Nicola Lisle talks to the Oxford Chamber Music Festival’s Priya Mitchell

Priya Mitchell is a very difficult person to get hold of. The Oxford-born violinist has a busy freelance career that takes her all over the world, and when I catch up with her to chat about this year’s Oxford Chamber Music Festival, she has just arrived in Dusseldorf.

But she will be back in Oxford later this month for the festival that she founded in 2000, and which has become very much her baby.

The baby analogy is an appropriate one, because this year’s theme, ‘From a tender age’, focuses on all aspects of childhood – from the innocence and joy of youth, the fantasy worlds that children occupy and the sense of loss as childhood gradually becomes a distant memory.

“I have very hazy memories of my own childhood,” Priya tells me. “Sometimes I have triggers of my childhood memories through music that has been written about childhood. It’s very evocative for me, so I thought it would be nice to put together music that has been important for me and also to explore music by the great composers.

“A lot of it is about beginnings, early opuses, experiments that young composers made before they went on to greater things. We always think of the Wunderkinder as Mendelssohn and Mozart, but there are so many other composers who are not so well known.”

As an example, she cites the Austrian composer Erich Korngold, who enjoyed a brief period of fame while exiled in Hollywood during the Second World War, but whose music sank into obscurity after the war. Korngold features in the Wunderkinder concert on the Friday night, when Priya will be playing his Violin Sonata Op.6, written when he was just fifteen.

Also featured in the Wunderkinder concert are early works by Schubert, Schumann and Brahms.

As the audience arrives for the opening concert, the musicians will set the tone for the entire festival by playing Steve Reich’s dramatic Different Trains, which reflects on children journeying into an unknown future.

For some, that ‘unknown future’ was dying young, and an early evening concert at Merton College Chapel, To the memory of an angel, includes Berg’s violin concerto of that name, written after the death of Mahler’s 18-year-old daughter from polio in 1935.

The festival is not all about poignancy and tragedy, though. A brunch concert for adults and children focuses on some of the more fun pieces written for or about children, including Ravel’s Mother Goose, Saint-Saëns’ The Elephant, a little-known Mozart piece Bread and Butter and many more.

There is also a nod to the 150th anniversary of Alice in Wonderland with a lunchtime concert featuring a chamber version of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and an improvised musical journey through Wonderland, narrated by popular children’s author Philip Pullman.

There is also the free, candlelit late-night concert on Friday.

The festival itself has come a long way since its birth as an informal gathering of friends, maturing over 15 years into an event with international status.

“A lot of the festival’s success is down to the audience in Oxford, which is the most engaged, loyal and passionate I’ve encountered,” Priya says.

Where and when
Oxford Chamber Music Festival. Sept 30-Oct 3. Holywell Music Room, Merton College Chapel and The Vaults Café. Details ocmf.net