Three Choirs Festival Launches bold new Programme for Hereford 2022

The Three Choirs Festival has launched its programme for 2022, where audiences will enjoy choosing from over eighty events taking place in and around Hereford between 23 and 30 July.  With eight premieres and over fifty works from 43 living composers across an exhilarating range of styles, nationalities and generations, the festival continues to champion the best of today’s new music, as well as celebrations of enduring favourites.

Hereford Artistic Director Geraint Bowen has chosen as his theme re-imaginings and new beginnings. Inspired by the 1946 Hereford festival, the first after a gap of seven years during the Second World War and based around the 1939 festival which had been cancelled only days before it was due to take place, Hereford 2022 will revive Dyson’s impressive choral work Quo Vadis and Finzi’s Dies Natalis, which had both been composed for 1939 and were finally heard in 1946.

The week begins with a rare performance of Dvořák’s powerful Requiem and closes with Elgar’s well-loved masterpiece The Dream of Gerontius.  New voices abound in this year’s programme, with the festival’s headline commission for the Three Choirs Festival Youth Choir, Voices of Power, leading the way. Featuring an original text by Jessica Walker and music by Luke Styles, the piece explores the world-changing power of words across the centuries from the perspective of powerful women.

The Three Choirs Festival has its origins at the end of the 17th century in visits by the lay clerks of Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester to one another’s cathedrals for joint services and informal singing. More formal annual ‘music meetings’ can be traced back to around 1715 and have continued ever since, interrupted only by the two world wars and in 2020 the coronavirus pandemic, making this the oldest continuously running classical music festival in the world.

For more details please visit Three Choirs Festival.