Upcoming Concerts
Reserve your place at our next concert now via the Tickets page!
Next Concert:
Saturday 15th February 2025 (Conductor: Natalia Luis-Bassa)
OUO’s long-time Principal Guest Conductor Natalia Luis-Bassa returns to the Sheldonian Theatre in a concert that features Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 as its centrepiece, continuing the successful relation that Luis-Bassa and OUO have established with Mahler’s symphonies over the years. As the composer once said, a symphony must be like the world, and his Fifth falls nothing short of that. A blockbuster journey of self-revelation from darkness to light, told in funeral marches, Viennese waltzes, and one of music’s sweetest love-letters, the Adagietto.
The concert will also feature Debussy’s iconic Prelude à l’aprés-midi d’un faune, whose idyllic flute solo sets the scene for Mallarmé’s poem, and Anna Clyne’s exuberant Masquerade, which evokes the lively promenade concerts of London’s 18th-century pleasure gardens.
Upcoming concerts this season:
Saturday 24th May 2025 (OUO Presents: An Evening of Orchestral Dances with Daniel Hogan, featuring Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances and Adams' The Chairman Dances)
Young conductor Daniel Hogan joins OUO in an evening of orchestral dances, featuring as its main item Rachmaninoff’s electrifying final masterpiece, the Symphonic Dances. Entirely written in the United States, this work evokes a ghostly nostalgia of the composer’s Russian homeland, saturated with ecclesiastical chants such as the Dies irae, and enigmatic retrospections on his earlier works – the First Symphony and All-Night Vigil. John Adams’ captivating The Chairman Dances, an “outtake” from his first opera Nixon in China portraying Chairman and Madame Mao’s exuberant foxtrot, will open the concert, alongside the Dance Suite from Ginastera’s Estancia, a lively ballet – inspired by the epic Martin Fierro by José Hernández – saturated with spirited Argentinian rhythms.
Concert dates for future seasons:
Thursday 12th November 2025 with Natalia Luis-Bassa
Saturday 14th February 2026
Friday 22nd May 2026
Thursday 12th November 2026
Saturday 13th February 2027
Saturday 29th May 2027
Thursday 11th November 2027
Saturday 12th February 2028
Saturday 27th May 2028
