In recent times it has formed part of Broomhill Festival which begins on Tuesday.

However, there is a university concert instead in the annual community festival, celebrating the cultural diversity of Broomhill, in what has become its normal slot at St Mark's Church on Thursday.

It is a Farewell to Broomhill concert as the chief university link with the area is the Department of Music which has been situated on Taptonville Road for nearly 40 years.

That changes in September when the department, rated one of the best in the country, relocates to new premises down the road at the old Jessop Hospital at the heart of the main university campus.

"It's a chance for the department to say thank you to the Broomhill community for its continual support throughout the past 40 years," says Stewart Campbell, the department's concert coordinator and organiser of the concert.

He exclaims: "Prepare for a musical extravaganza representing all aspects of the department's work!"

Mozart's Coronation Mass from the University Chamber Choir conducted by Nigel Simeone is the concert's central work. It is pure coincidence perhaps that the new Department of Music head since April, Prof Simon Keefe, happens to be a late 18th century music specialist with a strong affinity towards Mozart.

Tom Owen, one of George Nicholson's PhD students at the university, has written a "compact and fast-moving" Festive Overture for the occasion using Mozart's Coronation Mass orchestration, plus piano.

Tom said: "It's in a traditional festive overture format with a chorale followed by a fugal section, but with the spirit of modern invention in its harmonies and the way the counterpoint is generated, with canons set up between piano and organ, timpani and low strings, and so on.

"My doctoral folio is full of more experimental concerns, so it's been a nice break to write this piece which is intended mainly as an audience-pleaser."

Trio Elegiaque, a highly-accomplished threesome of Gary O'Shea, Amy Finch and Ed Harper who begin the university music festival today, have a slot in the farewell concert playing Debussy's Piano Trio.

Gary, an established pianist, is doing postgraduate studies with Peter Hill and Ben Frith and Ed, whose instrumental teacher is Elias Quartet cellist Marie Bitlloch, is nearing the end of studies for a BMus degree before going to the Royal Northern College of Music to study for a postgraduate diploma in performance.

Amy, the trio's violinist from Bristol and in her first year, arrived in Sheffield with a performance diploma and as a member of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain to study music, English and philosophy.

Lu Panling will be offering Chinese classical music on a Chinese bamboo flute called a dizi and Fay Hield English folk songs.

There are further contributions from Alan Brown (organ) and members of the university symphony, chamber and wind orchestras.