A TALENTED young musician saw his dream of playing in front of a packed audience at the Royal Albert Hall dashed when his performance was pulled at the 11th hour.

Ian Penketh (20) from Peckers Hill Road in Sutton, a first-year music student at the University of Northumbria, has been playing the electric guitar for the last seven years. And for the last few months he has been hard at work, along with university tutor Brendan Beales, on a classical piece of music written by Brendan which former St Cuthbert's High pupil Ian was set to play at the Royal Albert Hall as part of a special educational concert organised by the Royal Philarmonic Orchestra.

However, the night before the concert was due to start, the Philarmonic informed Ian and Brendan that the piece was being dropped from the programme.

Ian, whose musical heroes include The Beatles and Queen guitarist Brian May, told the Star: "I was absolutely gutted when I heard the news. The concert was due to start in the morning and someone from the orchestra only contacted us at about 9.30pm the night before. "My family and a lot of friends from St Helens had gone down to watch me play so they were disappointed as well.

"It is every musician's dream, including my own, to play at the Royal Albert Hall and it came so close to coming true for me that I still can't really believe this has happened."

Brendan added: "We had already had a rehearsal of the piece in the hall watched by a number of people and the reception was fantastic, it went down very well. Now, all they have succeeded in doing is making an extremely talented young man very disappointed."

Lynn Chambers, a PR consultant for the Royal Philarmonic Orchestra told the Star: "We actually employed Brendan Beales as a compere for the show but he asked us if he could also write a special piece for Ian, one of his students.

"The show's producer and director of education Judith Webster agreed to this on the condition that the piece was no more than five minutes long because we had to squeeze it in with the rest of the performance. However, when we heard it, it was more than 10 minutes long and Judith also felt that Mr Beales was taking too much time over this piece and consequently his work as compere was suffering.

"Eventually, we felt we had no choice but to cut the piece because Mr Beales still hadn't got it down to five minutes and also hadn't made any headway with his compering links so we had to get another compere as well. I understand how disappointed Ian must feel at not getting to perform the song but we made it perfectly clear to Mr Beales what was expected of him."

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