A NIGHT of music will commemorate the sacrifices of the fallen of the First World Fallen.

The Wilfred Owen Festival will offer performances of Laura Rossi's Voices of Remembrance and the Faure Requiem at Holy Trinity Church in Roft Street, Oswestry on Saturday, November 3.

Voices of Remembrance is an orchestral/choral work featuring readings from 10 well–known poems written to remember the soldiers who lived, fought and died in the Great War.

Composer Laura Rossi has written extensively for film and television, including scores for Paul Andrew Williams’ critically– acclaimed features, London to Brighton and Song for Marion.

Her music has been recorded and performed by the Philharmonic Orchestra, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Concert Orchestra and performed at the Barbican, the Royal Festival Hall and the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London.

Laura is also lecturer for film music at the London Film Academy.

She has also scored many silent films and as part of the WW1 centenary commemorations was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to create a new score for the original 1916 film The Battle of The Somme.

Shot and screened in 1916, The Battle of the Somme was the first feature length documentary about war.

The film was first privately shown to David Lloyd George on the 2 August 1916 and the first major screening took place on August 10 at the Scala Theatre, Soho, London.

The documentary continued to be distributed for at least five months afterwards and by October that year, the film had received around 20 million admissions in Britain and Ireland, informing and challenging the public with its images of warfare, and changing the way both cinema and film was perceived – the UK population at the time was 43 million.

When writing the new score for the film Laura discovered her great uncle Fred was a stretcher bearer attached to the 29th Division on July 1st, 1916.

Through his diaries Laura retraced his footsteps across the Somme Battlefields where he was the only one of his pals to survive.

She said “Reading my uncle’s diaries and remembering his voice made the connection to that time so much more vivid and had a profound effect on me.

"I wanted to go deeper into the feelings and emotions that the personal connection to the battle, the soldiers, and remembering my uncle brought to me, music and poetry have a unique way of helping us to get closer to the thoughts and feelings of the soldiers.

"The voices, the words reach out to us from behind the grainy black and white images from so long ago. We will remember them”

Festival organiser Chris Woods said; “Through her experience scoring The Battle of the Somme and her extensive research on World War One, Laura Rossi has created a richly evocative work that combines her stunningly emotive music with these important historical poems and we are greatly looking to the performance which will without doubt be one of the highlights of the festival”

Actor and musician Tom Scott read the poems during the performance.

Tom is with the Actors’ Lab in Cheshire and has appeared at the Lowry and Wightman Theatres.

More recently Tom appeared as Freddie Morris in the highly –acclaimed production of John Howard's Poppyfields the Musical at Theatre Severn.

The evening will also feature Faure Requiem by Gabriel Faure, first performed in Paris in 1888.

Both the evening’s musical scores will be performed by the popular Cantiones Chamber Choir and the Border Chamber Orchestra.

The Cantiones were founded in 1982 and this mixed choir has established a reputation for the highest quality of musicianship under the baton of musical director Gerry Howe who said of the event;

“The whole choir looks forward with great excitement to the Wilfred Owen Festival, and feels privileged to be participating in such a major way in the Festival Concert on November 3.”

The choir will be accompanied by the Border Chamber Orchestra which is a group of professional and experienced musicians invited and brought together to play for this special event.

Tickets for the concert are £20 are available online at www.wilfredowenoswestry and at Oswestry Tickets, Rowanthorn, Chapel Court, Oswestry.