It’s a bit like a novelist starting a new book with a blank sheet of paper. Where to start? As the Oxford Philomusica orchestra begins a new season, and enters its second decade playing to local audiences, I asked music director Marios Papadopoulos how he decides what to put on the menu.

“We’ve got virgin territory here in Oxford. So, basically, we serve the community, and whatever it wants us to put on, we’ll put on. If they want a Beethoven Five, they will have a Beethoven Five.

“Unashamedly, we will do the core repertoire over and over again, if this is what people want. We would never get bored with it. I would be happy doing Beethoven or Brahms symphonies for the rest of my life.

“But we also like to do things we haven’t done before: we’re a serious arts organisation, so we need to explore different musical territories. Finally, there has to be a balance between the innovative and the standard, in order to attract audiences to our concerts.”

But there must be thousands of pieces the Philomusica could present, innovative and standard. Something must focus Marios’s mind?

“This year we are highlighting the individual players within the orchestra. So we’ve planned concerts aimed at showing off their talents. That’s the theme behind the season. Also, we are completing our Brahms series, which we started off in the spring.”

Brahms, Marios went on to explain, was a forming influence on his life. “I was a boy of probably around nine or ten when my parents gave me my first turntable gramophone. Somebody must have given me a vinyl LP of Sviatoslav Richter playing the Brahms second piano concerto, and I fell in love with the piece. It was one of my first memories of classical music.”

It was the same for me, except that the LP in question featured Brahms’s first piano concerto. I managed to scratch the disc in the middle of the long orchestral introduction, and to this day I wait nervously for the resulting loud clicking sound to start, even though the LP is long gone.

“Tell me where the passage is, and I will scratch my foot on the floor at the appropriate moment!” Marios laughed — he is to play both Brahms piano concertos on December 3, in a concert that will mark his 100th appearance at the Sheldonian. Did he think he’d ever reach such a milestone?

“Not in my wildest dreams. And, if I may add, I don’t think anyone else thought that we would last for as long as we have.”

Marios is not actually going to conduct the Oxford Philomusica at all on that 100th appearance, concentrating instead on playing Brahms’s two massive concertos one after the other. Is there a more formidable challenge for a pianist than that?

“I’m not sure,” Marios replied with a perhaps slightly nervous laugh. “There’s a fiendishly difficult passage in the last movement of the second concerto, with double thirds in the right hand.

“But I’m hoping that, having played the first concerto already, by the time I get to that passage I’m going to be warm enough to be able to play it!”

How long, I asked, does it take to prepare for a performance like that? By tradition, the soloist in a piano concerto never has the music in front of him or her, so it’s surely a prodigious feat of memory quite apart from anything else?

“Let’s hope the memory doesn’t let me down: it’s something you can never guard against. A week or ten days beforehand, I tend to practise a performance — don’t let the performance be a surprise, that’s something my mentor Vladimir Ashkenazy taught me. It’s probably one of the best lessons I’ve ever had. Gear yourself up. It’s like getting into match practice.”

The original blank sheet of paper has duly been filled up with a new series of 14 concerts — not all of them strictly classical: there’s a tribute to Ronnie Scott’s Big Band, for instance. Plus something Marios Papadopoulos is plainly rather proud of.

“I don’t know whether I should boast about this, but in our ten years in Oxford we haven’t played Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. We thought, ‘what shall we do with it?’, so we’ve decided to couple it with Piazzolla, the master of the tango, and call it The Eight Seasons.

“It should be a fascinating musical experience.”

n Full details of Oxford Philomusica’s new season are on oxfordphil.com. Telephone bookings can be made on 0208 4501060.