Festival highlights need for arts venue; CLASSICAL Chester Summer Music Festival/ Various locations, Chester.

Byline: GLYN MON HUGHES

THE fact this year's Chester Summer Music Festival took place at all must have been a relief for organisers. Too often, this festival has been clinging by its fingernails to the edge of the cliff of survival. Threats that the festival could be heading for a cosy niche in the history books is no idle suggestion. It's faced tough times recently yet its loss is unthinkable, particularly as - Manchester International Festival apart - the North West is almost a cultural desert when it comes to classical music in summer months.

Some 25 events took place over nearly three weeks, including performances by Chetham's Symphony Orchestra and Manchester Camerata. The Camerata featured a preperformance of a work created by Year Six students at Upton Westlea Primary School along with Graham Fitkin, the festival's energetic a r tist-in-residence.

Throughout the festival, two anniversaries were conspicuously celebrated - the 250 years since the death of Handel and 200 since the birth of Mendelssohn.

So it was that a few rarities were given outings at the festival: Manchester Camerata performing Mendelssohn's String Symphony No 9 in C, for instance.

The closing concert, too, included the inexplicably rarely performed oratorio of Handel - Israel in Egypt at which the ever-disciplined Chester Festival Chorus was joined by the Royal Liverpool Philhar monic.

Highlights of the festival included a stunning performance of Britten, Bach and Mendelssohn by the BBC Singers making an all-toorare local appearance. Their performance of Judith Bingham's The Shepheardes Calendar and the stylish interpretation of Knut Nystedt's arrangement of the Bach chorale Come, sweetest death was stirring.

So, too, in a totally different way, was the concert entitled Dancing in Tetuan, an exploration of music inspired by the Sephardic Jews and performed by

Graham Fitkin

Joglaresa under the direction of Belina Sykes. Here was a combination of medieval songs and texts with more modern melodies, drawn from Spanish and Arabic sources.

Graham Fitkin was also in evidence at the festival and the debut performance of his "Group - a mixed ensemble performing his highly individual style of music, much inspired by jazz - was an earopening entertainment. Also to have secured Elin Manahan Thomas and Finchcock's Baroque for an exploration of Handel's Heroines was a stroke of genius.

Festival artistic director Andrew Cornall can be well pleased with what was achieved. But the festival pinpointed Chester's shortcomings as a musical centre as there is still no place dedicated to performance in the city.

Plans for a concert hall are dead in the water, but recent political rumblings about the much-discussed arts centre might just happen. Eventually. It's something the city, obviously, sorely needs.