Oxford University Orchestra trip to Japan in March 2019

The Oxford University Orchestra (OUO) is the University’s premier student ensemble. It has provided decades of top-class opportunities to players at the University of Oxford, impressing audiences from the University community, Oxford area and beyond.  It has recently received a Daiwa Foundation Small Grant and Violetta Suvini, who is in charge of fundraising, has written the piece below. 

We are delighted to be travelling to Japan in Spring 2019. During our tour, we will be performing with Orchestra MOTIF, a Japanese orchestra founded by OUO alumnus Shun Hioki which aims to provide musical opportunities to young musicians for whom these would otherwise be inaccessible. Alongside this orchestral partnership, we will be engaging in music outreach with El Sistema Japan, sharing and performing with students as part of the regeneration project which culminates every year in a festival weekend in Soma City. This year’s festival takes place around the 8th anniversary of the Fukushima disaster. 

This project is the first of its kind undertaken by the OUO. It will provide opportunities to share, learn and build lasting friendships with the members of Orchestra MOTIF, and will help support the excellent work of El Sistema Japan. The latter was founded in 2012 to support the children affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami in March 2011. It is committed to developing life skills in children through music, to help them overcome the post-disaster challenges. 

We are delighted to be partnering with guest conductor Cayenna Ponchione for our Japan 2019 project. Cayenna is a UK-based conductor committed to environmental activism through the arts and the promotion of gender and ethnic equality in conducting and composition. 

We are very grateful to the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation for their generous support of this project.

For more information please visit our website, http://ouo.oums.org/ 

The trip to Japan was featured on Japanese national television: