The Hereford Times

Outstanding Three Choirs Festival

1:50pm Tuesday 21st August 2007

THIS year's Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester came to a close with the latter half of the week featuring concerts that confirmed the view that, overall, this had been an outstanding festival.

It had accommodated not three, but 11 choirs in total and packed 58 events into eight days, compared with 19 at this reviewer's first Gloucester festival in 1062.

The reassuring presence on the rostrum of Christopher Robinson, doyen of cathedral musicians, is virtually a guarantee of the quality of any concert. His programme in last week's Three Choirs Festival began with the ravishing Serenade to Music which Vaughan Williams composed for the unusual luxury of 16 solo singers with orchestra.

The Philharmonia then played Robin Holloway's clever orchestration of Debussy's 1915 two-piano suite, En blanc et noir, where impressionism is tempered by the current warfare and the influence of Stravinsky.

There can be no more ecstatic choral work than Howells's Hymnus Paradisi, written shortly afterwards as a personal response to the death of his son. The density of its texture and harmonies are characteristic, its text based on parts of the Requiem and the psalms, but most notable are the huge climaxes, great phalanxes of overpoweringly intense sound filling the cathedral for minutes on end. The careful preparation undertaken by Robinson in all three cities bore fruit, their combined choirs sustaining enormous power along with soprano Geraldine McGreevy and tenor Andrew Kennedy.

The concert by the Cathedral Choirs of Hereford, Gloucester and Worcester conducted by Geraint Bowen was unrepresentative of the rich 500-year repertoire of English music that it is their daily privilege to sing. True, they had sung a number of services during the week, but the opportunity was missed to present some of the greater anthems uniquely suited to this augmented body of boys and men.

Instead, the programme was another showcase for the virtuosity of soprano Gillian Keith in Bach's solo cantata Jauchzet Gott , sung at breakneck speed challenging both herself and the accompanying members of the Corelli Orchestra. She and mezzo-soprano Frances Bourne took over a third of the two Vivaldi works (composed for a girls' choir in Venice), leaving the choirs no more than short choruses.

Mahler's gigantic Eighth Symphony, even with "reduced orchestration", was a bold choice for Gloucester organist Andrew Nethsingha's swansong, and a dream for those who wanted to hear the loudest noise ever conceived for chorus and orchestra (confirmed by a six-minute ovation) but the cathedral proved too small to contain its massive resources comfortably. The choral singing was first-class, as was the sensitive playing of strings and horns, but elsewhere many details of tempo and balance were missed.