Preview: Oxford Chamber Music Festival, to July 7

Both take advantage of something everyone who loves Oxford knows, but finds it hard to put into words. Here is a little world so cloistered and apart that it is always associated with dreaming spires and the calm pursuit of the most unworldly research. Yet it is just over an hour from London and the airports, and has the communications, the shops and the restaurants - a busy city.

It also has, within easy reach, as contrasting a collection of music venues as you will find anywhere. Wren's Sheldonian and the minute Holywell Music Room are glories of the 17th and 18th centuries respectively - and the latter has to be as fine an auditorium for string quartets and quintets as any in the country.

By contrast, the five-year-old Jacqueline du Pre Music Building in St Hilda's and the Magdalen College Auditorium, opened two years ago, are modern venues in the 250-seat range, with acoustics much praised by the artists who have performed in them (Sir Thomas Allen, the outgoing Professor of Opera Studies, was saying last week how agreeable he found the du Pre for his final Schumann recital).

These venues are backed by the practice studios of the Faculty of Music and the incomparable resources of the Bodleian Library. They are all within walking distance of one another - in the present state of Oxford traffic, the only distance which counts!

Both these festivals, however, are much more than concerts and masterclasses in attractive venues. Following the lead of Tanglewood (US) in the 1930s, Dartington Hall in Devon and Prussia Cove in Cornwall - among others - have made a huge difference to the public perception of classical music by revealing that the level of music-making is transformed when all participants live, eat and work together, ideally for a couple of weeks. Those, however, are remote, if ravishing, country estates with little public access. Oxford is just as delightful for the participants, but here their evening concerts can be attended by anyone in London prepared to jump on a coach.

I have talked to Julian Gallant (Piano Festival) and Duncan Hinnells (Chamber Music), the two administrators with the responsibility for making all this happen. Both have done brilliantly. In the first place, by finding the collegiate accommodation which is an Oxford speciality - St Hilda's for the pianists, and Magdalen College for the chamber musicians - each with its own auditorium. Both venues provide calm, tranquil surroundings, as far removed as possible from the airport-hotel-concert hall dash of the modern international musician.

Gallant and Hinnels emphasise, however, that the key factor is the loyalty and excitement inspired by their principals - the pianist Marios Papadopoulos and, for the Chamber Music Festival, the young violinist Priya Mitchell - herself brought up in Oxford, except that she went to the Vienna Conservatoire when most of her contemporaries were struggling with their A-Levels.

"I wasn't sure what Priya meant when she said "My friends will come along"," said Duncan. "I couldn't quite believe it when her 'friends' turned out to be the likes of Imogen Cooper, Melvyn Tan and Stephen Kovacevitch - players one thinks of not as chamber music partners, but world-class concerto soloists."

This year, the week will involve 28 of Priya's friends, including six pianists, 17 string players and three woodwind and horn players. Of course, many of these artists know each other and play together - the cellist Adrian Brendel has recently formed a new trio with Katherine Gowers (violin) and the pianist Paul Lewis. Some are linked through the same teacher - both Katherine Gowers and Priya herself owe a lot to David Takeno.

One or two have a strong connection with Oxford already, such as Krzysztof Chorzelski, the viola player of the Belcea Quartet, which has been the quartet in residence at the du Pre Music Building this last year.

But, as Duncan said, to get an inkling of what can happen when they don't know each other until they arrive, it's enough to listen to last year's festival CD. "Take just the first track," said Duncan. "The Haydn E flat Piano Trio with Imogen Cooper, the thrilling young German violinist Isabelle Faust and the cellist Natalie Clein. Total rapport - yet they'd never met before in their lives."

Both Priya and Duncan realised at once that an essential feature of the festival would have to be the full participation of the BBC. Fortunately, the du Pre Building is already considered an international venue for recording and Radio 3 last year made tapes which provided a most attractive concert on Christmas Day. This year they will be recording all the concerts, providing invaluable financial backing. Local support has also been impressive, with major contributions from organisations varying from the Ingenta Communications Company to the Petit Blanc Restaurant to The Oxford Times itself.

The confidence inspired by this kind of backing - plus the fact that almost all the concerts last year sold out - has enabled Priya and Duncan to embark on this year with an ambitious themed programme.

It consists of a quite superlative survey of the chamber music of eastern Europe, from the first nationalist works of Dvorak and Smetana to Ligeti and Kirtag in our own day. I think it should be remembered that for many of these musicians, mostly in their twenties and early thirties, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening up of Eastern Europe was a major event in their early lives.

Prague and Budapest are now as much recital destinations for them as Paris and New York. For their east European contemporaries, the 'freedom' proclaimed by Dvorak means as much now as it did in 1860.

How agreeable, however, to find in these subtly planned programmes, an balancing emphasis on less radical composers, such as Dvorak's favourite pupil (and son-in-law) Joseph Suk, whose A minor Quartet will be played before the rarely heard original version of Dvorak's Op 22 Serenade in E. This is the work which (on Brahms' recommendation) launched Dvorak's international career, but is known usually in the very over-ripe version for string orchestra.

Another joy will be the delightful sounding Piano Quintet by Zdensk Fibich - a Czech composer who, however, received a thoroughly German training in Leipzig. It is unusually scored for horn and clarinet, as well as piano, violin and cello, and rapturously celebrates a late affair the composer had in the 1890s.

Moving on, Priya pays inevitable homage to Janacek, but when it comes to Bartok and Kodaly, she has had the brilliant idea of demonstrating that the link between their researches in Hungarian folk music and the music they actually wrote is not just something you read about in books.

Concert 6 (July 3) will take place in Freud's Cafe, and will feature their duets (using nearly all the violinists taking part), followed by a performance by Hegedos, the folk band from Budapest, playing such rarities as the Jewish harp, the ocarina and the hurdy-gurdy. Perfect relaxation after the concert of Bach and Ligeti solo cello sonatas in Magdalen College Chapel.

I was thrilled also to see that Priya has not forgotten the vocal side, particularly of Bartok. The single singer taking part, the ideally chosen soprano Patricia Rosatio, will give a selection of his Hungarian folk songs in the Holywell on July 5, preceded by Dvorak's Gypsy Songs. The spoken voice features also, with Sam West reading the relevant excerpts from Tolstoy for Janacek's Kreutzer Sonata Quartet.

Concerts aside, there will be two particularly authoritative lectures on Eastern Europe and chamber music by Dr Bojan Bujic (Magdalen College) and Prof Jan Smaczny (Queen's University, Belfast).

In lighter vein, the Theatre Mimo Magique will liven up the Playhouse on July 5 with a mime show, which will include La Revue de Cuisine by that most eclectic Czech composer Martinu - who also figures as the only composer in the festival to make actual use of the theremin (in a Fantasy with oboe, piano and strings). The theremin is a rare electronic instrument whose possibilities will be demonstrated on July 1 by one of Prof Theremin's few living pupils, Lydia Kavina.

But perhaps the event I am looking forward to most is Stephen Kovacevitch's chamber music masterclass on July 1. Stephen, perhaps the most senior of the artists present, is the only one I have actually met - after a stunning account of all three of the last Beethoven piano sonatas in the Fenice Theatre, Venice.

Seeing him wandering around afterwards, looking understandably somewhat at a loss (how on earth do you come down after Op 109, 110 and 111?) I invited him for a drink. Talking to him made me realise the loneliness of the solo circuit, however glamorous or lucrative.

Priya's festival, based on friendship, communal music-making and a wonderful location is the exact opposite. No doubt we'll be giving her, as last time, the other vital ingredient - an enthusiastic audience.

**Programmes and tickets are available from the Oxford Playhouse box office.