Forget the Proms and Edinburgh – the Three Choirs Festival is where it’s at

The Proms have started but there is a world elsewhere, and in Worcester Cathedral the 296th Three Choirs Festival set sail with a concert that couldn’t have happened anywhere else. A few years back I caused grave offence when I described the Three Choirs as a ‘home of lost causes’; as if, coming from The Spectator, that could ever be anything but a compliment. In truth, there’s still no classical music festival that provides such a sense of being plugged into a vital and ancient tradition – of being so close, as Elgar put it to ‘the living centre of music in Great Britain’.

So here we were with the Philharmonia under the baton of a cathedral music director (Worcester’s Samuel Hudson) and a large amateur chorus cut from the same cloth as the lively, near-capacity audience. It looked and felt like a community expressing itself musically on the largest scale.