Three Choirs Festival News
Last update
2022-05-21
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2022-03-17 08:27:07
The Three Choirs Festival is the oldest continuously running music festival in the world. It can trace its history back to annual music meetings in 1715 and, barring two World Wars and COVID, has been running ever since, celebrating its 300th anniversary in 2015. Now, a new milestone has been reached and the festival has appointed a woman as chair of its board of directors for the first time. Naomi Belshaw, known to many for her work with the PRS and in PR, is taking over as chair from Dr Timothy Brain OBE whose significant tenure as chair was the professionalisation of the organisation and its vital modernisation. This year's festival runs from 23 to 30 July 2022 in Hereford, with the full programme announced next week (25 March 2022). The festival will include Dvorak's Requiem and Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius, the two works linked by the fact that Dvorak was […]
2022-03-09 09:49:35
[…] acknowledge this historic link there’ll be a fundraising concert for the Jenny Lind Hospital at St Andrew’s Hall on Monday 23rd May featuring the Swedish soprano, Hanna Husáhr, working alongside Simon Crawford Philips (piano) and Lawrence Power (viola/violin). The concert will chart Jenny Lind’s early life in Sweden coupled with her fascinating circle of musical and artistic friends.Interestingly, the Norwich Triennial shared its festival on a rotating basis with Birmingham and Leeds such as the Three Choirs Festival rotate to this day between the English cathedral cities of Hereford, Gloucester and Worcester. Great success befriended the first Triennial meeting of 1824. It proved a winner all the way and was a great financial success, too, with the sum (after all expenses) of £2411 4s. 2d. being donated to the Norfolk & Norwich Hospital.The festival, however, can proudly trace its roots back to the late 18th century when in 1772 (listed […]
2022-01-31 12:24:35
Collegiate Church of St Mary, WarwickThe period instrument group joined with violinist Rachel Podger to perform music by a lesser-known Scarlatti – Francesco Brother to the more famous Alessandro, who composed more than 60 operas, and uncle to Domenico, whose 555 sonatas are one of the mainstays of the baroque keyboard repertoire, Francesco Scarlatti spent his life as a choir master, first in his native Sicily, and later in the British Isles, where his music was performed in London and at the Three Choirs Festival; he apparently died in poverty in Dublin in 1741. Francesco’s own music is hardly known today, but one of the Armonico Consort’s earliest concerts, 20 years ago, included both of his surviving large-scale choral works, a Dixit Dominus and a Mass. As part of the group’s 20th anniversary season they have programmed the two again, before recording them. The pieces both date from the early […]