Nigel Kennedy’s cousin Susie Self says she’s “not quite of his league”, but audiences at Bushey Hall School have an opportunity to judge for themselves when the composer and mezzo-soprano joins Bushey Symphony Orchestra (BSO) and St Albans Choral Society for a celebration of English music, including Sir Edward Elgar’s The Music Makers, tomorrow night (Saturday).

“We’ve never shared a stage, but we played in a pram together,” Susie says of the acclaimed violinist, but she has had the opportunity to work with her other celebrity relative, journalist Will Self.

“We’re first cousins and very good chums, the confluence of two enfants terribles,” says Susie, who now lives "just down the road", in Burnt Oak but grew up in Hampstead.

Her cousins work has also provided inspiration for her own.

“I was commissioned to perform a piece based on Will’s Slump comic strip for The New Statesman,” Susie tells me. The result, composed by Steve McNeff with a libretto by Andy Rashleigh, saw Susie combining her singing skills with physical theatre playing six characters. The show premiered in London at the Lyric Hammersmith Studio in 1996.

Susie’s famous ancestry doesn’t stop there, however. Her grandfather, was the poet and dramatist John Drinkwater and her grandmother violinist Daisy Kennedy, both of whom were acquainted with Elgar.

“I have a personal connection with Elgar’s works, as I have original unpublished manuscripts by Elgar set to poems by my grandfather. On the back of one is a little pastiche of a Bach fugue.”

I ask Susie if she has plans to perform the pieces.

“There are copywright problems, because although Elgar came out of copyright, the law says that if a manuscript is unpublished, the copyright on it is 130 years. I could use them as a fragmentary start to an instrumental piece using strands of the works and not infringe on the copyright as Anythony Payne did with sketches from his Third Symphony, but I’ll have to wait till my dotage if I want to do anything else with it. I also have a collection of photos of Elgar at the Malvern Festival and a delightful one of him with my grandmother.”

Saturday’s concert will be conducted by BSO’s George Vass, with whom Susie first performed Verdi’s Requiem at St Albans Cathedral more than ten years ago. More recently, the conductor recorded Susie’s Second Symphony with the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra in the Czech Republic.

As well as appearing regularly on the opera houses and concert halls circuit, most recently in Salzburg for the Vlaamse Opera in Belgium, at Opera North and at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, Susie has found time to compose an opera, Heroic Women and record an album, Seachanges based on performances at the opera festival at London’s Riverside Studios.

“The album is very much a development of what I call classical music world fusion. It’s a new strand of work that’s come in response for a need to build bridges between traditional concert goers and a whole load of people who love to listen to classical music, but would never go near the Royal Opera House. I want to show that it’s not a snobby place and make the music more accessible. I might have been informed by Nigel, but I’m not quite as anarchic.”

The concert takes place tomorrow night at Bushey Hall School, London Road, Bushey at 7.30pm. Tickets: 01923 774229