concerts, organ recitals and evensong. It has a busy Philharmonic Orchestra and several choirs and is visited by various UK opera companies. It also has its annual autumnal International Festival of Song, which last year changed its name from Oxford Lieder.

Over the last 23 years  this festival has become much more than a celebration of European chamber music with guaranteed biggies like Das Lied von der Erde or Winterreise. Both were represented in 2024, but so was (for example) Indian music, with four events exploring the relationship of song and the Bhagavad Gita. There were also masterclasses with the likes of Dame Sarah Connolly tutoring. Add into that mix the now-annual Schubert weekend and a number of new compositions, and you have a powerful celebration of the human voice.

Oxford in autumn can be damp, with evening concerts presenting a challenge to those tempted to stay home during the dark, rain-drenched evenings of October, but morning and lunchtime events at the Holywell Music Room were popular with the older audience. Sometimes there were as many as six events in a day, keeping this venue, the oldest public music room in Britain, busy.

The festival opened worthily on 11 October with Haydn settings of verses by the English poet Anne Hunter and sung by Elizabeth Watts with great lyric beauty. Festival director, Sholto Kynoch accompanied on the Steinway. Interestingly these were works that coincided with the visit of Joseph Haydn to Oxford. But Kynoch admitted in his introduction that the Esterhazy court composer probably never actually performed in the Holywell Music Room. 'Papa' Haydn was just too big a name when he visited in the 1790s and definitely would have played across the road in Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre. It is a sign of the festival’s self-confidence that six days later it booked Brahms’ Liebeslieder Walzes at the music rooms while the Oxford Philharmonic were belting out Tchaikovsky’s 5^th Symphony, just a two-minute walk away.

The Monday 15^th, Hanns Eisler’s setting of Brecht songs traced the dramatist’s interwar move to the United States from Germany. The title of the concert, 'Hollywood Song Book' was deliberately misleading. Here were no sweeping Korngoldian phrases of the kind German exiles later contributed to Hollywood, and certainly no brazen showtunes, but rather a dark exploration of the poet looking backwards (in German) and forward (in English) to what music might mean in exile. Introducing his inevitable encore the baritone, Holger Falk (making his festival debut) offered 'Und ich werde nicht mehr sehen', an account of bereavement that he called particularly sad when Europe was once again at war.

Thursday 17 October was a Radio 3 sponsored day with radio presenter Ian Skelly introducing four recitals that featured the BBC’s New Generation Artists scheme and would be broadcast on Radio 3 the following week. The crystal-clear voice of Elizabeth Watts brought alive songs by Richard Strauss, Schubert and Britten while adding some comic moments with her wonderfully expressive face.

A 'Revolution' Day on Friday 18 October opened with a lecture on Byron as champion of the underdog and master of wit by Professor Fiona Stafford of Somerville College. The lecture was followed by a recital of Byronic works on the themes of exile and sacrifice. The soprano Ella Taylor had co-curated, with pianist Jocelyn Freeman, a lunchtime concert of 15 short pieces that included extracts from a life of Byron And Don Juan that is currently being written by the youthful Emily Hazrati. At 26, Hazrati is composer in residence at Oxford International Song Festival and her complete witty song cycle will be presented next year, hopefully sung by Taylor whose vocal sparkle and twinkling eye brought alive the lyrics of Joseph Spence.

The first weekend was devoted to Schubert. There has never been an Oxford Festival that has not featured the King of Lieder and this was Oxford’s third annual Schubert Weekend. It concluded with Wintereisse, sung by baritone Christopher Maltman with his wife, Audrey Saint-Gil at the piano. The venue was the substantial Church of St John The Evangelist, a suburban arts & crafts building with a finely decorated nave and sparkling acoustics. The capacity audience, however, only had eyes for Maltman, who is a thoroughly engaging presence on  stage. He paced himself assuredly through the 24 songs, sometimes plunging into the next and sometimes leaning on the open-lidded Steinway as if to catch an emotional breath. After rapturous applause, he told the audience us that it was almost impossible to provide an encore to Winterreise but added 'I only said “almost.”' He then treated us to Wanderers 'Nachtlied II' which was based on a poem written on a wall by Goethe as a youth and rediscovered by him 50 years later. The song promised 'peace' and sent everyone serenely out into the cold dark air in search of their taxis.

France was represented by the pre-eminent baritone Stéphane Degout in a late night recital of Fauré songs and by Marie-Laure Garnier in a lunchtime concert of American spirituals and some cabaret-style jazz by William Bolcom. With its elements of audience participation, this mini concert left everyone with a rare smile on their face. It was followed by a 5:15pm 'Rush Hour Concert' – a good idea because by 6:15pm the worst of the Oxford traffic has departed. 'Songs of the Angels' was a simple but brilliant idea: nine short Schubert songs (mainly pastoral)  paired with nine short Catalan folk songs. The singer was the divine Montserrat Seró and the accompanist guitarist Bernardo Rambeaud, who had arranged Schubert for guitar (something that the King himself was not averse to). The crossover elements were extraordinarily clear, so much so that Rambeaud used the Hurdy Gurdy Man refrain to introduce the unaccompanied Catalan song 'La Mort i la Donzella' (Death and the Maiden).

If this ambitious festival has a flaw, it is its unrelenting seriousness. We live in serious times and our universal concerns are well reflected in the choice of repertoire, but it was an utter relief on the last night to have Scots tenor Nicky Spence doff his white tie and give us cabaret in the second half of his set. We even had audience participation up on stage in Noel Coward’s 'Every Little Fish'. Spence, a fine Peter Grimes when he gets the chance, actually told the audience they could clap when they wished and not to be constrained by the asterisks in the programme that indicated applause. He even managed to elide from Schubert’s 'An die Musik' to ABBA’s Thank You for the Music. It was just the what we needed. Without doubt this is the most ambitious song event in Britain, showcasing what the human voice can achieve.But hopefully Haydn and Schubert would have roared with laughter at the end, and rightly so. The voice is also an instrument for comedy. 

The Oxford International Song Festival ran 11 to 26 October 2024 and featured 70 events over 16 days. oxfordsong.org