TV’s favourite physicist is the stand-out name at this year’s May Music Festival, Oxford’s annual showcase for science and the arts.
Prof Brian Cox makes a welcome return with an illustrated lecture based on his BBC series Wonders of the Solar System. Appropriately, this will be followed by Holst’s The Planets, in the composer’s little-known arrangement for two pianos. The piece will be performed by Katya Apekisheva and Ashley Waas.
Apekisheva and the Goldner String Quartet are this year’s musicians in residence, and will appear together in one of the festival’s highlights, a Benjamin Britten celebration, which features his String Quartet and Suite for Violin and Piano, alongside the Violin Sonata by Britten’s teacher, Frank Bridge. For this they will be joined by violinist Jack Liebeck, the festival’s artistic director and co-founder.
Popular baritone Roderick Williams continues the Britten celebrations with songs by Britten, Bridge, Vaughan Williams and other English composers, focusing on settings of poems by the likes of Shakespeare, Yeats, Hardy and Houseman.
The festival ends with a gala concert, which features Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Mendelssohn’s String Octet.
In between will be lectures, all helping to fuse together the two main strands of music and science.
“It’s got more immediately attractive things than we often have,” says administrative director Brian Foster, who founded the festival with Mr Liebeck in 2008. “The finale is selling extremely well, and Brian of course is extremely well known.”
May 1-6
oxfordmay music.co.uk
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