To celebrate their ongoing 50th anniversary season, The Arcadian Singers look forward to presenting Handel's Opera Acis and Galatea with the Instruments of Time and Truth in the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin

Handel’s Acis and Galatea is a tale concerning transient love, beauty and jealousy, and is told through music that encompasses the joyful and the melancholic. Handel’s first dramatic work in the English language, the story follows the nymph Galatea and the shepherd Acis, their love and adoration for each other, and the envious giant Polyphemus who threatens their happiness.

Experience one of the musical highlights of the year with Instruments of Time & Truth’s annual performance of Handel’s Messiah. Under the direction of Edward Higginbottom, this beloved work comes to life with the Oxford Consort of Voices and 4 incredible soloists Charlotte Bowden, Elizabeth Nurse, William Anderson & Filippo Turkheimer - an unmissable evening for both devoted audiences and newcomers alike.

What better way to start the Christmas season than with Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, which he assembled from the series of six cantatas written in Leipzig for the Christmas feast-days in 1734/5. Together they make a compelling narrative, beginning with the dramatic chorus 'Christians be Joyful'. To bring out its baroque authenticity we have the renowned period orchestra Instruments of Time and Truth to play with us.

The Choir of New College Oxford is firmly established as one of the most acclaimed British choral ensembles. Celebrated for its distinctive sound, it embodies the splendour of the English choral tradition. Founded in 1379, the choir frequently performs in prestigious venues worldwide, and its versatility is reflected in its diverse core repertoire, with a particular scholarly focus on renaissance and baroque music.

Niccolo Jommelli (1714-1774) was primarily a composer of operas in the Neapolitan style. His Requiem setting is one of only a few surviving sacred works.  But the large number of 18th-century sources attest to its widespread popularity.  Indeed, it has been said that Jommelli’s was the most frequently performed Requiem before Mozart swept away all competition.  IT&T’s special performance, during the Season of Remembrance, will be coupled with Samuel Barber’s Adagio. Both works draw on the same forces of strings and voices, and present a powerful meeting of period and more modern styles.   The concert re-affirms IT&T’s role in promoting neglected music of value, and in proposing ingenious juxtapositions.  Another rare opportunity lies before the Oxford public. 

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.