Elgar’s magnificent piano quintet is one of his last masterpieces, written at the end of the Great War which destroyed the world he had grown up in, with all its stability and self-confidence. Here Elgar’s inimitable grandeur, with its usual traces of doubt, encloses a deeply moving, elegiac slow movement, and indeed echoes of the war itself. Before the quintet, MacMillan’s haunting meditation on the wood of Christ’s cross, and Sally Beamish’s commission for our 2018 Festival, about leaving her Scottish home of many years, to return to England.

MacMillan Kiss on wood | Sally Beamish The Flittin’ | Elgar Piano quintet, op.84

Every year the Oxford Chamber Music Festival brings together some of the most exciting classical musicians in Europe to live and play together for a week. Creative sparks fly as the musicians change musical partners and master the widest variety of sound-worlds.

This year’s festival celebrates the infinite variety of music from the British Isles, across four centuries and four nations: from Celtic folk influences to English pastoral; from Renaissance fantasy to Radiohead; from the internationally-celebrated Vaughan Williams, Elgar and Britten to hidden treasures and exciting finds by composers you may not even have heard of – yet!