Freigeist

As a child I sang in the school choir and I learnt piano and violin for 10 and 8 years respectively. I've never practised enough to get anywhere close to compensating for my talentless attempts simply to play the right notes at the right time - I much prefer making music with others where we can hide each other's mistakes and I love sounding better than the some of just my part.

This week is the fabulous Oxford Chamber Music Festival. Every year the musical director, violinist Priya Mitchell, takes a theme that would never have occurred to me and programmes music to fit. I hear music I don't know and music I do know in a new way. She finds exceptionally talented performers from across Europe and wider who inhabit the music and very clearly love playing with each other. I was introduced to my two favourite cellists - Sheku Kanneh-Mason and Abel Selaocoe - at OCMF (different years).

This year's theme is Freigeist (approximately: free-spiritiedness) and today's lunchtime concert was called Gypsy Heart. I didn't know that traditionally Gypsy dance music was mostly sung not instrumental, but that in Europe back then playing music was a barrier to heaven (Taliban, anyone?) so musicians were mostly people with a different belief system, i.e. Gypsies and they took up instruments. I did know that Hungary and Romania had larger Gypsy populations than further west but I didn't know quite how much Brahms, Dvorak and even Haydn were influenced by Gypsy rhythms. I've known Brahms's Hungarian Dances since I was very young and they probably were an important source of my attraction to 'classical' music but I didn't know that he spent a lot of time with gypsy musicians and that their rhythms are identifiable in lots of his music.

The programme notes are fascinating but far, far better than the knowings are the feelings and wow, how the musicians that Priya chooses share those.

So I went to this evening's concert too, entitled 'Angelic, Demonic, Prophetic'. I cried a little less than at lunchtime.

Highlights in every piece: the resonance between ppp and silence. In the last piece this evening the silence hung in the air for about a minute before there was room for the applause.

This extraordinary festival is not well publicised and there are empty seats. Let me know if you want to come next year.