Happy Birthday Marios by Brahms, Fri 20 Dec 2024, From (2024/2024), Conductor Michael Papadopoulos, Marios Papadopoulos, The Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, United Kingdom

Music Director Marios Papadopoulos celebrates a landmark occasion as soloist in Brahms’s Piano Concerto in B flat major and conductor in the same composer’s Symphony No. 4. Brahms wrote the second of his concertos at the ripest moment of his productivity, apparently able to animate any possible musical idea and to blend beauty with ferocity and drama with intimacy. Rising star Michael Papadopoulos, makes his debut as conductor with the Oxford Philharmonic to provide an accompaniment of symphonic proportions to this, the grandest of piano concertos of the Romantic era. After the interval, Marios Papadopoulos steps on the podium to conduct Brahms’s Apollonian final symphony – a work conceived as a retreat from the world that reflects on the composer’s lifelong servitude and his luminous acceptance of the end of his creative and mortal lives.