BOURNEMOUTH Symphony Orchestra is limbering up for three days of concerts which will go from Sgt Pepper to Star Wars via the hits of Queen.

Investec Proms in the Park will run from August 11-13 at Bournemouth’s Meyrick Park, with something for all ages including an afternoon of family fun.

The weekend begins with a John Williams Filmfest, celebrating the composer responsible for Star Wars, Harry Potter, Indiana Jones and ET among others.

Pete Harrison, who will conduct two of the weekend’s concerts but will hand the baton to Victor Aviat for the Williams event, said: “He’s one of the few composers where you could do a whole evening of his work without getting stuck in a rut of repetition.

“He talks about wearing different colours when he writes. He might take on the style of Copland in Lincoln – it’s a different style from Star Wars or Titnin.

“He’s done such a broad variety of things. That’s the brilliance for me. He will take on the mantle of someone else but he definitely gives it his own twist.”

Saturday August 12 sees a Rock & Symphonic Queen Spectacular, featuring a rock band and stars from the West End musical We Will Rock You.

Mr Harrison, who will conduct, said the orchestra had impressed Queen’s guitarist himself.

“Brian May came and saw the concert we did a few years ago. He was just bowled over. He said, ‘That’s actually what we would have done if we had the resources’. They didn’t, so they used the multi-tracked layers of sound.”

He said the orchestra could deliver the effect the band wanted in their number one hit Bohemian Rhapsody, but which Queen themselves could never achieve on stage.

“They would get to the piano section in the middle, the stage would go dark and they would walk off,” he said.

Mr Harrison, a Queen fan himself, said: “The main thing for me was to keep truly authentic to the Queen stuff.”

August 13 sees a Sunday in the Park, a day for the whole family. It features a 4pm Summer Classics concert conducted by Victor Aviat, followed by Let the Sunshine In at 7.30pm, conducted by Mr Harrison.

The programme features the BSO with the Inspiration Choir Southampton. The choir, with Mr Harrison as music director, is a partner of the orchestra and has members of all backgrounds who don’t necessarily read music.

It will be full of popular hits including Fields of Gold, a Bee Gees medley, Mr Blue Sky and Together in Electric Dreams – and Mr Harrison said it would also include a 50th anniversary nod to the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album.

He said of the proms: “The BSO are an incredibly versatile orchestra, second to very few, if any. They play it fantastically well and they love doing it. You can’t say fairer than that.“There are some orchestras that are a bit snooty about this sort of thing. If it’s not Brahms, Bruckner or Beethoven or anything else beginning with B.”

He said the concerts played an important part in securing the orchestra financially.

“It’s a huge outlay but if it pays off and you do get however many thousand people in, it does work out,” he said.

“If you don’t do something to try and attract young people in, with all this huge variety of other things they’ve got in entertainment, there will be nobody there in 10 years’ time.”

n Details are at bsolilve.com