In 2025 Instruments of Time & Truth celebrate their 10th birthday. This programme will mark another anniversary, the 300th of the founding in 1725 of the Concert Spirituel, an organisation which became the major promoter of concerts in Paris during the 18th century.

Instruments of Time & Truth will perform instrumental and vocal music heard at the Concert Spirituel in the 1770s, by François-Joseph Gossec, Jean-Baptiste Davaux, Jean-Joseph de Mondonville and Amadeus Mozart. They will be joined by the Oxford Consort of Voices, soloists and student singers, under the direction of Edward Higginbottom. Presented in association with The Cultural Programme.

What brings together Benedetto Marcello and JS Bach in the same programme?  Their music for lower strings and lower voices: textures of special opulence and warmth.  Bach's last Brandenburg Concerto (BWV 1051), for violas, gambas, cello and violone, needs no introduction. Marcello's setting of Psalm 50 is less well known.  It is the last in an ambitious project of psalm settings in Italian paraphrases. appearing in eight volumes in the mid-1720s. Benedetto Marcello (not to be confused with his brother Alessandro, also a musician and composer) was a distinguished public official working for the Republic of Venice. It is all the more remarkable that he produced so much fine music alongside his public duties, notably in the sphere of sacred vocal music.  His setting of Psalm 50 shows him to be a composer of great accomplishment and sensitivity.  

This special concert will last just an hour, allowing plenty of time for dinner afterwards!

Featuring hand-picked student singers from across the university, coached by soprano Miriam Allan and IT&T’s Christopher Bucknall, this programme explores the astonishing laboratory of Monteverdi’s mind and explores the evolution of vocal music from renaissance polyphony to the dramatic music which evolved into opera as we know it today.

The St John Passion, a glorious choral work by Johann Sebastian Bach, was composed just over 300 years ago and first performed in St Nicholas Church, Leipzig, at the Vespers service on Good Friday in 1724. This was during Bach’s first year as director of music in Leipzig, where he remained for the next 27 years.

One of the greatest and most powerful musical works ever written, it was described by Robert Schumann as ‘more daring, forceful and dramatic’ than Bach’s St Matthew Passion, written three years later. Two magnificent extended choruses at the beginning and end frame the four elements of the work: speech rhythm narration, the ferocious and taut ‘crowd’ choruses, operatic-style arias, and Lutheran chorale melodies exquisitely harmonised by Bach.

Under the baton of our conductor, Duncan Saunderson, we shall be singing the excellent and very accessible English version of the text, in the New Novello edition. The orchestral accompaniment for the concert will be, as for several of the choir’s previous performances, by Instruments of Time and Truth. It will be a great experience for audience and singers alike.

In the climax of this year’s festival, Keble Chapel Choir are joined by the Instruments of Time and Truth and a stellar cast of young soloists in Purcell’s feted take on Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in a semi-staged production by Nicholas Heath, directed by Christian Wilson.

Join IT&T for its annual celebration of Christmas as we bring Handel’s Messiah to life.

University Church of St Mary the Virgin will be bustling with festive spirit as we usher in the holiday. IT&T will be joined by the Oxford Consort of Voices and an amazing line-up of soloists, Miriam Allan, Hugh Cutting, Benjamin Hulett and Daniel Tate.

To book tickets please use the button below.

For a musician boasting a string of prestigious appointments – maestro di cappella at Mantua, to Charles III (pretender to the Spanish throne) in Barcelona, Ruspoli in Rome, and finally Vize-Kapellmeister at the Imperial Court in Vienna – Antonio Caldara (1670–1736) is strangely overlooked in our own time. He held these positions precisely because he was an outstanding composer, both of opera and oratorio. Instruments of Time & Truth, as part of its tenth anniversary season, will offer a unique opportunity to hear one of Caldara's finest oratorios, Maddalena ai piedi de Cristo, a dramatic telling of the struggle between Good and Evil for the soul of Mary Magdalena. Such libretti were the stuff of Lenten observance in European Courts, but there is nothing Lenten about Caldara's treatment, vivid, intense, compact and compelling. Six solo voices take on six dramatic roles; one fabulous aria follows another; all enriched by highly original writing for string orchestra. A rare treat is in store.

As autumn threatens to cede to winter this October, Oxford Pro Musica Singers proposes to brighten things up by transporting you to Venice on the cusp of the Baroque period in a performance of Claudio Monteverdi’s glorious Vespers of 1610.

Nominally in honour of the Blessed Virgin, the work is an ambitious collection of vesper psalms, a Marian hymn and litany, and the Magnificat, Mary’s great song of praise. Monteverdi fuses traditional usage of plainchant psalms with the emerging operatic style to conjure up dazzling variety: the movements range from to virtuoso solos to complex madrigalian textures, from lively duets to rich polychoral settings, from restrained recitative and cantus firmus to exuberant instrumental interludes, to create a vivacious and uplifting musical assault on the senses.

Once more making apt use of the ornate spaces of the Sheldonian Theatre in the wake of our successful programme of Vivaldi’s Gloria and Handel’s Dixit Dominus in July 2023, we are delighted to collaborate again with Oxford’s specialist early music ensemble,  Instruments of Time and Truth, as well as a vibrant team of soloists.

We do hope that you will join us in restoring some colour to an English October evening with the glorious glitter of Venice.

We are delighted to be performing with the choir of Queens College, Oxford again.

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Join Instruments of Time & Truth and Edward Higginbottom at University Church of St Mary the Virgin as we celebrate the 350th anniversary of the death of Pelham Humfrey and his relationship with the wider community of musicians of his time. Featuring works by Humfrey, his mentor Matthew Locke and his pupil Henry Purcell. In the case of Locke, his suites for broken consort; in the case of Purcell, his glorious symphony anthem Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem. This music provides a sounding board for Humfrey’s work. The suites of Locke give us an idea of the instrumental idioms rooted in the English tradition, but not without traces of French influence. Purcell’s anthem shows us the potential that lay in Humfrey’s church music: clearly the path that Humphrey trod was crucial in establishing the framework for Purcell’s extraordinary accomplishment in the field.

Humfrey, The King shall rejoice
Locke, Voluntary in F
Humfrey, By the Waters of Babylon
Locke, Suite for Broken Consort in C & Voluntary in a
Humfrey, Hear my crying & O Lord my God
Locke, Suite for Broken Consort in D
Humfrey, Hear my prayer
Purcell, Voluntary in G & Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem

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.