A little less conversation, a little more rock’n’roll royalty
CITY’S SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA HELPING BRING THE KING, ELVIS PRESLEY’S BIG DREAM TO LIFE
LEICESTER Symphony Orchestra will help bring Elvis Presley’s dream of doing a concert with a full symphony orchestra to life on Saturday.
Their “Classic Elvis” show at De Montfort Hall will include a Las Vegasstyle show with the full orchestra.
This was the kind of show Elvis was planning at the time of his death in 1977, said Peter Phillips, director of the annual Porthcawl Elvis Festival, where the show was first staged.
The festival takes over the South Wales seaside resort town every September and is now regarded as the world’s biggest Elvis festival.
Peter said: “While in America, I talked with Charles Stone – Elvis’s road manager – who says he was working on an orchestral show when he died.
“So, in effect, we are bringing Elvis’s dream to life.
“We designed the show as part of the festival, but Porthcawl doesn’t have a large enough venue for a full orchestra, so we moved it to the St David’s Hall in Cardiff and worked with the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra”.
The full show divides into three parts and features two award-winning Elvis tribute artists.
In the first part of the show, Michael Glayser will play the young Elvis in a trio, playing a Sun Sessions sequence.
The orchestra’s strings section will join them for the second section, which features some of the main ballads and songs from Elvis’s films.
For the final section Gordon Davis will play the older singer and perform the Las Vegas-style set with the full orchestra.
Conductor will be John Quirk, who also wrote all the orchestral arrangements for the show:
He said: “For the Vegas section of the show the orchestral parts replicate the existing arrangements, but the middle set with string only required a lot of work to get the right, slightly smoochy strings sound – that was an interesting challenge.”
Tickets for the concert can be bought through the De Montfort Hall Box Office on 0116 233 3111.
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