The week's classical music highlights

  • Music at Oxford
  • Opera Up Close
  • L’Elisir d’amore
  • The North Wall, Summertown
  • Tonight (Friday), 7.30pm
  • Tickets: 01865 319450 or thenorthwall.com

Donizetti’s popular comic opera is given a Hollywood-style makeover in this production by one of the UK’s most adventurous small-scale opera companies. Director Valentina Ceschi has transported the action to a 1950s garden party, capturing all the glamour of Hollywood’s Golden Age, with piano, viola and sax. Anyone who came to the OperaUpClose productions of La Bohème and The Barber of Seville won’t want to miss this.

St Giles Orchestra

  • TOTALLY TCHAIKOVSKY
  • Cornerstone, Didcot
  • Saturday, 7.30pm
  • Tickets: 01235 515144 or cornerstone-arts.org

Get in the Christmas spirit early with highlights from Tchaikovsky’s festive ballet The Nutcracker, as well as other favourites including the Marche Slave, Capriccio Italien and excerpts from his opera Eugene Onegin. Suitable for all the family.

Oxford Philomusica

The Oxford Philomusica — which celebrated its 15th birthday last week — continues its Beethoven Festival with two magnificent symphonies, the so-called ‘little’ No.8 in F Major and the glorious No. in F Major, the ‘Pastoral’. The programme also includes the Piano Concerto No.2 in B flat major, with soloist Marios Papadopoulos.

Oxford Symphony Orchestra

  • WAGNER BICENTENARY CONCERT
  • Oxford Town Hall, St Aldates, Oxford
  • Saturday, November 23
  • 01865 305305 or oxford symphony orchestra.org

Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. Siegfried’s Rhine Journey from act one of Götterdämmerung Siegfried’s death and funeral music from Götterdämmerung. Brunnhilde’s immolation from Götterdämmerung.