Search programmes

Enter a composer, work, performer, etc. in the search box. Search terms are not case sensitive, and accents are ignored. 'Entire site' excludes pages in the Members area.

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Searches on programmes are limited to those listed in the linked pages on the left. Where programmes exist, results will be accurate for 1922-25 and from 1937 onwards. They may be incomplete for other years because of text being unrecognised, particularly those from March 1926 to May 1928 where some text is in a Gothic typeface.

The search algorithm is tolerant of spaces, so Op.16 will also return instances of Op. 16, and K.516 will pick up K. 516.

Be wary of older spellings and abbreviations. Searches on Piano will not find Pianoforte which is invariably used in older programmes. Neither will Quartet and Quintet find Quartett and Quintett. However searching on Quartett will pick up Quartette and vice versa. Names ending in -sky and -ski are also interchangeable.

Obsolete spellings of Russian composers in the 1922-25 programmes (e.g. Glazounov, Tschaikowsky) have been updated, but will persist in other printed programmes where the OCR may be otherwise satisfactory. Note that Rachmaninoff and Rachmaninov are both used, similarly Mussorgsky and Moussorgsky.

Concert archive

We are building an online archive of the Club's historic programmes. All the programmes available to us have been scanned and processed by OCR (optical character recognition) to make them searchable and are on the website. Thanks are due to Tamara Ravenhill, Alan Reddish and Chris Underhill for doing most of the scanning.

We are missing the following programmes:

  • most programmes from Jan 1900 to Feb 1922; these are held in the Bodleian Library
  • concert nos. 759-762 from 1933
  • concert no. 959 from 1955
  • concert no. 1022 from 1958
  • many programmes between 1961 and 1973, including most from 1961 to 1964

If you are able to lend any of the missing programmes, please get in touch.

Programmes prior to 1937 may not be full text searchable because of shortcomings in the OCR. Most programmes from 1961 to 1999 have been manually edited in Microsoft Word before conversion to pdf, a very time-consuming process undertaken by Alan Reddish and Chris Crocker but one that ensures all words are searchable and typographical errors corrected. Programmes between March 1922 and March 1926 were processed similarly, along with some between 1953 and 1960. Recent software improvements have made it practicable to correct text recognition errors in the majority of pdf scans without exporting to Word. We are in the process of tackling the remaining programmes in this way, though some of the poorer scans still have to be edited in Word in order that all works, composers and performers are searchable. We are working backwards in time and have reached 1936.