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Cornbury Festival preview
5:00am Thursday 2nd July 2009
REG LITTLE looks ahead to next weekend’s Cornbury Festival
Have your say »Ramadan Moon
8:40am Thursday 2nd July 2009
Oxford illustrator Shirin Adl, who grew up in Iran, has collaborated with Muslim convert Na’ima Robert to produce Ramadan Moon (Frances Lincoln, £11.99) a lyrical picture book which captures the spirit of the festival for young children.
Return to childhood haunts
8:40am Thursday 2nd July 2009
Nicholas Shakespeare, former literary editor of the Daily Telegraph, acclaimed novelist and biographer, meets me in the St. Giles Café, a tiny, 1960s-era time capsule. The small, bustling place is lorded over by a lady owner who, following an hour’s wide-ranging conversation, barks at us: “You’ve been here for over an hour now. I have a business to run and I don’t want to turn away customers.”
Return of the Fat Man
8:30am Thursday 2nd July 2009
IDNIGHT FUGUE Reginald Hill (HarperCollins, £17.99)
Perelandra: Keble College
4:02pm Wednesday 1st July 2009
History was in the making last week in Oxford, when an opera that has lain dormant for over 40 years was finally given a long-overdue showing. Perelandra, based on C.S. Lewis’s novel of the same name, was written in the early 1960s by Donald Swann (of Flanders and Swann fame) and librettist David Marsh, together successfully exploiting the operatic qualities that Lewis himself saw in his novel. The libretto, which Lewis considered “stunningly good”, was overlaid with Swann’s richly melodic score, which drew on sources ranging from the classical traditions to Greek folk song, to produce an immensely dramatic and compelling work.
Local author
3:49pm Wednesday 1st July 2009
Oxford-born journalist Ros Wynne-Jones, who as a student worked at The Oxford Times during her holidays, has published her first novel.
Nightmare led to bestselling book
3:37pm Wednesday 1st July 2009
In the early summer of 2005, crime writer Simon Kernick was reaching the final stages of his fifth novel, a hefty, heavily researched thriller that “touched on the area of terrorism”. Then, on the morning of July 7, four young men joined the throngs of London commuters on their way to work carrying rucksacks stuffed full with explosives.
Oxford Bach Choir: Sheldonian Theatre
9:31am Thursday 25th June 2009
The Oxford Bach Choir broke new ground last Saturday – and had they not done so, one might have suspected more than a touch of midsummer madness – with a programme of Gershwin (a Gershwin Portrait comprising many of his greatest hits, arranged by Mac Huff) followed by Kern and Hammerstein’s Show Boat in an abridged concert performance. There may have been the occasional Oxford accent on the Broadway stage, but the overwhelming experience, delivered with crispness and rhythmic verve, and much enjoyed and appreciated by the audience, was of a choir responding with enthusiasm and musical skill to this repertoire far removed from its staple fare of the classical choral masterpieces.
Mirandolina: Garsington Opera
9:29am Thursday 25th June 2009
Carlo Goldoni was a comedy writer so prolific – with more than 150 plays to his name, plus several dozen libretti – that our own Sir Alan Ayckbourn (72 plays so far, and rising) looks costive in comparison. Garsington has in the past delighted audiences with two Haydn operas for which he supplied the words, Il mondo della luna and La pescatrici (which is being given this year by Bampton Opera on July 17 and 18). Now, in its 20th year, the festival offers a third in the British premiere of Bohuslav Martinu’s Mirandolina.
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