Three Choirs Festival 2027 announced: Gavin Higgins premiere, Grace-Evangeline Mason as new Associate Composer, Elgar's Piano Concerto revisited

Three Choirs Festival, Worcester with Samuel Hudson (Photo: Dale Hodgetts)

The Three Choirs Festival has announced the preliminary programme for next year's festival which takes place from 24 to 31 July 2027 in Worcester under artistic director Samuel Hudson. The festival opens with Britten's War Requiem with soloists soprano Elizabeth Watts, tenor Peter Hoare, and baritone David Stout, and the final concert features Elgar's The Light of Life, written for the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester in 1896. 

Gavin Higgins (Photo: Joseph Wong)

Other key performances include Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, marking the bicentenary of his death, with soloists Katie Trethewey, Helen Charlston, Nick Pritchard, and James Atkinson. Another anniversary being marked is the 300th anniversary of Handel's Coronation Anthems performed by the three Cathedral Choirs. The Three Choirs Festival Youth Choir will perform Haydn’s Nelson Mass alongside a new work by Cecilia McDowall, Songs of Exile.

2027 will be Gavin Higgins's second year as Three Choirs Festival Associate Composer. For 2026, the Festival premiered his Gloucester Service at the Festival Evensong which was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and available on BBC Sounds (for 30 days).

Higgins's new work His Salt Skin will be performed at the 2027 Festival by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conductor Duncan Ward, mezzo-soprano Marta Fontanals-Simmons, and countertenor Cameron Shahbazi, alongside RVW's A Sea Symphony.  The world premiere of a Festival commission by Dobrinka Tabakova will be the centrepiece of a concert featuring Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music, and the first public performance of a new realisation of Elgar’s Piano Concerto by David Owen Norris. 

Worcester-based Ian Venables's Portrait of a Mind will be performed by tenor Gwilym Bowen, and other contemporary pieces in the Festival include Joby Talbot's Path of Miracles and a new commission by Eric Whitacre for Tenebrae to be performed alongside Howells's Requiem. 

The Festival has also announced Grace-Evangeline Mason as the new Associate Composer from 2027 to 2029. Mason’s orchestral work The Imagined Forest (2021) opened the 2024 Three Choirs Festival in Worcester, conducted by Samuel Hudson.

Full details from the Three Choirs Festival website. 

Das Klagende Lied: Adrian Partington on the fascination and mysteries of Mahler's astonishing early symphonic work which he conducts at this year's Cheltenham Music Festival

Adrian Partington conducting Mahler's Symphony No. 8 at Gloucester Cathedral as part of the 2022 Cheltenham Music Festival
with South Cotswold Big Sing Group, British Sinfonietta

As part of this year's Cheltenham Music Festival, Adrian Partington will be conducting the British Sinfonietta and the South Cotswold Big Sing Group in Mahler's Das Klagende Lied at Tewkesbury Abbey. Adrian is music director at Gloucester Cathedral, which pays host to this year's Three Choirs Festival, and his concerts with the South Cotswold Big Sing Group have become a feature of Cheltenham Music Festivals where last year they performed Berlioz's Te Deum.

Das Klagende Lied is the earliest of Mahler's large-scale symphonic scores. Mahler wrote his own text based on Der singende Knochen (The singing bone) from the tale collected by the Brothers Grimm. Mahler's first version of Das Klagende Lied was finished in 1880, whilst he was still a student. He submitted it for a competition where Brahms and colleagues on the jury dismissed the work. Mahler then revised it in 1893, but it was not performed, and he revised it further in 1898 with the first performance finally taking place in Vienna in 1901.

Gustav Mahler in 1898

When I asked Adrian why he had chosen Das Klagende Lied he explained that the work offers some of the best examples of Mahler but on a compact canvas. Despite being an early work the music is instantly recognisable as Mahler. Adrian explains that for him, though Mahler's style developed his tools did not, so the work uses the off-stage bands, marches and fanfares that reoccur in his later music, albeit with more sophistication.

The South Cotswold Big Sing Group likes to explore music that choral societies cannot do, and the group was set up in order to explore possibilities for co-operation between choral societies on events which would otherwise be beyond individual societies. In previous years, Adrian has conducted them in works such as Berlioz's Te Deum and Grande Messe des Morts, and Holst's Hymn of Jesus.

Adrian had been involved in two previous performances of Das Klagende Lied, rehearsing with the CBSO for performances by Simon Rattle and back in the 1980s with Worcester Festival Choral Society who performed it with conductor Bernard Keeffe. It is a work that stayed in his mind, a most attractive piece with fresh, interesting music. Also whilst you need a lot of voices, it is not too demanding a piece.

Adrian did a lot of research on the piece and its various versions, consulting Professor Jeremy Barham and the New Critical Edition of Gustav Mahler’s works in order to have a performing version that the festival could afford. The 1880 original is an astonishing work for a teenager, but it includes a prominent role for 18-part off-stage band and in fact this version has never been performed. In 1893 Mahler reduced the work from three to two movements and dispensed with the off-stage band. Nothing happened, and this version does not seem to have been performed. Then Mahler revised it again, keeping the two-movement format but restoring the off-stage band; this revision was wholesale enough to need a new manuscript and has become the standard version.

A new organ, Gavin Higgins as the Festival's inaugural Associate Composer, & celebrating Elgar: Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester in 2026

Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester Cathedral (Photo: Michael Whitefoot)

The Three Choirs Festival, this year at Gloucester, takes place from 25 July to 1 August 2026, curated by Adrian Partington who is director of music at Gloucester Cathedral.

2026 is the 75th anniversary of the Elgar Society so that the music of Elgar is a renewed focus for the festival. Adrian Partington conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra in Elgar's Symphony No. 1, Cockaigne Overture,  Martin Brabbins conducts Roderick Williams (!) and the Philharmonia in Sea Pictures, and the festival concludes with Adrian Partington conducting The Dream of Gerontius with John Findon, Niamh O'Sullivan, David Ireland and the Three Choirs Festival Chorus.

Gloucester Cathedral has a new organ, 54 years after the previous one was installed.  Nicholson & Co. Ltd are renewing and rebuilding the instrument, all within the historic organ case which was originally constructed in 1666 by Thomas Harris. It is the only complete 17th century cathedral organ case surviving in this country. To celebrate, Katelyn Emerson is the soloist in Poulenc's Organ Concerto and Janacek's Glagolitic Mass in a concert conducted by Adrian Partington and featuring soprano Rachel Nicholls, contralto Hilary Summers, tenor Gwyn Hughes and bass Ashley Riches. And there will be an organ recital from Thomas Ospital, organist of St Eustache in Paris .

Gloucester-born Gavin Higgins, is the Festival’s inaugural Associate Composer, and Higgins premieres a new setting of the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis, sung by the three cathedral choirs and broadcast live on BBC Radio 3.  Other works of his during the Festival include the UK premiere of Fanfare Americana, for orchestra, and Urban Fairy Tales played by pianist Misha Kaploukhii. Other contemporary composers at the festival include Cecilia McDowall, Cheryl Frances-Hoad, and Judith Weir.

Large choral works include Walton's Belshazzar's Feast, Beethoven’s Mass in C, and Mozart’s Requiem with the Three Choirs Festival Chorus, Monteverdi’s Vespers from La Serenissima and the three Cathedral Choirs, and Rachmaninov’s Vespers with Jeffrey Skidmore conducting Ex Cathedral. 

Adrian Partington is also conducting a Come and Sing Mozart Requiem event, along with a come and sing a full cathedral Evensong, while the Gloucestershire Academy of Music collaborates with young musicians and community choirs in a concert exploring music and wellbeing. Free services, open rehearsals, and accessible family events ensure that the Festival continues to welcome audiences of all ages and backgrounds.

Full details from the Three Choirs Festival website. 

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.