Gavin Higgins to be inaugural Associate Composer at the Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester in 2026

Gavin Higgins (Photo: Yusef Bastaway)

The Three Choirs Festival has announced Gavin Higgins as its inaugural Associate Composer, marking the launch of a major composer development programme. Higgins will launch his three-year residency with a commission for a new setting of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis to be premiered at the 2026 Festival in Gloucester, the city of his birth. The work will be premiered by the combined three cathedral choirs of Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester at Choral Evensong on Wednesday 29 July 2026, and will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. Higgins' cantata The Faerie Bride was performed at the Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester in 2023 [see my review]

Unusually, the new Associate Composer programme will involve multiple composers, each year, a new composer will join the programme, building a cohort of three composers in residence by the third year. Over the course of their residencies, Associate Composers will engage with audiences and contribute to the artistic life of the festival, culminating in the premiere of a major choral-orchestral work in their final year. 

The Three Choirs Festival opens in Gloucester on 25 July 2026 with Walton's Belshazzar's Feast and concludes on 1 August 2026 with Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius. See the festival website.

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.

Highlights of the 2024 Three Choirs Festival in Worcester: but don't just listen, why not join in?

Vaughan Williams: The Pilgrim's Progress - British Youth Opera,  Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Three Choirs Festival Youth Choir, Charlotte Corderoy at the Three Choirs Festival 2023 (Photo Dale Hodgett)

The Three Choirs Festival returns to Worcester next year, from 27 July to 3 August 2024, under artistic director Samuel Hudson, director of music at Worcester Cathedral. The full programme will be released in March 2024, but highlights will include Elgar's The Kingdom, music commemorating 100 years since Stanford's death, 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.

Besides simply going and listening, there are many ways to get involved with the festival with opportunities to volunteer, auditioning for the Three Choirs Festival Chorus, joining Three Choirs Festival Voices or Three Choirs Festival Youth Choir, or performing on the Bandstand. 

The Three Choirs Festival Chorus is drawn from auditioned singers in and around Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester, with the largest contingent each year coming from the host city. Amateur choral singers have been taking part in the festival since the middle of the 19th century to augment the cathedral choirs of boy trebles and male altos, tenors and basses. In 2010, the Three Choirs Festival Youth Choir was established for singers aged 14-25, and the choir made a terrific contribution to this year's performance of Vaughan Williams' Pilgrim's Progress [see my review]. The Three Choirs Festival Voices is new for this year and is open to everyone, with no audition required and a reduced rehearsal period in comparison to that of the Chorus. Find out more at the festival website.

Greater than the sum of its parts: British Youth Opera perform Vaughan Williams' The Pilgrim's Progress at the Three Choirs Festival

Vaughan Williams: The Pilgrim's Progress - Emyr Lloyd Jones (Evangelist), Ross Cumming (Pilgrim) - British Youth Opera at the Three Choirs Festival (Photo James O'Driscoll)

Ralph Vaughan Williams: The Pilgrim's Progress: British Youth Opera, Royal Philhamonic Orchestra, Three Choirs Festival Youth Choir, Charlotte Corderoy; Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester Cathedral

Vaughan Williams' morality stage with young singers in Gloucester Cathedral proves to be a communal achievement underpinning a terrific account of the role of Pilgrim from Ross Cumming

Premiered in 1951, Vaughan Williams' morality The Pilgrim's Progress was some 30 years in the making, at one point the composer despairing of it ever reaching the stage. RVW regarded the 1951 production at the Royal Opera as unsatisfactory and when Cambridge University performed the work in 1954, he saw it as the real premiere. Since then the work's idiosyncracies - its avoidance of conventional operatic narrative, the large number of small roles - have restricted performances. But when handled sympathetically it can create magic.

I first saw the opera in 1992 at the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) and since then there have been occasional sightings - Richard Hickox' determined espousal of the work with three semi-staged productions, English National Opera's production of 2012 and the RNCM's return to the work in 2019.

Vaughan Williams: The Pilgrim's Progress - Ross Cumming (Pilgrim), Armand Rabot (Apolloyon) - British Youth Opera at the Three Choirs Festival (Photo James O'Driscoll)

Having performed RVW's Sir John in Love at Opera Holland Park in 2022 [see my review], for its Summer showcase performance this year, British Youth Opera joined forces with the Three Choirs Festival to perform The Pilgrim's Progress.

At Gloucester Cathedral on 24 July 2023, Charlotte Corderoy conducted, the Three Choirs Festival Youth Choir, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and British Youth Opera in RVW's The Pilgrim's Progress with soloists Issy Bridgman, Charlotte Janes Kennedy, Angela Darlin-Barlow, Lydia Shariff, Matthew Curtis, Gabriel Seawright, Zihua Zhang, Ross Cumming, Jia Huang, Emyr Lloyd Jones and Armand Rabot. The work was directed by Will Kerley.

Eclectic mix: Gavin Higgins' The Faerie Bride is a highlight at the Three Choirs Festival alongside a new Ronald Corp piece & Vaughan Williams' Flos Campi

Gavin Higgins: The Faerie Bride - Marta Fontanals-Simmons, Roderick Williams, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Martyn Brabbins - The Three Choirs Festival (Photo: Dale Hodgetts)

Ronald Corp: Hail and Farewell; Ralph Vaughan Williams: Flos Campi; Gavin Higgins: The Faerie Bride; Marta Fontanals-Simmons, Roderick Williams, Rebecca Jones, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Three Choirs Festival Chorus, Martyn Brabbins; Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester Cathedral

A contemporary retelling of a Welsh folk tale makes a vivid and engaging climax to this concert mixing contemporary and classic repertoire

Gavin Higgins' cantata The Faerie Bride was premiered at last year's Aldeburgh Festival by Martyn Brabbins and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales at Snape Maltings, and the same forces also performed it at St David's Hall, Cardiff, and the work received its third performance at the Three Choirs Festival on Sunday 23 July 2023 at Gloucester Cathedral. Martyn Brabbins conducted the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, mezzo-soprano Marta Fontanals-Simmons, baritone Roderick Williams and the Three Choirs Festival Chorus in the world premiere of Ronald Corp's Hail and Farewell, RVW's Flos Campi (with viola soloist Rebecca Jones) and Gavin Higgins' The Faerie Bride.

Corp's song cycle Hail and Farewell, for baritone (Roderick Williams) and string orchestra was written in memory of Catherine Pascall, a board member of the Three Choirs Festival until her recent death. Corp's choice of poetry for the cycle reflected Pascall's love of carousels, with Verlaine's Chevaux de bois and Diana Jones' Roundabout, plus Pascall's favourite poem, Shakespeare's sonnet, When in disgrace, with fortune and men's eyes, Catullus' Ave atque vale, the anonymous early English Pleasure it is and Robert Bridges' My spirit sang all day. The result was a rather diverse group of texts, lacking a particular thread, something emphasised by Corp setting the Verlaine in the original French and the Catullus in Latin.

Gavin Higgins: The Faerie Bride - Marta Fontanals-Simmons, Martyn Brabbins - The Three Choirs Festival (Photo: Dale Hodgetts)

The cycle began with Pleasure it is, Tippett-like string textures full of lively cross-rhythms against a more declamatory vocal line. This was the prevailing sound world of the cycle. In the Verlaine setting, the vocal writing was more lyrical yet it was the string writing that remained memorable. Here, and in several movements, the balance rather favoured the strings, unusually for Roderick Williams, the words were occluded. The Shakespeare and Catullus settings were the serious centre of the cycle, though the interest was more in the relationship between voice and instruments rather than the vocal line itself. Diana Jones' poem, written specially, proved engaging and the cycle ended with a setting of the Bridges poem that featured more engaging Tippett-esque string writing.

Looking back at the 2022 Three Choirs Festival in Hereford, from Dyson's Quo Vadis to Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius

Geraint Bowen conducts Dvořák’s Requiem in Hereford Cathedral at Three Choirs Festival with Anita Watson, Catherine Carby, Ruairi Bowen, Stephan Loges
(Photo: Dale Hodgetts & James O’Driscol)

This year’s Three Choirs Festival has drawn to a close in Hereford, after eight days of choral concerts, chamber music, family events, theatre and more. Around 800 performers took part across the week, with almost 150 composers represented, over a third of whom are still alive today.

The festival brought a series of firsts including the festival’s first ever mention on Woman’s Hour thanks to Luke Styles and Jessica Walker’s festival commission Voices of Power, a first UK performance for Finnish conductor Emilia Hoving, and premieres of fourteen different pieces across the festival programme.

2022 saw revivals of Dyson’s cantata Quo Vadis and Dvořák’s Requiem, both rarely-performed works which were well received by festival audiences. Dyson's cantata was planned for the 1939 Three Choirs Festival, but was cancelled and the premiere finally took place at the 1949 festival. Dvořák’s Requiem was composed for the 1891 Birmingham Triennial Festival, the second time the composer had been commissioned for the festival, and the first text he considered setting was The Dream of Gerontius (an intriguing might have been).

'The Three Choirs Festival does George Dyson's Quo Vadis proud' – Seen and Heard International;
'The Three Choirs Festival Chorus superbly navigated Dvořák's turning the music inward, becoming quiet devastation' – Bachtrack 

A series of intimate chamber concerts augmented by morning and evening talks made up the day programme, including recitals by the Piatti Quartet, Fenella Humphries, and Mark Bebbington, while the festival bandstand gave the cathedral close a fantastic atmosphere, with people dancing to the music from Hereford Big Band and Hereford Folk Ensemble, among many others. The festival drew to a close with a  performance of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, movingly sung by Nicky Spence, Dame Sarah Connolly, Neal Davies and the Festival Chorus, with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Geraint Bowen.

Young performers were a highlight of this year’s festival, with the headline festival commission Voices of Power sung by the Festival Youth Choir, the children from Gloucestershire Academy of Music giving an excellent performance at Tewkesbury Abbey, and a fantastic concert by the National Youth Orchestra of Wales conducted by Kwamé Ryan at Hereford Cathedral.

The Three Choirs Festival moves to Gloucester in 2023, where the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams will be celebrated in his 150th anniversary year. Before then, on the composer’s birthday itself this October, the festival will present two days of events showcasing some of his best-loved music, including the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. Full details are available the festival website.