An opera without singers, a Strauss orchestra of just 16, and an early music ensemble playing Mahler: welcome to the Oxford Lieder Festival, where familiar repertoire is getting a reboot this year thanks to some brilliantly ambitious programming.
When it comes to classical music, we’re used to living in a bifurcated world. On the one hand, you have the contemporary ensembles: the orchestras, choirs and quartets performing pretty much everything from Mozart onwards. And on the other the early music groups, whose territory is everything that’s left — Bach, Byrd, Hildegard of Bingen.
It’s only fairly recently, and thanks to groups such as the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, that this crude, artificial divide has been challenged. Symphony orchestras are increasingly looking back in time (and not with Karajan-style colonising instincts), and so-called early music groups are extending their gaze right through to the end of the 19th-century, giving us a new, sepia-tinted window on to works whose familiar colours have been painted on by modern hands.
But period performance is one thing when it means a 100-strong OAE performing Wagner under Simon Rattle, quite another when it’s just 16 players summoning the pillowy depth and expanse of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier score, with not so much as a single singer to help them.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in