Parisian Paintings of Modern life.  In an influential essay The Painter of Modern Life (1863), the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire described his ideal artist going out into the city to seek out new subjects for art: a “flâneur”, or “passionate spectator”, rejoicing in the experience of the crowd. Taking Baudelaire’s essay as a starting point, this lecture explores celebrated paintings of Parisian life by artists including Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Mary Cassatt.    

The Impressionist Landscape.  In this lecture, we follow the artists who went out beyond the city into the environs of Paris, painting en plein air, with a special focus on the art of Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. We analyse what was modern about Impressionist landscape paintings: their experiments with colour theory, new synthetic pigments, and, most importantly, the distinctly modern landscape that they chose to depict. We’ll be travelling by train, in and out of the Gare Saint Lazare in Paris, with boating trips and balloon excursions thrown in. We’ll also consider the distinctively modern independent exhibitions mounted by the Impressionist group in Paris from 1874 onwards, and beyond that, Monet’s exploration of a new kind of modern landscape painting during the 1890s, epitomised by his series of Poplars, Haystacks and Rouen Cathedral, and culminating, at the end of his life, with his monumental Water Lilies.   

Dr Lois Oliver is Professor in History of Art at the University of Notre Dame in London, and a Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute. She has worked as a Curator at the V&A, the National Gallery, and the Royal Academy. Her recent exhibitions include ‘Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery and ‘Jock McFadyen: Tourist without a Guidebook’ for the Royal Academy.

"I got to thinking about comedic moments in music after my chamber ensemble made a live recording of Perpetuum Mobile by Johann Strauss. At the end of it, the audience reacts with a good chuckle and it’s great to have this spontaneous audience feed-back on the recording because sometimes people think Classical music is all about seriousness and Teutonics, but there are of course times when you can't suppress a laugh at the composer's wit."

Lecture 1.   A look at snippets of the classical cannon from Mozart's A Musical Joke and Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals, to Malcolm Arnold's Grand Overture for Three Vacuum Cleaners, a Floor Polisher and Four Rifles, taking in along the way footage of Charlie Chaplin, Dudley Moore and Victor Borge, to uncover the techniques composers use to make us chortle. 

We'll savour the humour of Rossini, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Leroy Anderson and many more. In the mix too are a couple of short pieces for solo clarinet played by me but this is primarily a talk looking at how music can make us laugh.  

Lecture 2.   Mozart, Haydn, Gluck, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Strauss, Mahler, Bruckner, Schoenberg – it reads like a list of the great and good in classical music – but the amazing thing is that every one of these musical geniuses lived and worked in Vienna. 

With slides showing Viennese art and architecture as well as audio excerpts by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Johann Strauss and Mahler, this talk brings Vienna in its heyday to life.

Vienna’s proximity to nature, its politics and its burgeoning middle classes were all factors in the city's cultural blossoming, but most important was Vienna’s geographical location at the heart of the Habsburg Empire and the "wine, women and song" philosophy of the Viennese

We discover the special qualities that enabled one city to foster such a golden age for music. We'll also look at the developments in visual art, architecture, science and politics which formed the backdrop to this unparalleled explosion of musical genius and discuss why it ended so abruptly with the First World War.

Internationally acclaimed clarinettist, recitalist, chamber musician, recording artist and lecturer, described by The Times as "Britain's favourite clarinettist", Emma Johnson is one of the few clarinet players to have made a career as a soloist. Since winning the BBC Young Musician of the Year at the age of seventeen she has gone on to become one of the UK's biggest selling classical artists and is known for the diverse range of the repertoire she plays.

Emma studied Music and English at Pembroke College, Cambridge University, where she was the first woman to be made an Honorary Fellow.  She was honoured by the Queen with an M.B.E. in 1996.

Her charity, the Emma Johnson Music Foundation, gives workshops in primary schools to introduce children to instrumental music.