THIS year’s Petersfield Music Festival, which runs from March 11-19, will have more on offer than ever before, according to the organisers.

In addition to the traditional choral and orchestral concerts, the volunteer organisers have added a Sunday concert for the first time to the eight-day festival runs from March 11-19.

Families, particularly those with younger children, can enjoy an hour’s music in the Festival Hall beginning at 3pm on March 13. The programme includes a light-hearted medley of theme tunes, from The Pink Panther to Harry Potter, Peter and the Wolf with narrator, and, to encourage participation by all – The Orchestra Song. Even tone-deaf dads can sing on one note as the horns. Afterwards, children will be encouraged to examine the instruments and talk to the musicians who are drawn from Basingstoke Chamber Orchestra. All seats are priced at £3, adult and child.

Following the practice of recent years, the festival opens with local music-makers. This year it is the Horndean-based A Choired Taste, sharing the stage with the Hampshire Guitar Orchestra. The phenomenal rise in community choirs is a welcome trend, and Horndean has one of the best. The Guitar Orchestra, or Hago for short, aims to revise people’s perception of classical guitar, and since it leader has been known to exhort the audience to ‘use your dentures as castanets’, perhaps they will.

St Peter’s Church in The Square is hosting two recitals in festival week. At the first, at 1pm on Tuesday, March 15, the duo, Sara and Alessandro Timossi, professional musicians from Liss, will play piano and violin (entry free, retiring collection).

On Wednesday evening, the second celebrity organ recital brings composer and broadcaster Malcolm Archer to Petersfield. Malcolm is currently Director of Chapel Music at Winchester College. His Quiristers broadcast recently on Radio 4.

Petersfield’s children get their chance, as always, at the youth concerts on Monday and Wednesday evening. Shakespeare will be honoured this year, as we celebrate his 400th anniversary.

There will, of course, be the traditional festival choral and orchestral concerts. Central to Petersfield Orchestra’s programme is the stirring Piano Concerto no. 1 by Tchaikovsky

As usual on the two Saturdays of the festival, local choral societies will join together under the baton of Paul Spicer. The first, on March 12, features the exuberant and popular Carmina Burana by Carl Orff, whose music is fitted to a collection of medieval poems on the fickleness of fortune and the perils and pleasure of drink, gambling and love. This will be preceded by a setting of Rio Grande, a poem by Sacheverell Sitwell, in which the English composer Constant Lambert combines jazzy syncopation with Latin-American rhythm.

The unique 15-minute composition will be played on two pianos and a five-strong percussion ensemble from Southern Pro Musica who will be playing, among other instruments, the cow bell, Chinese tom-tom and Turkish crash.

The final concert of the festival, on March 19, is Weber’s Mass in E flat – nicknamed ‘Der Freischütz’ because he uses tunes from the opera of the same name – was first performed in 1818 and has been popular ever since and choirs find it a delight to sing. Mendelssohn’s motet Hear My Prayer, which includes the well-loved ‘O for the wings of a dove’, opens the concert. Other works on the programme are Weber’s Concertino for Clarinet and Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony.

Before the grand finale, on March 18, there will be the traditional ‘Friday Celebrity Concert’. This year the audience have the chance to swing with The Cotton Club. Harry Strutters and his Hot Rhythm Orchestra have been playing to packed halls up and down the country. Harry, in company with the Jiving Lindy Hoppers, will take the audience back to 1930s’ New York.

Bojangles and Billie Holiday ride again in this high-octane performance bringing the music and dance of Harlem’s famous nightclub back to life.

Tickets are available from One Tree Books, on Lavant Street, by calling 01730 261199 from February 8, or by visiting petersfieldmusicalfestival.org.uk.