RICHLY-DESIGNED AND ORIGINAL
RODERIC DUNNETT looks forward to the Three Choirs Festival, 27 July - 4 August 2024 in Worcester, UK
Year upon year the Three Choirs Festival stands out as one of the most fascinating weeks of the English musical summer. Innovative, imaginative, wide-ranging, vivid, exploratory, enterprising and captivating.
Staged in turn by three Midland cathedrals - those of Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester - the Festival features a dazzling series of choral concerts, vocal and chamber works, plays, community events, walks, related lectures, and an unbelievably impressive gathering of musical happenings of all kinds.
Worcester Cathedral at festival time. Photo © 2002 Keith Bramich
Worcester in 2024 will see as inventive and daring a collection of new and rare works as any recent Festival. Worcester's 2020 Festival - and that had planned some immensely original events - was wiped out by the disaster of COVID-19. This summer, at the end of July, Worcester speaks for itself: a vast amount of ingenious, resourceful programming. What a treat it will surely be.
The festival is commonly wound up with a major work by Elgar, usually with that year's artistic director taking the helm. However on this occasion Samuel Hudson, who (with Worcester chairman Ben Cooper) has masterminded this enterprising programme, has ceded The Kingdom - Birmingham Festival, 1906 - to his colleague Adrian Partington, who as it happens will the previous night also conduct, on its first hearing at a Three Choirs, the universally praised and profoundly moving Requiem by Ian Venables, originally heard at Gloucester with organist James Mitchell (recorded on SOMMCD 0618 - an outstanding performance in every respect).
Since then a new wonder has evolved. Now presented in a sensationally gorgeous full format, orchestrated by the composer - first heard at Merton College, Oxford, it has since been likewise recorded (on Delphian, DCD34252), Venables' Requiem will be performed with instrumentalists from the Philharmonia Orchestra - for many years now annually resident at the Three Choirs - under Adrian Partington. All the more so, to hear it sung by the festival's Youth Choir (which he founded) should be a stirring and moving experience.
Artistic director Samuel Hudson is the fount and prime source of 2024's well-conceived, indeed remarkable programme.
Samuel Hudson. Photo © Michael Whitefoot
For a start, he will oversee the opening celebration, which will include music by Gustav Holst. Aptly, honouring a double anniversary, 1874 to 1934, Holst figures above all other composers this year.
Gustav Holst (1874-1934).
Photo © 1921 Herbert Lambert
Also, notably, William Mathias - who was born in 1934, and died tragically young: a first-rate composer of choral works especially, but also a symphonist. His major cantatas were all loyally championed some time ago in Hereford by Roy Massey.
Hudson also offers up a timely, and shining, tribute to Sir Charles Stanford, who died a century ago in 1924: his Stabat Mater. It's one of two magnificent large-scale Stanford oratorios - the other one is the full-length, hour-long Requiem - both virtually never done in England. Programming the Stabat Mater is a marvellous, surely perfect, contribution from Worcester in this, Stanford's centenary year. The solo quartet bodes well: soprano Rebecca Hardwick, mezzo-soprano Marta Fontanals-Simmons, tenor Nicky Spence and the splendid Zambia-born baritone Themba Mvula.
Equally Hudson's creative programme does noble justice to Holst, who like Elgar and Delius died in 1934. Based (like several of Holst's works, including opera) on oriental, here Sanskrit, texts, The Cloud Messenger (1910-12) - a major undertaking - will be unveiled by Geraint Bowen. Intriguing, because it's another work almost never heard.
But especially important, there is also Holst's fabulously inspired and atmospheric The Hymn of Jesus, part based on the Greek Apocryphal Gospel of St John, conducted by Samuel Hudson; plus items for brass (starring the eloquent Symphonic Brass of London); and a clutch of vocal and chamber works. Furthermore, arrangements of Holst, new and appetising, will feature in two organ recitals, by Roger Sayers (formerly of Rochester Cathedral and London's Temple Church) and Sophia Membery.
Rossini's large scale Petite messe solennelle - by no means petite, but a dazzling, oompahing, very late work from 1863, when he had recently turned seventy - by this magnificent, dramatic, comic opera composer, promises, even in the piano duet and harmonium version in which it is, as here, most commonly performed, will be a pretty thunderous, highly melodious midweek evening, with Geraint Bowen conducting.
Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868)
Other gems in the afternoons and evenings abound. They include Baroque - some ravishing works by Francesco Scarlatti (younger brother of Alessandro and uncle of the best-known, Domenico), brought by Christopher Monks and his masterly Armonico Consort; Renaissance sacred music (from the Corvus Consort); an enticing medley of modern composers (The Carice Singers) and a vivid, full-bodied collection from the Festival Chorus, led once again by Hudson.
Add to these a clutch of novelties from the Heath Quartet and likewise from Hereford Chamber Choir; and a top rate programme conducted by Hudson with, as its main item, the ever-inventive Bob Chilcott's alluring substantial work The Angry Planet, featuring the eloquent forces of Three Cathedral Choirs (as opposed to the Festival Chorus).
British choral composer, conductor and singer Bob Chilcott (born 1955)
The astoundingly ample body of contemporary work featured in Worcester this summer is surely as impressive as any in recent years. They reflect an astonishing knowledge of up and coming composers, fresh names to invite and to frontline. Most especially, a wealth of names unfamiliar hitherto to the Three Choirs, some of them just beginning, optimistically, to make their names and devise fresh work which will help them hasten up the ladder.
Chilcott's bracing oratorio and Venables' deeply beautiful Requiem stand out among the major programmes; but so too does another evening work: the UK premiere of a stunning full length - forty-four minutes long - Mass for the Endangered by the American Sarah Kirkland Snider.
Sarah Kirkland Snider (born 1973) observing a
Birmingham Royal Ballet rehearsal of her music.
Photo © 2018 Drew Tommons
This is presented by Hudson, alongside an exquisite work, O Sweet and Spontaneous Earth, from the distinguished and wonderfully creative Dame Judith Weir, seventy this May and just completing her term as Master of the King's Music: her string quartet is a also a highlight of the Dante Quartet's appearance, and her spectacular cantata In the Land of Uz is a masterpiece performed by the BBC Singers' evening concert midweek; these works by her are surely among the most significant of the contemporary contributions to this summer's festival.
British composer Judith Weir (born 1954)
This year, a staggering number of today's modern composers have been invited: some works brief, some longer, embraced by a range of talented performers. For a start, Luke Lewis provides an eight minute festival commission (from a composer already internationally acclaimed); and there's music by Canadian composer Cassandra Miller, North Wales-based Cameron Biles-Lidell and violinist and vocalist Claire Victoria Roberts.
Joe Duddell, born in Salford (Manchester) and one of the supremely successful composers of his generation, supplies his eighteen minute A Life Cycle to the Heath Quartet's daytime concert.
British composer Joe Duddell (born 1972)
Likewise Judith Bingham (whose Clarinet Quintet features) is in the very front rank of UK composers. Paul Mealor (recently honoured with the Royal Victorian Order) furnishes a twelve minute premiere, enticingly named Ringed with the Azure World (Four Madrigals on Birds). A substantial quarter of an hour commission by Nathan James Dearden, Messages, creates 'a series of choral landscapes that respond to, and set, messages from throughout history to future generations', and can be heard the same evening as Holst's The Cloud Messenger. Grace-Evangeline Mason's fourteen minute The Imagin'd Forest lends added character to the concert featuring Stanford (Stabat Mater) and Holst (The Hymn of Jesus).
British composer Grace-Evangeline Mason (born 1944) in Oxford, 2019
Organ recitals - usually three, by young or college performers - are a regular festure of Three Choirs week. The range here is wide and gratifying: Stanley, Wesley and Buxtehude; Dupré, Vierne and Dubois, and the most famous teacher of all, Nadia Boulanger, whose sister, Lili, is now also recognised as a major figure among French Impressionist composers; plus a striking offering from Cecilia McDowall.
British composer Cecilia McDowall (born 1951). Photo © 2023 Bridget Osborne
But there are two more outstanding events this year: in Pershore Abbey, Messiaen's superlative final organ work, Le Livre du Saint-Sacrement, played by Tom Bell, can be heard on Thursday; and two mornings earlier, Roger Sayer plays a vivid and enterprising programme entirely consisting of organ arrangements: Strauss, Holst and so on.
If any part of each day should be given a special mention - indeed each is at the heart of daily events, displaying standards of phenomenal expressiveness and agility - it is the performance of daily evensong: sometimes sung by the host choir, sometimes by all three cathedral choirs together.
Worcester Cathedral choristers
Worcester remembers its great and lamented former director, Donald Hunt; The Worcester Cathedral Chamber Choir culminates with Elgar's powerful anthem Great is the Lord, Howells features several times, and all three cathedral choirs unite for a scintillating work by Richard Blackford, for the Jesus College Service by the masterly William Mathias, and, most significant of all, a brand new set of Evening Canticles by Ian Venables, which surely promises to be a highlight of the entire week's Evening Services.
This is a phenomenally richly-designed and original programme from Worcester's Three Choirs Festival - a feast of events surely not to be missed.
Copyright © 29 June 2024
Roderic Dunnett,
Coventry UK