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. No arm-waving attempts at crossover; no big-name touring orchestras unloading their Summer 2024 Deluxe International Festival Programme for the third time this week (if it’s Thursday, it must be Edinburgh). None of that: just honest, imaginative fare, locally sourced and served fresh.

Grace-Evangeline Mason’s symphonic poem The Imagined Forest opened the concert – an iridescent fantasy commissioned for the 2021 Proms, though apart from a few jangles of tuned percussion (young composers are required by statute to include these weird marimba outbursts), it might have been written by a student of Ravel. Again, it’s probably necessary to clarify that this is a compliment.

Anyhow, it worked nicely as a set-up for the vibrant blocks of colour and shadow with which Holst constructs his ‘Hymn of Jesus’. Hudson deployed cathedral choristers on either side of the main chorus and orchestra, while the cathedral organ loomed behind the rood screen and occasionally picked out a bass line in a low, dark rumble.