Instruments of Time and Truth

New College School Choral Society

New College School Chamber Choir

Thomas Neal Conductor

IT&T join the combined choirs of New College School for a Henry Purcell’s masque adaption of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Robert Quinney directs the choir of New College with Sebastian Hill as the evangelist.

Tickets, free - but must be booked in advacne

Instruments of Time and Truth

Oxford Bach Choir

Benjamin Nicholas Conductor

300 years after its first performance, the Oxford Bach Choir performs the St John Passion.

The shorter of Bach’s great settings of the Passion story, this is arguably the more dramatic, engulfing listeners and performers alike from first to last. The days leading up to the crucifixion of Christ are dramatically narrated by the Evangelist, beginning with his arrest following the Last Supper and following him through his trials, death, and burial. This narrative is interspersed with vivid evocations of various moments in the action, in which the chorus features prominently, at one moment portraying a bloodthirsty mob, next anguished believers, then with moving meditations on various aspects of the story.

In Bach’s masterpiece, recitatives, arias, and chorales are woven into an extraordinary whole, evoking by turns terror, joy, longing, and hope.

The St John Passion has been in the repertoire of the Oxford Bach Choir for over a century, and this latest performance promises to be another memorable occasion.

Instruments of Time & Truth

Soloists Miriam Allan, Kate Symmonds-Joy, David de Winter, Christopher Webb

Directed by Christopher Bucknall

IT&T Student Vocal Consort

Join Instruments of Time and Truth - Oxford's period instrument orchestra - for a programme which includes the sumptuous vocal works from one the seventeenth centuries pre-eminent female composers, Chiara Margarita Cozzolani. A crack consort of the country's finest consort singers will work alongside members of Instruments of Time & Truth and a select group of Oxford’s student singers to bring this extraordinary music to life.

Summertown Choral Society

Instruments of Time and Truth

Duncan Saunderson Conductor

Mozart “Great” Mass in C Minor

H. Purcell Funeral Music for Queen Mary

H. Purcell They that go down to the sea in ships

Mozart’s ‘Great’ Mass in C minor was composed in Vienna in 1782/3 and is regarded as one of his finest works. Scored for large orchestra and double choir, it shows the influence of Bach and Handel, whom Mozart had been enthusiastically studying. The soprano solos, written for his wife Constanze, are some of the most ravishing soprano solos he ever wrote. She too adored the work of Bach and Handel and the Mass has been described as a love offering to her.

Purcell’s Funeral Music for Queen Mary was first performed in 1695 in Westminster Abbey. The music, showing Purcell at his absolute best, completely transcends the sombre words, and the hauntingly beautiful instrumental interludes played by brass and drum are unforgettable.

They That Go Down to the Sea in Ships is an extraordinary anthem featuring an extended bass solo originally written for the Reverend John Gostling, a ‘basso profondo’ well known to Purcell. These voices, plumbing the depths of the bass clef, are a rarity, but SCS think they have the man!

Instruments of Time & Truth
New College Choir
Robert Quinney Director

Join New College Choir and IT&T for a performance of parts I, II, and III of J.S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio in the beautiful surroundings of Oxford’s University Church

Instruments of Time and Truth

Oxford Consort of Voices

Edward Higginbottom Conductor

Sophie Bevan Soprano
Austin Haynes Alto
Nick Pritchard Tenor
Giles Underwood Bass

A highlight of Oxford’s musical calendar, don’t miss this chance to hear the quintessential Christmas work in the expert hands of the city’s own period-instrument orchestra and world-renowned conductor, Edward Higginbottom.

Instruments of Time and Truth

New College School Choral Society

New College School Chamber Choir

Thomas Neal Conductor

IT&T join the combined choirs of New College School for a festive feast of music, including J.S. Bach’s Cantata BWV 140 Wachet Auf! along with Haydn’s Missa Sancti Nicolai and Symphony No. 11 in E flat.

Instruments of Time and Truth

Benson Choral Society

Steven Grahl Conductor

IT&T returns to Dorchester Abbey for the second time this year to join Benson Choral Society in a grand performance of J.S. Bach’s monumental B Minor Mass

Tickets not yet available.

Instruments of Time and Truth

Oxford Consort of Voices

Edward Higginbottom Conductor

Come with IT&T on a trip to 18th-century Bohemia (present-day Czechia) as we bring to light brilliant works by a trio of composers who deserve to be much better known: Franz Brenda, Johann Baptist Wanhal, and Jan Dismas Zelenka, whose Requiem in D Minor forms the centrepiece of this concert.

This concert is generously supported by John Osborn.

Instruments of Time and Truth

Choir of Merton College, Oxford

Benjamin Nicholas Conductor

Merton College Chapel is the magnificent setting for this performance of Claudio Monteverdi’s dramatic and thrilling Vespero della Beata Vergine given by the Choir of Merton College, the Girl Choristers of Merton College and Instruments of Time and Truth under the direction of Benjamin Nicholas.

Soloists will include Sophie Bevan and Ruairi Bowen

Join IT&T for a workshop in baroque bowing for intermediate and advanced school-age violin, viola, cello and double bass players (grade 5+)

Bring your own instruments. Baroque bows will be provided.

Featured repertoire: Ouverture, Rondeau, Minuet and Jigg from Purcell Abdelazar Suite (download the sheet music from IMSLP here)

Featuring acclaimed soprano Harriet Burns, this concert explores some of Georg Telemann's most heartfelt and beautiful music for wind and voice, from the dark, brooding cantata 'Ein Jammerton' to the achingly beautiful aria 'Rimembranza crudel.' Wind soloists from IT&T will round off the programme with highlights from Telemann's inventive and characterful sonatas and trios.

Harriet Burns - Soprano
Jonathan Slade - Flute
Mark Baigent - Oboe
Gabriel Amherst - Cello
Silas Woolston - Harpsichord

This concert is part of the Instruments of Time and Truth Summer Concert Series 2023, and is generously supported by John Osborn. 

Free tickets are available for audience members under 26 thanks to the support of the CAVATINA Chamber Music Foundation.

William Lawes’ large collection of pieces composed ‘for the harpe, base violl, violin, and theorbo’ is unique in English consort music repertory in that each has a harp-accompaniment part. Containing some of Lawes’ finest compositional writing for virtuoso violin and viol, with theorbo continuo, these consorts are now performed using a gut-strung, Italian triple harp instead of the brass-wire-strung Irish harp that scholarship indicates was the more plausible instrument.

IT&T present a premiere modern performance using not only an early Irish harp but also a unique, 17th-century manuscript from the Christ Church Library as one of their sources for this glorious music that would have been heard in the rapidly disintegrating court of King Charles I.

Siobhán Armstrong - Irish harp

Bojan Cicic - Violin

Reiko Ichise - Bass viol

Liz Kenny - Theorbo

This concert is part of the Instruments of Time and Truth Summer Concert Series 2023, and is generously supported by John Osborn. 

Free tickets are available for audience members under 26 thanks to the support of the CAVATINA Chamber Music Foundation.

A programme of echoes, canons, and other three-part violin music from the Baroque, featuring Pachelbel’s Canon and Purcell’s bewitching Three parts upon a Ground.

The programme also includes Marini’s ‘Sonata in Ecco con tre Violini’, in which the two echoing violins are instructed to remain hidden out of sight. 

Schmelzer’s Sonata a tre violini further explores the unusual sonority of three interweavingviolin parts. William Williams’ Trio Sonata for recorder and violin, and Walther’s solo sonata“Imitatione del Cuccu” evoke a woodland environment, full of echoes and birdsong. We play with the idea of the cathedral and the forest being an echo of each other’s environment in Marais’s Sonnerie de St Geneviève du Mont de Paris. 

Jean Paterson, Kirra Thomas, Melanie Gruwez* - Violin
Catherine Latham - Recorder
Imogen Seth-Smith - Viola da Gamba
Steven Grahl - Harpsichord

*IT&T Early Career Artist

This concert is part of the Instruments of Time and Truth Summer Concert Series 2023, and is generously supported by John Osborn. 

Free tickets are available for audience members under 26 thanks to the support of the CAVATINA Chamber Music Foundation.

We invite you to join us on Saturday 22nd July in Iffley Village Hall for a family-friendly Baroque Dance Workshop. Suitable for all ages, come and learn English Baroque country dancing with specialist Ricardo Barros of the Mecurius company, to a delectable live accompaniment, accompanied by tea and cake!

The afternoon will end with a short informal performance at 5.30pm.

This is very much a no-experience-necessary event, so bring as many left feet as you have, and friends and family are all welcome. If you would like to come and not dance, you are of course welcome to simply observe and learn about Baroque dance, how connected it is to the music, and also just for some tea and a chat.

There is no dress code, but if you are planning on dancing, do wear comfortable footwear!

After the performance there'll be the opportunity to head over the Iffley Lock to the beautiful Isis Farmhouse pub for an evening together by the river.

The mythical, musical character of Orpheus, who charmed rocks and trees with his lute, has been a perennial source of inspiration for composers. This was never more true than during the Baroque, when a fascination with classical mythology led to an outpouring of operas and smaller-scale works based in mythical settings. In this concert IT&T performs two dramatic retellings of different parts of Orpheus’ descent into Hell by early 18th Century French composers: Jean-Philippe Rameau and Louis-Nicolas Clérambault. 

David de Winter - Haute Contre
Bojan Cicic - Violin
Jonathan Slade - Flute
Susanne Heinrich - Viola da Gamba
Christopher Bucknall - Harpsichord

This concert is part of the Instruments of Time and Truth Summer Concert Series 2023, and is generously supported by John Osborn. 

Free tickets are available for audience members under 26 thanks to the support of the CAVATINA Chamber Music Foundation.

Whilst Archangelo Corelli was basking in his reputation in Rome, and Michel-Richard Delalande soaking up the flattering attentions of the Parisian public, some notable musicians were making waves in London.  They are not so well-known, but they deserve to be.   It’s a cosmopolitan crowd.  Alongside the Englishmen ­–  John Weldon, Daniel Purcell and William Croft – we can count Gottfried Finger, Francesco Geminiani  and Johann Cristoph Pepusch.  All of them were soon to be eclipsed by Georg Frederic Handel, for sure, but none deserves oblivion.  This concert will ensure that doesn’t happen.

Esther Mallett - Soprano
Catherine Latham - Recorder
Bojan Cicic - Violin 
Susanne Heinrich - Viola da Gamba
Edward Higginbottom - Organ/Harpsichord

This concert is part of the Instruments of Time and Truth Summer Concert Series 2023, and is generously supported by John Osborn. 

Free tickets are available for audience members under 26 thanks to the support of the CAVATINA Chamber Music Foundation.

Instruments of Time and Truth

Edward Higginbottom Director

Bojan Cicic Violin

IT&T is delighted to join the 2023 Oxford Festival of the Arts to present a musical journey to Paris in the 1770s in the magnificent surroundings of Dorchester Abbey.

Created in 1725 to provide public musical performances on days when the opera was shut (principally around major religious festivals), the Concert Spirituel is one of the first public concert series in existence, famously taking place at 6pm in the evening in Tuileries Palace, until they moved to a theatre in Paris, when the royal family was confined in the Tuileries.

The repertoire typically consisted of both sacred choral works and instrumental music, and included symphonies and concertos.

Tonight’s programme offers a snapshot of the repertoire heard in the 1770s, including works by François Joseph Gossec, and Jean-Baptiste Davaux, and culminating in 1778 with the first public performance of Mozart’s aptly named Paris Symphony, alongside a violin concerto by Chevalier de St Georges, performed by acclaimed virtuoso Bojan Čičić.

In 1705, the young Johann Sebastian Bach’s famed walk from Arnstadt to Lübeck to attend the evening concerts (Abendmusiken) directed by the old master organist-composer, Dietrich Buxtehude, brought about one of the most important connections in music history. 

Inspired by experimentation and transformation, this programme reveals Bach and Buxtehude’s thirst for colour and texture, featuring Sonatas for different combinations of instruments in original and new versions. 

Catherine Latham - Recorder/Voice Flute
Rachel Byrt - Viola/Violin
Susanne Heinrich -Viola da Gamba
Christopher Bucknall - Organ/Harpsichord

This concert is part of the Instruments of Time and Truth Summer Concert Series 2023, and is generously supported by John Osborn. 

Free tickets are available for audience members under 26 thanks to the support of the CAVATINA Chamber Music Foundation.

Oxford Pro Musica Singers
Instruments of Time and Truth
Mark Jordan Conductor

IT&T joins the Oxford Pro Musica Singers perform Handel's sparkling early work Dixit Dominus in the spectacular Sheldonian Theatre, together with Vivaldi's popular setting of the Gloria. The programme is completed with Buxtehude's Der Herr ist mit mir.

Choir of the Queen’s College, Oxford
Instruments of Time and Truth
Owen Rees Director

Prelude: Toccata ottava, Libro II (Frescobaldi)
Introit: Cantate Domino (Monteverdi)
Responses: Monteverdi
Hymn: Ave maris stella (Monteverdi)
Psalm: Beatus vir (Monteverdi)
Lessons: Acts 17:22-31 & John 14:15-21
Preacher: The Chaplain
Magnificat: Legrenzi
Marian antiphon: Salve regina (Legrenzi)
Voluntary: Toccata quinta, Libro II (Frescobaldi)

IT&T joins the choir of Queen’s College, Oxford, for a liturgical service of Vespers, using movements from Claudio Monteverdi’s enduringly popular Vespers of 1610 and music by the later-17th Century Venetian composer Giovanni Legrenzi.

This is a chapel service; attendance is free and tickets are not required.

Civil war, political upheaval, plague: Hay Castle’s rebirth in the mid-17th Century came at a time of great drama in British history - most memorably observed through the eyes of that great diarist, Samuel Pepys. Instruments of Time and Truth present a concert exploring the sounds and colours Pepys himself would have been familiar with: music he would have experienced at the theatre in works by Purcell, chamber music by the likes of Matthew Locke that he himself would have played, and finally the diverse range of music that he owned, brought to life from the many books and scores of his famous library.

Bojan Cicic: Violin

Ian Wilson: Recorder

Susanne Heinrich: Viola da Gamba

Linda Sayce: Theorbo

Christopher Bucknall: Harpsichord

This special concert in the atmospheric surroundings of Trinity College’s Wren modified Chapel offers a musical glimpse of London in the later years of the architect’s extraordinary life. It showcases composers who were active around 1723 and who represent the musical styles prevalent in London in the first three decades of the 18th century as Wren stepped back to survey his astonishing lifetime’s work. The programme features trio sonatas by William Croft (1678-1727), sacred songs of John Weldon (1676-1736) and secular songs and theatre music by John Eccles (1668-1735)

Join IT&T for a unique evening celebrating music in the Historic House and new galleries dedicated to Thomas Gainsborough in Sudbury - a man known for his passion for music, musicians and music-making.

Enjoy a musical tour of the Historic House with performances in the David Pike Drawings Gallery, the Gainsborough Gallery and, within the Music and Early Gainsborough Rooms. After drinks in the interval in the Landscape Studio, enjoy a concert in the Gainsborough Gallery featuring music by Gainsborough’s friends: Karl Friederich Abel, Johann Christian Bach, Ignatius Sancho, and John Christian Fischer.

With grateful thanks to John Osborn for supporting this performance.

IT&T joins the choir of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin to celebrate Easter Day with music by Padilla and Bird.

This is a church service; attendance is free and unticketed.

Choir of Merton College, Oxford
Instruments of Time and Truth
Ruairi Bowen Evangelist
Áine Smith Soprano
Hugh Cutting Alto
Benjamin Nicholas Director

As part of Passiontide at Merton 2023, experience this gripping and vividly human masterpiece performed in the magnificent Merton College Chapel.

New College School Chamber Choir
New College School Choral Society
Instruments of Time and Truth
Lizi Vineall Soprano
Louise Ashdown Contralto
Colin Danskin Tenor
Charlie Epps Bass
Thomas Neal Director

Malcolm Bruno's new (2019) reconstruction of J. S. Bach's lost Markus-Passion, BWV 247, performed by the Chamber Choir and Choral Society of New College School and IT&T.