MUSIC: Composer and opera singers stars lined up for Chester Summer Music Festival

Apr 23 2008 by Phil Key, Liverpool Daily Post

BRITISH saxophonist/composer John Harle and opera singer Alfie Boe are two of the stars of this year’s Chester Summer Music Festival.

It is the first Chester festival under new artistic director Andrew Cornall, executive director of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.

His theme for the event opening on July 19 is the human voice.

John Harle as the festival’s artist-in-residence has been commissioned to write a new choral piece and Blackpool-born Alfie Boe will perform popular Italian classics.

The British solo-voice ensemble I Fagiolini, which specialises in Renaissance and contemporary music, will perform, the music of Claudio Monteverdi. And the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic under principal conductor Vasily Petrenko will play at Chester Cathedral with baritone Garry Magee and the Chester Festival Chorus. The festival is now in its 31st year, and Andrew Cornall said he was looking forward to building on the success it had achieved in the past.

The vocal theme, he said, was chosen because the voice had been “used by composers throughout the ages to express the most complex and also the simplest and most direct emotions”.

The instrumental recitals would also feature music inspired by the melody and form of vocal music.

John Harle will also join pianist Steve Lodder for an evening of jazz and classical music in a programme that includes works by Bela Bartok and Duke Ellington. There will also be a saxophone master class and a lecture at the city’s Grosvenor Museum.

Harle is one of the leading saxophonists on the concert platform and has had over 25 concerti written for him by composers like John Tavener, Michael Nyman and Harrison Birtwistle, famously premier-ing the latter’s Panic to boos at the Proms.

He has also written a num-ber of film and TV scores in-cluding the music for Simon Schama’s TV History of Britain while collaborating with various popular musicians including Elvis Costello and Paul McCartney.

* CHESTER Summer Music Festival, July 19 to 25.