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Image Description: A crowd in a concert venue, a silhouette of a hand is in focus on a background of yellow lighting. In better times, concerts were easily my favourite night out. There’s something about the ebb and flow of a crowd that makes music that much more thrilling. I have very vivid memories of […]
Continue ReadingThe Ripieno Players have earned quite a name for themselves on the classical music circuit in Oxford. You could tell that much from the large, excited audience that was waiting in St Peter’s Chapel – the orchestra’s home turf – for their Hilary concert on Friday 19th January. Performing under the Ripieno name, the musicians […]
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On Saturday 14th, an audience gathered in St Mary’s Church for two reasons: to seek sanctuary from the circus of matriculation going on outside, and to hear some of the best classical music Oxford has to offer. With their concert of Beethoven and Mahler, the Ripieno Players managed to give us both. Oxford is overflowing […]
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With a background as a wilderness survival expert and burlesque dancer, Sam Lee is hardly your stereotypical folkie. Not one born into the tradition, London-native Lee discovered traditional British folksong through old field recordings, which he listened to in his West End dressing room, between glittery-hotpant costume changes. But to learn second-hand was not enough […]
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Everything the Pains of Being Pure At Heart do seems effortless. Vocal hooks, effortless; Belle and Sebastian-esque vignettes ripe with detail and pathos, effortless; Jesus and Mary Chain feedback, Jonny Marr jangle, classics straight off a C86 compilation mixtape from the 1980s, all seem to breeze past without any exertion on the part of anyone […]
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“Are you a music journalist?” I got asked, for the first time of my life last Friday at the O2, catching me ever so slightly off guard. “Yeah. I’m actually supposed to be reviewing this gig.” “Ah, that’s sweet! For who?” Deep breath. “The OxStu.” “Ah.” And she turned around and didn’t speak another word […]
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Once upon a time, the Oxford University Brass Band (OUBB) and the Oxford University Wind Orchestra (OUWO) combined forces to deliver an evening of music based on fantasy and make-believe. The performance featured a varied repertoire of old and new, light-hearted and serious, understated and ornate – and the results were magical indeed. The Once […]
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Ryley Walker is something of an eccentric. At only 27 years old, he’s already built a solid reputation in the psychedelic rock scene for his creativity and improvisational skills: ‘The way I play is just like: first thought, best thought. And that’s a really rewarding feeling, to just improvise and have it work.’ With that […]
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When Ezra Furman laughs that the crowd is ‘starting to get the hang of it’ three songs into his frenetic, marathon set, the crowd understand exactly what he’s talking about. Resplendent in a pink shirt, skirt, red lipstick and pearls, Ezra Furman is by no means a typical rockstar. Raising money on Kickstarter for his […]
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I suppose that there must have been at least someone else in the room who expected to be hearing Rach 2 on Saturday night—only to find themselves wondering where on earth the piano was! But if there was then, like me, they were keeping a low profile because unfortunately, this review must start with an […]
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☆☆☆☆☆ Now I was never going to give Madonna anything less than a 5-star review. Even if she hadn’t turned up. But last night she proved that she was not only 5-stars, but the greatest living performer on earth. The over two-hour long extravaganza was a spectacle of such magnitude, evoking every possible emotion, that […]
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Following the success of their first concert last term, St Peter’s College Chamber Orchestra returned to give a concert of Debussy, Mahler and Vaughan Williams. The program posed a series of challenges for a chamber orchestra consisting of only seventeen players, as this repertoire is usually played by a symphony orchestra consisting of around ninety […]
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