Green light for 2021 Three Choirs Festival

With the easing of COVID restrictions from 19 July across England, non-professional choirs are returning to rehearsing and performing. The Three Choirs Festival’s large-scale choral concerts involving the Three Choirs Festival Chorus, including Elgar’s The Music Makers and Gabriel Jackson’s exciting new commission The World Imagined, can therefore go ahead.

The 2021 Festival returns to Worcester from Saturday 24 July to Sunday 1 August, incorporating the themes of journeying, exploration and looking to the future. The 2021 festival will be the first for Worcester Artistic Director Samuel Hudson, who took up the post in September 2019 but missed out on hosting a festival last year.

The programme ranges from major choral and orchestral events in Worcester cathedral, to chamber music, late-night events, family shows, sung cathedral services, talks and al fresco theatre, walks and excursions. A stellar line-up of soloists will join the festival’s own chorus, the three cathedral choirs of Worcester, Hereford and Gloucester, and orchestra-in-residence, the Philharmonia Orchestra.

The Festival Village will be up and running at the heart of the festival on College Green, Worcester Cathedral, where audience members can relax in between events, enjoy the food and drink on offer, soak up the festival atmosphere, catch free, live music and entertainment on the community bandstand, or pop into a festival rehearsal in Worcester Cathedral to get a flavour of what goes on behind the scenes.

Samuel Hudson, Worcester Artistic Director, said, ‘It is simply wonderful news that the Three Choirs Festival Chorus will be on stage in Worcester for this year’s festival. After so many months with restrictions on choral singing in place, it will be a joy for the singers to perform again, and a privilege for me to conduct them on the opening night of my first festival. Where better to begin than Elgar’s The Music Makers – ‘We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams’.’