McCartney’s ‘Liverpool Oratorio’ to Premiere : Music: The ex-Beatle’s first classical work is a semi-autobiographical account of his early days in the city. It will be performed this weekend.

Paul McCartney’s first musical work in the classical idiom will be given a premiere this weekend in the same Anglican cathedral in Liverpool where the ex-Beatle once failed an audition for the church choir.

“Liverpool Oratorio”--a semi-autobiographical account of war-baby McCartney’s early days in the city--will be performed Friday and Saturday by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, a 100-voice chorus and boys’ choir and soloists, including soprano Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, and two Americans, tenor Jerry Hadley and bass Willard White.

Carl Davis, best known as a film and TV composer, will conduct the work. He collaborated for two years with McCartney on the oratorio, which was commissioned by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic to commemorate its 150th anniversary.

Set in eight movements, the oratorio lasts 90 minutes--30 times as long as most of the songs that have sealed McCartney’s worldwide fame.

The singer-songwriter has collaborated previously with record producer George Martin on songs with classical settings--”Yesterday” and “Eleanor Rigby” used a string quartet, and “Penny Lane” a trumpet obbligato. But for McCartney, an honorary doctor of music at England’s University of Sussex, this is his most ambitious classical venture by far.

McCartney has said he is aware that the work lays him on the line: “There are certain to be critics out there who are going to slag it off.” Close friends, including wife Linda, George Martin and Beatle films director Richard Lester, had all warned him to think hard before going ahead with the project: “But I’m not a great thinker. I plunge. I like risk.”

An earlier detour from his career as a pop artist and performer was badly received; his 1984 film “Give My Regards to Broad Street” was a critical and commercial bomb.

McCartney, who has attended all rehearsals of the work in the city’s Philharmonic Hall, will attend the two performances, along with a large number of his relatives, many of whom still live in the Liverpool area.

McCartney is staying at a house outside the city that he originally bought for his now-deceased father and which he keeps for visits to his hometown. He and his immediate family have been traveling to and from Liverpool in a private jet.

Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral is an ironic venue for the oratorio’s first performance; McCartney auditioned for its choir when he was 11 and was turned down because he could not read music. He also recalls skipping summer classes at his school, the Liverpool Institute, to go sunbathing in the cathedral’s cemetery.

There’s an irony in the timing of the work’s premiere. It is a thinly disguised love letter to Liverpool, a city currently the focus of seething political tension. Mountains of garbage have been piling up at emergency dumps because of an unsanctioned strike by city garbage collectors. They are protesting redundancies imposed by a City Council close to bankruptcy.

After the first two performances of the oratorio in Liverpool, it will be given its London premiere on July 7. An album will be released shortly.