A NEW work by royal composer Paul Mealor is being premiered at a top music festival.

The concerto written by Professor Mealor, one of the world’s most performed living composers who was born in St Asaph and brought up in Connah’s Quay, was jointly commissioned by the North Wales International Music Festival.

The event is being held in a hybrid format for the very first time this year and resumes virtually later this month.

The headline sponsors are the arts loving care organisation Pendine Park via the Pendine Arts and Community Trust which supports arts and community based activities across Wales.

Prof Mealor, who divides his time between composing and teaching at the University of Aberdeen, wrote the piano concerto after being jointly commissioned by the festival and the JAM on the Marsh Festival in Kent.

The concerto was performed before a live audience for the first time at the festival’s traditional home, St Asaph Cathedral, last month before a sell-out audience.

It was filmed and will play an important part in the festival which resumes as an online festival, starting on November 15, with the concerts free to watch.

Paul said he was overjoyed to hear the concerto being performed in the cathedral by pianist John Frederick Hudson and the NEW Sinfonia conducted by Robert Guy.

The concerto, Paul's second, is one long movement, lasting just over twenty minutes and subdivided into three sections.

He said: "The piece is a landscape piece and very slow moving. It plots a day really starting with sunrise and there's a storm in the middle of it and gradually it becomes more complicated as the piece goes on.

"At the performance in the cathedral there were people turning round to look if they were inside the building."

He studied composition from a young age and received lessons from another royal composer, Professor William Mathias, the founder of the North Wales International Music Festival, half a century ago.

Paul said he would visit the professor at his Bangor home and would often meet Aled Jones, the boy soprano turned television presenter, on the doorstep.

"Aled was receiving singing lessons from the professors wife, Yvonne, who was a world class opera singer. We got to know each other quite well," he said.

Paul’s links with the North Wales International Music Festival also go back many years. He stood alongside Prof Mathias as he himself performed his piano concerto turning the pages of the music as and when required.

For more information about the resumption of the North Wales International Music Festival online with the concerts free to watch from November 15 please visit www.nwimf.com