Jesus College Visiting Artist: Malcolm Martineau and Christopher Maltman

Join us in dusting off the post-Christmas blues as we welcome back Christopher Maltman (baritone) and Malcolm Martineau (piano) for our first concert of the year. Since winning the Lieder Prize at Cardiff Singer of the World in 1997, Christopher Maltman has given recitals in many of the world's most prestigious concert halls, and has been described in The Times as “Britain’s hottest young baritone”. Malcolm Martineau is of course a familiar face to Oxford Lieder audiences, following his recent concerts for us with Amanda Roocroft and Sophie Daneman, and we are delighted to start 2008 with two names so synonymous with the performance of song. This is the second concert in this year’s Jesus College Visiting Artist Series.

This outstanding duo will be performing an exhilarating programme surveying some great composers of the 20^th-century song repertoire, ranging from Poulenc to Shostakovich, via the ever-popular giant of English music, Benjamin Britten. His Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, written for none other than Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, are ideally suited to the thrillingly dark baritone voice, and the listener that is prepared to enter the work’s intense emotional world will be amply rewarded. These are contrasted with Shostakovich’s penultimate work, his provocative Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin, based on Dostoyevsky’s reprehensible protagonist in The Devil, and Poulenc’s saucy Chansons Gaillardes, full of the insouciance and brilliant whirl of the 1920s; Poulenc himself remarked of these songs, “I am fond of this collection, where I tried to show that outright obscenity can adapt itself to music”. This programme promises to be a real treat and we look forward to seeing you there. This concert takes place at 8.00pm, and we return to the beautiful and atmospheric University Church on the High Street, after its popularity as a venue in our June concert with Ann Murray and Graham Johnson.

Tickets are on sale now from TicketsOxford (www.ticketsoxford.com / 01865 305305), and student tickets are as ever available for only £5 on the door.

Please note there will be no pre-concert talk on this occasion.