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Preview of Oxford Trobadors, Holywell Music Room

2:47pm Wednesday 8th February 2012

Anyone who saw the Oxford Trobadors at the Holywell Music Room last year will want to catch them in action again next week.

Preview of Alfred Brendel masterclass

3:04pm Wednesday 1st February 2012

Legendary pianist Alfred Brendel will be in Oxford this month for two events which may be the last opportunities we have to hear him play in public.

Nigel Kennedy: The New Theatre, Oxford

2:08pm Wednesday 25th January 2012

On the penultimate date of his UK Tour, acclaimed composer and performer Nigel Kennedy brought Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons and his own creation The Four Elements to The New Theatre. The concert was certainly one of two halves. Pre-interval, Kennedy — sporting a surprising hairstyle and similarly extraordinary garb, of chain-covered trousers and over-sized rumpled shirt — supported by his Orchestra of Life, reinvented The Four Seasons. Kennedy, who could easily be described as a violin-wielding vagrant, guided his orchestra through the classic not with a baton, but with a series of wild hand gestures and enthusiastic nods, before breaking into unexpected electric violin solos. This particular rendition is known as ‘The Kennedy re-write’, and while definitely entertaining it would be perhaps more favoured by fans of Kennedy than fans of Vivaldi.

City of Oxford Orchestra's Viennese New Year Concert

2:00pm Wednesday 25th January 2012

Beaming conductor Stephen Bell told Friday’s audience at the Sheldonian that he foresaw complaints in The Oxford Times over his exclusion of The Blue Danube from the City of Oxford Orchestra’s Viennese New Year Concert. Well, here is a mention of the omission, if emphatically not a complaint, there being so much to compensate for it in the programme, besides Johann Strauss II’s glorious Emperor Waltz, with its triumphant drumrolls and brass, that was the ostensible substitute.

4 Girls 4 Harps

9:02am Thursday 19th January 2012

For a quartet with a difference you could do a lot worse than 4 Girls 4 Harps — a group that does exactly what it says on the tin. The harp is traditionally the instrument of angels, and this quartet certainly played in angelic style, in a varied programme that was interspersed with informal chat about the pieces they were playing.

Preview of Showaddywaddy: Dorchester Abbey

8:49am Thursday 19th January 2012

The 1970s band Showaddywaddy will be shaking the rafters at Dorchester Abbey at the end of this month to help raise funds for the Nasio Trust, a Christian charity formed in 2003 to help care for HIV orphans in Kenya.

EUBO: St John the Evangelist

2:34pm Friday 30th December 2011

It’s quite a surprise to discover any European Union institution that’s not quaking in its financial boots. Yet the European Union Baroque Orchestra (EUBO) is able to go on comparatively undisturbed. “We’ve managed to stay above a lot of the problems in Europe because we have quite a small budget, relatively speaking,” EUBO director general Paul James told me in an Oxford Times interview.