A platform to showcase music

If it wasn't for the traffic noise, in the next few days you could stand at the junction of Longwall and High Street, and almost hear two different pianists at once, one through each ear. That's because the Oxford Philomusica's tenth International Piano Festival and Summer Academy will be taking place in the Holywell Music Room, and also just across Magdalen Bridge at the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building.

A mixture of masterclasses, lectures, and concerts, the festival is the brainchild of the Philomusica's music director, Marios Papadopoulos.

"It began as a by-product of the orchestra," Marios explained when we met up. "Because I'm a pianist, I wanted to feature the instrument within the Philomusica organisation. It is wonderful to enable young students to converge on Oxford, utilise the beautiful venues we have here, and give them training. It all seems right.

"We've got students coming who are on the verge of international careers. This year, we've got the top prizewinner in the Rubinstein competition, just coming to study. And we have a 12-year-old boy - I was watching him on a DVD, directing a Mozart piano concerto from the keyboard. He's a little genius."

Marios Papadopoulos himself may have been described as a little genius in his time, but if so he is far too modest to admit it. Born in Cyprus in the 1950s, he doesn't come from a musical family.

"My parents were brought up in small places where music was certainly not in abundance. But there was a great uncle in the family, who played the violin. Apparently, when I was five and a half, I could pick up tunes from the radio, and go and play them on a toy piano. So he suggested to my family that perhaps I had a musical ear. He also had a sister, who ran a piano conservatory in Nicosia, so I was taken to her for lessons.

"Two years after I began to play, I could play movements from a concerto. At that time, the famous pianist Gina Bachauer was visiting the island, and it was arranged that I should play to her. She was adamant that I should come to the UK and study."

With the tenth piano festival imminent, it seems as if Marios has always been part of Oxford's musical life. But that isn't the case. I asked him how he came to pick the city as a centre for his work.

"It was in 1973. I'd won my category in the Young Musician of the Year competition - the competition was far less glamorous than it is today. There was no television coverage, and you could make music in those days! I was given a string of engagements up and down the country as a result, and I was invited to appear with the Oxford Pro Musica orchestra. It went very well, and I was invited back.

"I realised then the potential Oxford had, not only to develop musically, but also to offer me what I was looking for, a platform to showcase my work, a platform to play for a discerning audience. I have never been comfortable touring. I prefer to come back to the same audience and speak with them - exchange ideas on a regular basis. When people say after a concert: I was interested in the way you twisted that phrase tonight,' that means a lot to an artist. So I felt that I could perhaps develop something in the city. I feel that I have, to a certain degree, achieved that."

Marios formed the Oxford Philomusica orchestra in 1998, and it gave its first concert that November - not in Oxford, but at the Barbican in London. Then, as now, most of the players are based in London, so I wondered if it was difficult to get them to form a firm bond with Oxford.

"At the beginning, it was very difficult. We are a freelance orchestra, like many others in the UK. But over the years, as we've increased the amount of work we're offering the musicians, we have also increased loyalty. So, in other words, you will meet the same people playing in the orchestra at each concert. The busier the orchestra becomes, the better it will be, because it will meet and rehearse together more regularly."

The orchestra's tenth birthday celebrations this November will take the form of a complete cycle of Beethoven's symphonies and piano concertos, performed in the Sheldonian Theatre, with Marios Papadopoulos as both soloist and conductor. Beethoven is as sure a box-office winner as it's possible to predict, but I wondered if, over the last ten years, Marios had felt any conflict between the need to play it safe, and a desire to programme less well-known music.

"I'm very much aware that, for the orchestra to survive, we've got to provide programmes that are popular enough to yield a high box-office revenue. But we're very fortunate that Oxford is virgin territory as far as orchestral provision is concerned. Long gone are the days when the Bournemouth and Birmingham orchestras would come regularly.

"More or less, therefore, we've got a situation where we can programme anything we like. But I want to emphasise this: we are here to serve our public. So if the public wants to hear a Beethoven symphony because there is no other opportunity in Oxford to hear it played by a professional orchestra, then we will programme it.

"So we constantly try to do programmes that appeal to the wider public on the one hand, while at the same time allowing me, and members of my artistic team, to include things that we as musicians find more interesting at times. But, of course, it's always a challenge to come back to a symphony that you've done a hundred million times before and see it afresh. I do not like performances that are run-of-the-mill. You cannot sit on the fence, you've got to say something. Otherwise what's the point of doing it?"

The International Piano Festival and Summer Academy runs from Wednesday until August 6. The Oxford Philomusica's Beethoven Festival takes place November 9-28. For full details of both events visit www.oxfordphil.com