THIS year marks a very special moment in the history of the Three Choirs Festival.

The event, which takes place in Hereford from July 25 to August 1, turns 300 this summer.

The exact origins of the event are obscure – musicians from the three cathedrals of Hereford, Gloucester and Worcester have probably been travelling backwards and forwards between one another’s choirstalls since medieval times.

They’ve certainly been drinking together in local taverns and ale houses for centuries.

But research by Sir Ivor Atkins, the organist of Worcester Cathedral and a great friend of Sir Edward Elgar, traced more formal ‘music meetings’ where secular as well as sacred repertoire was performed back to 1715, so this year the festival will be celebrating 300 years of choral singing in the three cities.

Geraint Bowen, director of music at Hereford Cathedral and artistic director of the Hereford Three Choirs Festival, has chosen to reflect the festival’s heritage and extraordinary longevity by presenting repertoire that would have been well known to participants at the start of the 18th century alongside more recent works whose scale, complexity and sound-world would have been utterly unimaginable to them.

The Opening Service will feature a period instrument orchestra and the music of Purcell, and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment will visit the Three Choirs Festival for the first time to accompany Bach’s St Matthew Passion performed by the Three Cathedral Choirs.

The festival will also feature what is believed to be the first performance in any of the three choirs cities of Olivier Messiaen’s massive orchestral work Turangalîla-Symphonie.

Premieres will include a new set of Evening Canticles by Bob Chilcott and a cantata by Pete Churchill for community choir The Gathering Wave, which will explore the experience of the Polish community who came to Foxley in Herefordshire as refugees after the second world war.

As ever, the central pillars of the festival are the evening cathedral concerts featuring the Three Choirs Festival Chorus and the Philharmonia Orchestra, featuring internationally-known guest conductors such as Sir Andrew Davis as well as Geraint Bowen and his colleagues from Gloucester and Worcester, Adrian Partington and Peter Nardone.

The close connections between the Three Choirs Festival and the life and music of Sir Edward Elgar are not forgotten and the first evening concert of the festival on July 25 will be a performance of his most famous oratorio The Dream of Gerontius.

The full Three Choirs Festival Hereford 2015 programme will be announced at the end of March.

More information about all the festival’s activities can be found on our new website www.3Choirs.org or you can ring our Ticket Office on 08456 521823

Join in

Alongside the main Three Choirs Festival programme runs the Three Choirs Plus (TC+) strand of free street performances, art, craft and dance workshops and exhibitions, community music events and lots more, all aimed at spreading the festival atmosphere throughout Hereford and involving everyone in our activities.

Compose yourself

If you fancy yourself as a composer of church music, there’s still plenty of time to enter the competition to write a new Introit for the Hereford Cathedral Voluntary Choir to sing in a service of Choral Evensong. The judges are Professor Paul Mealor, famous for having written for the wedding of HRH Prince William and Catherine Middleton and the No 1 hit song for Gareth Malone’s Military Wives Choir; Kate Johnson from Novello music publishers; and Peter Dyke, Assistant Director of Music at Hereford Cathedral and Director of its voluntary choir, who will conduct the winning piece in the Three Choirs festival. The closing date for entries is March 25

Firm Foundations

A new charitable foundation to support the future of the Three Choirs Festival and open doors to wider participation for the next 300 years was launched on January 22 at the House of Lords in London. The Three Choirs Foundation has plans to preserve the continuity of the Three Choirs Festival enterprise through a Tercentenary Appeal and other fundraising initiatives.