QUEEN OF THE HARP to Headline at Radyr and Morganstown Festival.
The Radyr and Morganstown Festival continues its tradition of inviting local artists to headline at its May Festival. Over the last few years singers Helen Field and Jeremy Huw Williams, both residents of Radyr, have been the main attraction. The 2006 Festival is no exception, Catrin Finch, who lives in Gwaelod y Garth, has agreed to perform at the Festival.
Catrin who has been called Queen of the Harp was until recently Royal Harpist to the Prince of Wales. The Prince revived an ancient tradition, last used by Queen Victoria in 1873, to honour Catrin. In a recent Radio 3 interview Catrin told a story of how her parents took their three small children to a concert given by Marisa Robles to save the cost of a baby sitter. As a result of this visit Catrin became “hooked on the harp”. Catrin is breaking into her busy schedule to perform at the Radyr and Morganstown Festival on Tuesday 9th of May before leaving on an extensive tour with flautist James Galway and the London Mozart Players. Catrin can be seen at Christ Church, Radyr on Tuesday 9th of May at 7.30 p.m.
The other major musical event at this year’s Festival is a visit by the Hermitage Ensemble of St. Petersburg, Russia. The Hermitage Ensemble is a small choir of male voices. All the members of the Ensemble are professional singers in their native St. Petersburg, singing in concerts, choirs and at the world famous Kirov Opera. The aim of the Ensemble is “to bring the Russian tradition of church music closer to the west”. Their concert will contain work by some of the best known Russian composers, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov as well as less well known names like Galuppi and Berezovsky. Banned after the 1917 revolution this sublime music was inaccessible for more than seventy years.
The second half of their programme will be made up of folk and national songs which show a range of emotion and covey the characteristic of the great “Russian Soul”. The Hermitage Ensemble appear at Christ Church, Radyr on Tuesday 2nd of May at 7.30 p.m.
To celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday in 2005 Harold Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pinter is undoubtedly one of the great dramatists of the twentieth century with a string of prize winning plays, The Birthday Party, The Dumb Waiter, Old Times and The Caretaker to name but a few. He is also a prolific writer for the cinema having written more than twenty films, The Servant, The Go-Between and The French Lieutenant’s Woman being, perhaps, the best known.
To celebrate this incredible career the Radyr and Morganstown Festival will close with a visit by Fluellen with their production of one of Pinter’s best known plays The Caretaker. The Sunday Times called it “A modern classic, tough, cruel and brutally funny”. Fluellen is the resident theatre company at the Grand Theatre, Swansea and this will be their third visit to the Radyr and Morgantown festival where they have built up quite a following. They previously brought Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Victorian melodrama Maria Martin to Morganstown Village Hall.
The Caretaker can be seen at Morganstown Village Hall on Friday 12th of May at 7.30 p.m. Tickets £8 and £6 are available on Cardiff Nick Hawkins 20842561 or Allan Cook 20843176.