The St Anne’s Camerata is performing in a prestigious concert at the Holywell Music Room tonight organised by the Faculty of Music and the Oxford Cultural Programme. The concert is the result of the latest creative collaboration between the Camerata and the world-renowned Castalian Quartet, which is the university’s string quartet in residence. The exciting and challenging repertoire in this concert, includes Richard Strauss’s ‘Metamorphosen’, string orchestra music by twentieth century British composer Susan Spain Dunk, and a newly-commissioned work by our second year undergraduate composer, Nicholas Samuel. The whole event is a significant endorsement of the Camerata’s work, as well as the quality of string playing generally at St Anne’s College.
In fact this will be the second world premiere of Nicholas Samuel’s music this week. Last Wednesday Nicholas’s work for baroque orchestra, ’The Four Neomartyrs of Rethymnon’, and ’Smears’ by another St Anne’s College undergraduate composer, Daniel Reynolds, were the two student works chosen from across Oxford University for the ‘Bach 1725’ concert given by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment at the Sheldonian Theatre. In this case, to celebrate the arrival of Bach’s rare original manuscript of his 1725 Ascension Day Cantata, ‘Auf Christi Himmelfahrt allein’, students were challenged to compose new pieces for the same group of instruments as part of a unique concert celebrating Bach’s 300-year-old piece that also included a new work by the former Master of the Queen’s Music, Judith Weir.
Nicholas Samuel’s and Daniel Reynolds’ superb pieces were widely acclaimed for their sensitive and original responses to Bach’s cantata and to the unusual instrumentation, which unusually for orchestral pieces included parts for recorder, two oboe d’amores, oboe da caccia, two baroque horns and baroque trumpet. Both Nicholas and Daniel will also be creating new pieces for the special event on 14 June to celebrate the arrival of the seven new pianos at St Anne’s College on Saturday 14 June in celebration of St Anne’s College’s All-Steinway School status.
Both the Holywell Music Room and Sheldonian Theatre concerts are promoted by the Oxford Cultural Programme, a new artistic initiative set up to coincide with the opening of the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities in September 2025. The Castalian Quartet is the first Hans Keller String Quartet in Residence at the University of Oxford, funded by the Cosman-Keller Trust.
~ Professor Martyn Harry
Composer; Artistic Director, JdP Concert Series
Professor of Composition, Faculty of Music, Oxford University
Tutorial Fellow in Music, St Anne’s College, Oxford