The Three Choirs Festival is at Hereford this year, running from 26 July to 2 August 2025 with its familiar mix of large-scale choral concerts, chamber recitals, late-night events and family friendly programmes. The programme draws on not only the three cathedral choirs (Hereford, Worcester and Gloucester), but The Three Choirs Festival Chorus, drawn from auditioned amateur singers in and around Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester, the Three Choirs Festival Youth Choir for singers aged 14-25 and the Three Choirs Festival Voices which is open to everyone, with no audition required.
This year’s programme celebrates Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s 150th anniversary with a performance of his major choral work, The Atonement which was written for the 1903 festival in Hereford. A large-scale 90 minute choral and orchestral work, the premiere was conducted by the composer and featured a text by local writer Alice Parsons. This year, the work is conducted by Samuel Hudson with the Three Choirs Festival Chorus and Philharmonia Orchestra plus soloists Rebecca Hardwick, Aoife Miskelly, Amy Hoyland, Martha McLorinan, Mark Le Brocq, and David Stout.
The work was unpublished and the score has been resurrected from the manuscript held by the Royal College of Music [and is now happily available on IMSLP]. For the libretto, Parsons crafted a unique libretto that features a combination of paraphrased biblical quotes from the Gospels along with her creative extra-liturgical narrative commentary, and the work features the dramatic characters of Christ (baritone), Pontius Pilate (tenor), Pilate’s wife (soprano), Mary the Mother of Christ (soprano), Mary, the wife of Cleophas (mezzo-soprano) and Mary Magdalene (contralto).
Other major works at this year’s festival include Mendelssohn’s Elijah and Howells’ Hymnus Paradisi, alongside the premiere of Richard Blackford’s The Black Lake which is inspired by the 1961 Welsh novel, One Moonlit Night by Caradog Pritchard.
Other performers in Hereford include the King’s Singers, Roderick Williams, Sarah Connolly, Emma Johnson, the Carducci Quartet, and Stile Antico.
Full details from the Three Choirs Festival website.
