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.