The Oxford Concert Party: Holywell Music Room (From The Oxford Times)

The Oxford Concert Party: Holywell Music Room

3:35pm Wednesday 17th February 2010 in Leisure By Giles Woodforde

Can it really be six years since I last saw the Oxford Concert Party, enlivening St Barnabas Church in the company of some swirling Russian folk dancers? Since then, OCP has been based in the Lake District, while expanding its work in prisons, and at Kidlington’s Campsfield House. So this concert, played to a near-capacity audience, was a public welcome home, plus a chance to raise funds for OCP’s pioneering work.

“Dull?” I wrote six years ago, “OCP doesn’t know the meaning of the word.” Clad in an array of colourful waistcoats, the group (artistic director Arne Richards, plus Isabel Knowland, Gregory Warren Wilson, James Sleigh, Trevor Burley, and Lucy Hare) duly proceeded to zip up the staid Holywell atmosphere. “Since we were last here, they’ve put bars across the windows, which makes us feel very much at home,” Arne remarked, as OCP despatched a William Boyce symphony in double-quick time.

Then it was on to another of OCP’s loves: the championing of little known composers, and quirky corners of the repertoire – the quirkier the better. There was music from an OCP favourite, the Scottish James Scott Skinner (“great composer, dreadful fiddler,” we were told), and there were contributions from Irish composer Carolan (“Do you know why he’s said to buried in 37 different places?”). In each case, slow, introspective numbers were followed by fast dances, thereby heightening the impact of each individual piece. A haunting setting of Yeats’s poem The Cloths of Heaven was particularly poignant.

After the interval, Richards switched from piano accordion to bandoneón (“an instrument that has given me great misery for ten years”) for spicy tangos from the legendary Piazzolla. And there was a Richards original too – composed in honour of an unfortunate incident involving a bicycle in Blenheim Park . . . As always with OCP, real musical skill was combined with an infectiously enthusiastic approach.