A MUSICAL adventure through fairytale stories of trolls, belly dancers, witches and gingerbread cottages is coming to Grays.

The Essex Concert Orchestra and the South Essex Youth Symphony Orchestra will be performing extracts from 'Hansel and Gretel' by German composer Engelbert Humperdinck and 'Peer Gynt' by Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg in a Fairytale Twosome at Grays Civic Hall.

They will be joined by Southend High School for Girls’ performing arts department, which will be providing dancers and support for the evening.

A highlight of the night will be a performance of Grieg’s well-loved romp ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ which listeners unfamiliar with the composer may remember from various Alton Towers advertisements.

It is taken from Grieg’s incidental music, composed in 1875, for Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 dramatisation of the traditional Norwegian fairytale Peer Gynt.

Gynt is a dreamer, liar and serial womaniser cast out of his home town, leading him on an adventure in search of fame, fortune and the meaning of life.

He sweeps around the world in a fruitless search, outwitting wedding guests, trolls and a belly dancing con-woman all intent on bringing him down - eventually redeemed by the love of a good woman.

Humperdinck’s music is taken from an opera he composed in 1893 to Hansel and Gretel, a traditional European fairytale recorded by the Brothers Grimm earlier in the century.

The siblings are scolded by their desperately poor mother and sent into the forest to collect berries to eat.

However, deep in the forest there lives an evil witch who casts spells on vulnerable children, then fattens them up and turns them into confectionery.

The performance begins at 7.30pm on June 20 at the Civic Hall, on Blackshots Lane.

For more information contact director Malcolm Hiscock on 07956 378070.

For tickets, priced £8 adults, £7 seniors, £5 students and children or £20 for a family of two adults and up to four children, email boxoffice@seyso.org.uk or boxoffice@essexconcertorchestra.org.uk