Handel’s Messiah - just like the good old days! Concert takes place in the venue where the composer’s own musicians performed back in 1763.

A special concert performance of Handel’s Messiah is being held at an Essex Church, where the composer’s own musicians played more than 250 years ago.

St Peter’s Church in Colchester is one of the few churches in the country that has its own entry in the Domesday Book of 1086.

The present building dates back to Medieval times but extensive work was carried out during the 1700s when the tower was declared unsafe.

To celebrate the building of a new tower in 1763, the church decided to hold a classical music festival celebrating the works of Handel and to do that they invited the very musicians who played alongside the royal composer.

The Messiah, one of Handel’s most famous works, was at the time just over 20 years old but was already hugely popular and if the composer had not died four years earlier, perhaps the affluent townspeople of Colchester would have invited him along too to conduct the piece.

Now the Messiah is making a welcome return to St Peter’s thanks to the organisers of this year’s Roman River Music Festival.

Festival director Orlando Jopling says: “You can imagine the balconies packed for the church’s Handel festival in 1763, just a few years after Handel himself died.

“Fortunately the church has given us special permission to open up the balconies, from which concert-goers will be able to hear the beautiful sounds these exceptional musicians, and this stunning building, will create.”

Performing a chamber version of the piece on period instruments will be some of the country’s brightest musical stars including James Eastaway and Mark Radcliffe on oboes, Zoe Shevlin on bassoon, Dorothea Vogel on viola, Richard Lester on cello, Kate Aldridge on double bass, David Blackadder and Matt Wells on trumpets, Pawel Siwczak on harpsichord, Scott Bywater on timpani and Julia Kuhn and leader Matthew Truscott on violins.

Providing the vocals will be sopranos Elizabeth Atherton and Alice Gribbin, altos Tim Travers Brown and David Clegg, tenors Nick Pritchard and Matthew Beale and basses William Gaunt and Johnny Herford.

The evening, which takes place at the Colchester church on September 26 at 4pm, is one of the many highlights of this year’s Roman River Music Festival, which runs in and around the Colchester area until October 4.

About Roman River Music Festival

Based in and around the salt marshes and wide open skies of coastal north east Essex, the Roman River Music Festival has been attracting internationally acclaimed musicians since 2000.

It began as a simple one-day event, aimed at encouraging young people to play, held in the atmospheric surroundings of the medieval whitewashed walls of Fingringhoe Church, which was then followed by a concert in the evening.

Today the festival has a packed programme of truly international quality music set in unusual and unexpected venues, featuring new commissions, emerging talent, young artists and world renowned musicians.

Among the rest of the highlights still to come at this year’s festival will be a chance to see singer and pianist Joe Stilgoe in a former Victorian music hall, a pair of Russian quintets performed by, among others, the festival’s musician in residence Elena Urioste, and an Evening Serenade courtesy of some of Britten Sinfonia’s most eminent wind soloists.

Roman River Music Festival 2015 – more details