Scents and sensibilities

Oxford Song, which starts this weekend, is an imaginative festival combining sound, vision and smell-in short, a feast for the senses. Henrietta Bredin reports

- Henrietta Bredin

OXFORD SONG is the new title of Oxford Lieder, reflecting the annual two-week festival’s ever-expanding repertory and breaking out of the German art-song niche indicated by its previous name. Not that it has been in any way confined to niche repertory: under the guidance of its inspirational founding director, Sholto Kynoch, it has developed steadily in scope and ambition, attracting new audiences as well as managing to keep its existing devotees happy—no mean feat.

He devises programmes and follows themes with a light touch and has an unerring instinct for making connections, teasing out surprising and unexpected links, working with exceptional musicians, both experienced and newer to the scene. The 400th anniversaries of William Byrd and William Shakespeare’s First Folio, the Mendelssohn family, the Tribulations of love and Picasso’s Guernica, represent only a handful of themes.

Day of fragrance 

October 14 is a day of typically eclectic, imaginative Kynochery. Dedicated to Fashion and Song, it starts with a morning concert inspired by Yves Saint Laurent and his designs for ballet, involves a tenor, a dancer and a pianist and finishes with the aptly named baritone Benjamin Appl giving a recital dubbed Forbidden Fruit; in between dips into the Weimar Republic, it touches on artworks by Jeanne Mammen, George Grosz and Otto Dix and, most intriguingly, offers a selection of French song under the alluring title of Parfums et Paroles, which comes with olfactory participation for the audience.