The King’s Singers are excited to announce that actor Tim Pigott-Smith will be joining them as narrator at Cheltenham Music Festival next week (2 July) as part of the Alice in Wonderland programme, celebrating 150 years of Lewis Carroll’s classic.

Having featured in Tim Burton’s film Alice in Wonderland (2010), Tim Pigott-Smith proves the perfect addition to this magical event. Seeing his career take off with his first major role in Jewel in the Crown, he has since worked with directors Martin Scorcese, the Wachowskis and Marc Forster to appear in films stretching from Gangs of New York and Wodehouse in Exile to the James Bond blockbuster Quantum of Solace and – most recently – Jupiter Ascending.

Excerpts from the novel will be interwoven through the carefully-crafted programme that journeys from madrigals and partsongs to Ligeti’s The Lobster Quadrille and Cy Coleman’s The Rhythm of Life.

David writes:
“To celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865, The King’s Singers have created Through the Looking Glass, a programme that charts Alice’s story. The pieces we have chosen sit beneath each of the book’s chapter titles and follow Alice all the way from the riverbank down the rabbit hole into a fantasy world of weird animals and grotesque people. Much of the music in this programme is chosen to reflect the story, rather than to narrate it, although included this evening are some settings of Carroll’s original text in three of György Ligeti’s Nonsense Madrigals. Much as Alice’s adventures are an exciting, although somewhat unexpected, journey of discovery, so our programme provides a diverse and unusual array of music from across our repertoire.”

There are still a few tickets left for this magical evening.