Young musicians raise the roof at the Cathedral

The Manx Youth Orchestra will perform at the Cathedral, Peel, on Tuesday 17 July as a part of the venue’s summer concert season.

The concert begins at 7.45pm and will last an hour, with light refreshments served afterwards. The programme will include a full orchestral version of Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, the popular tone poem Finlandia, by Sibelius, and lighter pieces such as the theme from The Magnificent Seven and It Had Better Be Tonight, a lively song with a Latin influence by Henry Mancini, made famous to a new generation by Michael Buble.

The Cathedral incorporates a hymn into its Tuesday concerts and the orchestra will raise the roof with the rousing Old One Hundredth, or All People That On Earth Do Dwell, arranged by Vaughan-Williams.

Admission to the concert is free but a retiring collection will be taken for the St German’s Cathedral Foundation for Music and the Arts, which encourages the development of music and the visual arts, particularly in the west of the Island.

It’s the final concert of the academic year for the Manx Youth Orchestra, which is run by the Department of Education and Children’s Music Service.

Maggie Richardson, Head of Music Service, said:

‘It has been a busy term for all nine groups under the Manx Youth Orchestra umbrella, with our 40th anniversary celebrations in March and successful concerts more recently.

‘The Manx Youth Wind Orchestra, Concert Band and Training Band wowed a capacity audience at the Villa Marina Arcade in June and we had to put out extra chairs, such was demand. The Manx Youth String Orchestra gave a wonderful evening’s entertainment at the Methodist Church in Ramsey on 23 June. The Training Orchestra and Band will perform to families and friends on 12 July and the Manx Youth Swing Band has a workshop on improvisation with guest tutors planned for the same day.

‘Our 2012/13 season starts in September when preparations will begin for our traditional Christmas Festival Concert at the Villa Marina on 15 December.’

Young people wishing to join should have reached grade 1 on an orchestral or band instrument and can obtain details from;

To find out who else will perform at the Cathedral this summer, visit its website at http://peelcathedral.wordpress.com/ or the what’s on guide on www.gov.im