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.

search tips advanced search
site search by freefind

Full stops, hyphens and apostrophes are treated as spaces, and double spaces are treated as single. So Op.86 will find Op 86 and Op. 86, and cello will find 'cello. K.516 will also return K 516 and K. 516, but not K516. Unless you enclose the string in quotes, or use Advanced Search, entering two or more words will return all programmes containing both words. So a search on J S Bach would return a programme containing composer J C Bach and performer J S Lowe. "J S Bach", J.S.Bach and "J.S.Bach" would all give the correct result. Bear in mind many older programmes have only Bach.

Searches will find only whole words, so Piano and Cello will not find Pianoforte and Violoncello which are invariably used in older programmes. Old spellings of common words in work titles have been corrected in the OCR, so do not search on Quartett(e), Quintett(e) or Sextett(e).

Obsolete or less usual spellings of Russian and Slavic composers (e.g. Tschaikowsky, Glazounov) have been updated in the OCR. Lyadov is preferred to Liadov. Rachmaninoff and Rachmaninov are both used, similarly Mussorgsky and Moussorgsky. Foreign spellings in a work's title e.g. Poulenc's Sonata à la mémoire de Serge Prokofieff are unchanged. Names ending in -sky and -ski are interchangeable, so searching on Rimsky-Korsakov will find Rimski-Korsakov and vice versa. Words ending in -in or -ine are also interchangeable, and so are -ett and -ette.

Song titles can be unreliable. The word O as in "O Death" is often misrecognised as number 0 rather than letter O.

Concert archive

All the programmes available to us have been scanned and processed by OCR (optical character recognition) with manual error correction to make them searchable. 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.

Some scanned images were not very susceptible to OCR, particularly programmes created on a typewriter. All programmes from 1961 to 1999 were manually edited in Microsoft Word before conversion to pdf, a very time-consuming process undertaken by Alan Reddish and Chris Crocker 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 and a few from the 1930s. Such programmes will have a slightly different appearance from the original typed or printed document but the formatting has been matched as far as possible.

Chris Crocker
Club archivist