Petersfield Musical Festival invites youngsters to join in and have some musical fun at a Family concert on Sunday 20th March. Children aged from four to eleven may bring along a small drum or another percussion instrument to the Festival Hall for a 3pm start to accompany a varied programme of music including selections from ‘Lion King’, Fanfare for the common man (by Aaron Copland) and Rippling Watercolours. The concert will be performed by Meridian Winds, a local band of wind players with close connections to local schools and colleges, encouraging young musicians to enjoy and broaden their music-making.
St Peter’s is the venue for the 2022 Festival’s lunchtime recitals on Tuesday 22nd March and Wednesday 23rd March (both at 1pm). Tuesday’s concert will be devoted to young recipients of the Michael Hurd for Young Musicians who are thrilled to perform to a live audience. Flautist Shoshana Yugin Power, recent winner of one of the prizes at PMF’s Young Composer Competition, will play a programme including CPE Bach. Shoshhana is a music scholar at Bedales. Kenji Luc will be accompanied by his sister on cello for a selection of music including the beautiful Debussy piano Sonata.
The following day, two popular musicians familiar to local audiences take the stage. Emilie Capulet and Mark Dancer will perform a programme of Viennese piano duets including Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven (a piano arrangement of the famous 5th Symphony.) Emilie is an award-winning international pianist, writer and musicologist in demand for both her lectures and performances. Mike Dancer is Director of Music and organist at St Peter’s Church.
The final concert in the Festival, In Praise of Singing (26th March) features Felix Mendelssohn’s Hymn of Praise, an exhilarating cantata originally composed to commemorate the publication of the Gutenberg Bible. The music sets a sequence of Biblical texts, mainly from the Psalms, and charts a journey from darkness to light. It will be a fitting celebration for the four young soloists and Festival Chorus of a return to live performance and encapsulates for many the sheer joy of choral singing. Other highlights of the programme are Britten’s Soirées Musicales (based on Rossini) and Smetana’s rousing and popular Vltava.
Image: SouthDowns Camerata
Sarah Hard
