Worcester 2024: Three Choirs Festival releases full festival line-up along with announcing a new composer development scheme

Three Choirs Festival 2023 (Photo: James O'Driscoll)

The Three Choirs Festival has launched a new composer development scheme. New Voices Academy will be devoted to choral music, led by composer Daniel Kidane and hosted by the Three Choirs Festival in partnership with Carice Singers and Spitalfields Music.

Applications are now open, for the Academy will run from Friday 26 July to Tuesday 30 July, embedded within the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester, and will offer four ‘springboard’ and further ‘sandbox’ places for composers at the start of their professional careers. It will provide workshop, showcase, recording and networking opportunities alongside panel discussions and sessions on the practicalities and business of composition, concert and rehearsal access, and discussion time in which participants will co-design future iterations of the Academy so that it best serves today’s early-career composers.

Applications are encouraged from any composer in the early stages of their career who feels they would benefit from the project, and applicants do not need to have written for choral forces previously. Full details, including a contact for further information, can be found at the festival's website.

The full line-up of the Summer festival was recently announced, so that alongside  Elgar's The Kingdom, music commemorating 100 years since Stanford's death, Holst's early rarity The Cloud Messenger, premieres of two new festival commissions from Nathan James Dearden and Paul Mealor, and music inspired by the natural world including Bob Chilcott's The Angry Planet, and Sarah Kirkland Snyder's Mass for the Endangered, there is a packed daytime programme, including the Armonico Consort in The Forgotten Scarlatti, tributes to Steve Martland from the Heath Quartet and GBSR Duo, the Elias Quartet and Robert Plane, and a visit from The Symphonic Brass of London.

The festival features a total of 26 premieres, including performances of the New Voices Academy's Springboard composer works, which will be repeated at next year's Spitalfields Music Festival.    

Full details from the festival website.