This year’s Oxford Chamber Music Festival promises “some of the greatest pieces in the history of chamber music”. But, like previous festivals this isn’t simply a showcase of the standard classics. Yes, there are works by some of the giants of the 18th and 19th century — Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms, for example. But 20th-century classics are equally represented — by Berg, Bartok, Shostakovich and Stravinsky, as well as works by more recent composers Berio, Cage and Birtwistle.

Priya Mitchell, the artistic director of the festival, says the idea for this year’s event came to her while visiting the Byzantium exhibition at the British Museum earlier in the year.

“I had been looking at lots of icons and got the idea of presenting both iconic and iconoclastic works,” she said.

Some of the works in the programme, Mozart’s Dissonance String Quartet or Beethoven’s Kreutzer Violin Sonata, for example, can certainly lay claim to iconic status. I asked Priya about some of the 20th-century pieces. Did she see Alban Berg’s Piano Sonata as iconic or iconoclastic?

“We’ll it’s both,” she said. “It’s his opus 1 but already it’s a masterpiece.”

Bartok’s Sonata for Solo Violin is another work we agree can be considered both iconic and iconoclastic — indeed most of the works in the programme can be seen this way. All charted new musical territory at the time they were written and most later came to be seen as masterpieces.

Among modern iconoclasts the American composer John Cage is famous, if not infamous, for his prepared pianos and weird sound experiments. This year’s festival offers a rare chance to ‘hear’ Cage’s 4’33” — a work for any combination of instruments, in which the performers do not play.

The work is often described as consisting of silence, but Cage saw the ‘performance’ as being the ambient sounds the audience hear around them while the musicians are on stage. Cage studied and was influenced by Zen Buddhism.

4’33” will be preceded by Cage’s Living Room music, a cacophony of sound performed on household utensils.

And before this, comes another rarity — Mozart’s Würfelspiel (dice music). Games in which dice were used to determine the ordering of musical phrases were popular in the 18th century. For this performance the audience will help randomly arrange the two-bar phrases in Mozart’s manuscript. After the contemplative stillness of 4’33” the concert will close with Schubert’s sublime String Quintet in C, D956. It promises to be a lot of fun.

There are 14 musicians listed in the programme, compared to the 25 or so appearing last year, and the festival has been trimmed back to four days. The financial climate is tough, Priya said, but there is no paring back on quality.

Ivry Gitlis returns to the festival having appeared previously in 2004 and 2007. One of the great violinists of his generation, Gitlis, now 89, will be teaching a masterclass along with other festival artists — surely a must as observers can attend for free. He will also star in an evening of ‘spontaneous music making’ at the Vaults and Garden Restaurant. The ‘chamberjam’ at the Vaults was one of the highlights of last year’s festival — a perfect evening of convivial music-making and good food. In another concert, Gitlis will read from Tolstoy’s short story, The Kreuzer Sonata, between performances of the sonatas by that name by Janacek and Beethoven. The violinist has acted in several films, for example playing the hypnotist in Francois Truffaut’s The Story of Adele H. “He has a wonderful reading voice,” Priya said.

Other familiar faces include Daniel Rowland, pictured, lead violinist of the Brodsky Quartet, who will perform the Bartok sonata, and the oboist Nicholas Daniel, who plays Berio’s Sequenza VII.

New to the festival this year is the German pianist Alexander Lonquich.

Lonquich will play, the Berg sonata and also the wonderful Schubert Fantasy in F minor, D940, for four hands. The second pianist joining him in the Schubert will be his wife, Christina Barbuti.

Another star pianist is the young Russian artist Polina Leschenko, a protégé of the great Martha Argerich. Gramophone described her as having “technical dexterity in abundance, and signs of a major artist in the making” She will perform Mendelssohn’s Double Concerto for Violin, Piano and Strings, with Priya playing violin, in the festival finale concert. As an added bonus, Sister Wendy Beckett, famous for her art history programmes on BBC television, will give an illustrated talk on icons.

  • The festival runs from September 30 to October 3. For more information visit festival website ocmf.net