The oldest and finest college choirs
Provision for music to accompany the liturgy was stipulated by the founders of the major early colleges at Oxford, and choral church music there is still very much a living tradition. Many of Britain’s professional singers and choristers have passed through college choirs. As a consequence English liturgical singing is the best in the world.

Christ Church, Magdalen, Merton and New College choirs remain the finest in Oxford and enjoy international reputations for excellence. All perform in this festival.

Internationally acclaimed professional ensembles
Five professional choirs also participate: The Tallis Scholars, the world’s leading performers of Renaissance repertoire; Westminster Cathedral Choir, among the most exalted of liturgical choirs and exceptionally experienced in plainsong; Stile Antico, a young ensemble which has rapidly acquired great acclaim; Sospiri, an Oxford-based choir which specialises in chant; and the Gabrieli Consort, whose a cappella forces are equally brilliant in early and later music.

Instrumental interludes are provided by Phantasm, the viol consort led by the Oxford Professor of Music, Laurence Dreyfus, and the period-instrument orchestra Charivari Agréable, which joins New College Choir for the final concert.

The golden age of English music
The Tudor and early Stuart period was the golden age of English music. Taverner, Tallis, Sheppard, Byrd, Gibbons and many others rank with the greatest of their Continental peers – and many of them studied or taught at Oxford. This glorious body of music dominates the festival.

A second golden age of the English choral tradition arose towards the end of the nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth. This is also well represented, with compositions by Parry, Vaughan Williams, Holst, Howells and others.

A beautiful and suitable city
Oxford is one of the world’s great historic cities: a dense accumulation of architecture in every style from the twelfth to the twenty-first century embedded in a web of picturesque streets and alleys and dappled with lawns, trees and riverside meadows.

Reflecting their quasi-monastic origins, many colleges are equipped with cloistral layouts and magnificent chapels, which make Oxford a uniquely apposite location for a celebration of church music.

The Divine Office day itself
A major feature of the festival is the complete Divine Office, the eight services of the monastic day, performed at the intended times – which means beginning at 1.00am and ending at about 10.00pm.

Even were you to skip the less agreeably timed Offices, you would still be exposed to the oldest living musically enriched ritual in the world. The most spiritually charged and aesthetically intense experience to have emerged from western civilization has, in essentials, changed little in fifteen hundred years.

Highly complex, immaculately administered
Martin Randall Travel has devised and run sixty such festivals putting music in appropriate historic buildings and winning accolades for exceptional musical experiences and skillfully managed complexity.

• Concerts

• Choirs, Musicians

• Chapels, Venues

• Chapel Walks

• Lectures

• Accommodation, Meals

• Prices

• Practicalities