Musicians return to St Ives festival with novelist’s memoir

»»MUSICAL duo ARKangel are to return to the St Ives September Festival with their show Cider With Rosie, new for 2024.

Featuring guitar, voice and spoken word, Katherine and Alan Clark present poet and novelist Laurie Lee’s “rich memoir of childhood and awakening, in an age of dramatic social change – the last witness to a lost time.”

Their September Festival show will take place at the St Ives Society of Artists’ Mariners Gallery on Wednesday, September 18.

This year’s show is a compantion piece to Lee’s memoir As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, which ARKangel, from Southwell in Nottinghamshire, performed in the same venue at last year’s September Festival.

Their Laurie Lee programmes are part of the Arts Councilfunded 2024-25 Rural Touring programme Live and Local, with performances from north Lincolnshire down to Gloucester and, said Katherine, “all counties east and west in between.

“We’re really looking forward to returning to St Ives”.

A festival spokesperson said: “Capturing Laurie Lee’s richly descriptive language in a powerful narrative coloured with music, ARKangel’s Cider With Rosie explores Laurie’s muchloved memoir of childhood in an age of dramatic social change: the damp, cramped Cotswold cottage, the rural poverty following the First World War and his never-to-be-forgotten encounter with Rosie Burdock.

“With haunting songs and the music of Vaughan Williams, John Ireland, Elgar Debussy and Holst, the programme includes

Fantasia on Greensleeves, The Lark Ascending, The Snow It Melts The Soonest, the New World Symphony and Sea Fever”.

For tickets see www. stivesseptemberfestival.co.uk and stives.ticketsolve.com