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Liverpool Echo

Entertainment

Jess Flaherty

Music festival returning to Liverpool this weekend after three year hiatus

John Lewis (Person)

Liverpool Early Music Festival is returning this weekend after a three year hiatus.

The popular event made its debut a few years ago and will be back with a bang, kicking off festivities with one of the UK's finest choral ensembles The Sixteen, The Linarol Consort of Renaissance Viols, and early music and theatre company The Telling. Liverpool Early Music Festival is set to launch this Saturday, September 17 with The Telling, who are holding five events across the weekend.

A Singing and Recorder Workshop will start the fun on Saturday at 2.15pm, where The Telling's singer Clare Norburn and recorder player Emily Baines will teach participants how to sing or play Spanish mediaeval and Sephardic songs. This is in direct reference to the theme of their 5.45pm concert; Music from the Spanish Melting Pot.

If visitors crave a taste of the limelight, they'll be invited to perform what they learned at the 5.45pm concert, though shy people needn't worry as it's entirely up to each individual. The concert will be made up of Sephardic Jewish and Spanish mediaeval repertoire performed by The Telling. Both events will take place at Liverpool Parish Church, Chapel Street.

Continuing the musical extravaganza into the evening, The Telling will perform an informal concert at the Nordic Church, Park Lane, from 8.45pm until 10pm. This will be a jamming session, with the artists taking requests alongside performances of some of their usual early music repertoire, as well as an Irish set.

Local musicians are invited to attend with their instruments in tow so they can join in with the group, which includes a soprano, recorder, fiddle, bagpipes, harp and percussion to create a mash-up of old and new. On Sunday at 1.30pm, The Telling will dial it back with a beautiful, traditional and mediaeval lullaby concert at Ullet Road Church Hall.

This performance is aimed at babies, children and their parents, grandparents and/or guardians, but the repertoire, which will be performed by singer Clare Norburn and harpist Jean Kelly, is one which can definitely be enjoyed by anyone.

The festival's headline event, Unsung Heroine, a critically acclaimed half concert/half play, will take place on Sunday evening at 8pm. It will transport audience members to 12th century Provence, France to uncover the imagined life and love of 'mediaeval Amy Winehouse', the troubadour/mediaeval poet, Countess Beatriz de Dia. The stage show will star actor Leila Mimmack (BBC Doctors), and is directed by the BAFTA-nominated Nicholas Renton (Mrs Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, Musketeers, A Room With A View, Lewis, Silent Witness).

Discount day and weekend tickets are on sale now for The Telling's weekend of events, as well as individual event tickets. Clare Norburn commented: "Women are under-represented in the classical and singer-songwriter industries – so it's extraordinary that back in the 12th Century, Beatriz was just one of a number of women who were creating and singing their own songs in exactly the way that singer-songwriters start picking out tunes today."

The festival continues on Thursday, September 22 at Nordic Church with Epitaph For a Green Lover, as The Linarol Consort with soprano Héloïse Bernard tell the remarkable story of Marguerite of Austria, one of the 16th century's greatest patrons of the arts, through music from her own manuscripts. The programme includes songs and instrumental music played by renaissance viols, with a rebec, pipes and drums making an appearance too.

Then, on Friday, September 23, the festival is completed with The Sixteen's Choral Pilgrimage of 2022 at Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral. Centred around Hubert Parry's heartfelt Songs of Farewell, the tour also explores music by Campion, Howells, and award-winning composer Cecilia McDowall. For more information and to book tickets for the festival, click here.