YORK Early Music Festival stalwart Peter Seymour is participating in two of the centrepiece concerts of this month's festival with the Shakespeare 400 theme of Fairies, Witches And Aerial Beings.

On Wednesday, he directs the Yorkshire Baroque Soloists in a 7.30pm performance of Henry Purcell's The Fairy Queen at the Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, University of York at 7.30pm, followed by Thursday's 2pm concert at the York Guildhall, where he accompanies soprano Bethany Seymour and bass Thomas Guthrie on harpsichord, with Ian Hoggart on recorder, for Where The Bard Lurks, Shakespeare In Music.

Peter is no stranger to Purcell's 1692 semi-opera, considered to be among his greatest compositions. "I remember it was done here to mark its tercentenary, and I'd done it a couple of times before then, since when we've found out a lot more about it," he says of Purcell's loose adaptation of Shakespeare's romantic comic romp A Midsummer Night's Dream, with its cast of Oberon and Titania, an 'Indian boy' fawns, dryads, savages, the rustics Croydon and Mopsia and a Chinese man and woman, among others.

Soloists will include Bethany Seymour, bass Matthew Brook and narrator Jason Darnell, a former University of York student, who will perform the "brilliant and rhyming narration", specially prepared for the occasion by Andrew Pinnock. "Even with the full narration, the performance works within three hours," says Peter.

He has presented Purcell's work at the University of York no fewer than four timers as a performance project. "Each time, how we did it, depended on the people involved," he says. "So the first time, for example, we had music students doing the spoken parts. We then did it with the East 15 Acting School at Sheriff Hutton, when everything was rehearsed independently, the chorus, the dancers, the spoken parts, etcetera, and then it all came together wonderfully, the music and the play, especially the final masque of 45 minutes, which is basically non-stop music."

The Fairy Queen starts with the music being almost secondary to the play and then the music gradually taking over, says Peter. "Andrew Pinnock, secretary of the Purcell Society, has re-written the prologue, which was always pertinent to the day, and they always made it something where they could say things they couldn't otherwise say in the play, a bit like on Have I Got News For You today."

Peter's second concert, Where The Bard Lurks, comprises settings of Shakesepeare by the likes Thomas Morley, Thomas Arne, Benjamin Cooke, Robert Johnson, Thomas Chilcot, John Wilson, John Weldon, Henry Purcell, Joseph Haydn and Joseph Vernon.

"It's amazing how many volumes of Shakespeare settings there are, usually ones that have been over-edited," says Peter. "So the main route I used was to edit from the first editions, looking to arrange it for one or two voices, to accompany solo recorder, which was very popular in the interludes, and will be played on Thursday by Ian Hoggart, the director of the Minster Minstrels." Box office: 01904 658338 or ncem.co.uk/yemf