Garden rehearsals at Worcester Cathedral

Restrictions? What restrictions!

Worcester Cathedral Choir take to the gardens to rehearse for Three Choirs Festival

Restrictions on singing is not getting in the way for Worcester Cathedral Choir who have taken to the cloister gardens to rehearse for the next Three Choirs Festival which will take place this summer in Worcester.

This year’s festival, which rotates each summer between the three English cathedral cities of Worcester, Hereford and Gloucester will take place from Saturday 24 to Sunday 1 August, and incorporates the themes of journeying, exploration and looking to the future.

It will be the first for Worcester’s Director of Music, Sam Hudson, who took up post in September 2019 but has missed out on hosting a festival due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This year’s festival features over a thousand performers across 77 events in a week-long programme of choral and orchestral concerts, cathedral services, music recitals, masterclasses, talks, theatre, exhibitions and walks.

At the heart of each Festival are the large-scale evening concerts featuring the Three Choirs Festival Chorus made up of the three cathedral choirs of Worcester, Hereford and Gloucester, internationally acclaimed solo artists and the Philharmonia Orchestra, which has been resident at the festival since 2012.

The Three Choirs FEstival is the oldest, non-competitive classical music festival in the world, and celebrated its 300th anniversary in 2015.

It was last staged at Worcester in 2017 with 74 musically-themed events which attracted more than 20,000 ticket holders from across the world – including HRH The Prince of Wales who attended a performance of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius

The full programme and tickets can be found here.