McCartney premiere at Royal Albert Hall

McCartney premiere at Royal Albert Hall

LONDON (AP) — Paul McCartney's Ecce Cor Meum (Behold My Heart), a new classical work for chorus and orchestra, will premiere at Royal Albert Hall on Nov. 3.
The concert will feature soprano Kate Royal and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Orchestra; London Voices; the boy singers of Magdalen College Choir, Oxford; and the boys of King's College Choir, Cambridge, conducted by Gavin Greenaway — the same cast that appears on the studio recording, to be released Tuesday by EMI Classics.

Anthony Smith, president of Magdalen College from 1998-2005, asked the former Beatle to compose a work celebrating the opening of the college's new concert hall.

The first version of Ecce Cor Meum was performed with the Magdalen College Choir at Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre in November 2001.

In a statement Friday, McCartney, 64, said this early performance taught him a great deal.

"Eventually I made it all come together through correcting a lot of misapprehensions — a lot was learned before the Sheldonian performance, but a lot of it was learned afterwards," he said.

"If it had been a Beatles song, I would have known how to do it. But this was a completely different ball game."

Ecce Cor Meum is McCartney's fourth classical album. His first, The Liverpool Oratorio, was released in 1991.