Michaelmas 2021

Sunday 21st November 2021, Sheldonian Theatre

Conducted by Robert Hodge

Led by Amy Moynihan

Arnold Symphony No.2

Gipps Symphony No.2

Arnold Variations on a Theme of Ruth Gipps

Maconchy Proud Thames

In Michaelmas 2021, OUO were joined by Robert Hodge as guest conductor for an evening centenary celebrations for 20th century composers. The concert was performed in the historic Sheldonian Theatre in the heart of Oxford on Sunday 21st November 2021 at 8pm

Our repertoire for this concert was a really exciting mix of lesser-known orchestral works. Malcolm Arnold and Ruth Gipps were contemporaries at the Royal College of Music and great friends so it is fitting to be performing their works together to mark the centenary of their births. Their respective second symphonies are gorgeous works which the orchestra loved rehearsing and sharing them with the audience. Arnold's Variations on a Theme by Ruth Gipps is a work that Hodge was keen to perform with OUO. This piece takes it's inspiration from Gipps' Coronation March 4 and features beautiful melodies from OUO's oboist and BBC Young Musician of the Year finalist: Ewan Millar.

To complete the concert, the orchestra featured Elizabeth Maconchy's Proud Thames overture, also written for the 1953 coronation. Despite scarce opportunities for female composers during her lifetime, Maconchy is considered to be "one of the finest composers the British Isles have produced". She also has strong links to Oxford, being elected an honorary fellow of St Hilda's College in 1978, the same college at which her daughter Nicola LeFanu (also an accomplished composer) studied.

We were very excited to exhibit multiple, excellent works by female composers in this concert and we would like to thank the Ambache Trust for their support with performing these. We would also like to thank the Malcolm Arnold Trust for their support in performing his works. 

A review of this concert can be found here:

OUO MT21 Concert review (oums.co.uk)

Checkie Hamilton reviews the OUO concert held on the 21st of November 2021.

This term’s OUO concert promised an ambitious programme of four lesser-known works, with two pieces composed by women and the entire programme written by composers born post-1900. The room was packed to the gunnels despite a glimpse of the phrase “avant-garde” in the programme notes, two words more at home in a sparsely attended back-end concert hall than Sir Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre.

The concert began with Elizabeth Maconchy’s Proud Thames Overture, a work which won a competition to be the Coronation Overture for the new Queen of England in 1953. It opened with a well-controlled trumpet announcement, followed by bubbling woodwind, evoking the mouth of the great river. Despite the significant additions of orchestration throughout the piece, the essence of the Thames River was never lost due to the repetition of ascending and descending thirds throughout the movement which created a sense of development as the river flowed through the piece. The final rendition of this motif echoed the grandeur and depth of the Thames in its majestic performance on the timpani.

This was followed by Ruth Gipps’ Symphony No.2. While this work is a one movement symphony, it is split into eight different sections with distinctly contrasting moods which were brilliantly conveyed by the orchestra, from the nationalist, military fourth section to the lyrical violin solo that opened the seventh section. The programme notes described how the work displayed the influence of her teacher and mentor Vaughan Williams and this was evident in the second section with a folk-like, pastoral violin melody, brilliantly performed by Amy Moynihan.

Malcolm Arnold’s Variations on a Theme by Ruth Gipps created an effective segue into the second half of the concert. The main theme, a pastoral oboe solo was capably played by Ewan Millar at the beginning of the work and could be heard in various contexts throughout the piece from an excitable trumpet and string rendition in the first variation to an urgent pizzicato string version in the fourth variation. The variations were bookended by another rendition of the theme on the oboe in the sixth and final variation.

The final work, Malcolm Arnold’s Symphony No.2, was a particularly impressive end to the concert. The programme notes told that ‘Arnold’s life was one notoriously pervaded by alcoholism, severe depression, and suicide attempts, and the interpretative distance from his biography to the music of the third movement is short.’ This was certainly conveyed in this performance with the sul ponticello violins creating a harsh and unsettling sound and augmented intervals in the woodwind giving a sense of being suspended between tonalities. The tolling of a tubular bell was effective in evoking a sense of impending death. After hearing the third movement of this work, it was hard to believe that the same tormented composer could have written the following, final movement. A cymbal crash launched us into the fourth movement, followed by a cheeky, energetic clarinet solo brilliantly performed by James Garagnon. There were some issues with the string ensemble in the final movement, but this was a minor flaw in an exceptionally well-performed programme.