The Three Choirs Festival always feels so nourishing, so eternally English, that you sometimes forget how much history has been made there. It was in Gloucester in 1910 that the young Herbert Howells and Ivor Gurney heard the world première of Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia while Elgar, in rented digs, tried out his Violin Concerto with Fritz Kreisler. Three years later you’ve got Sibelius despatching Aino Ackte to première Luonnotar, and Saint-Saëns, at 77, playing Mozart by day, then cracking out his celebrated musical impersonations at the post-show party. Apparently his Cosima Wagner was quite the knockout.
The point is that there have been moments when the musical universe pivoted around this quiet cathedral close. The 2026 festival wasn’t quite as epic but what it did offer – as always – was ambitious, locally rooted music-making on the most generous scale. Tuesday evening’s concert had a maritime theme, so Martyn Brabbins conducted the Philharmonia in Mendelssohn’s The Hebrides and Elgar’s Sea Pictures. Instead of the usual contralto, the soloist was Roderick Williams, whose baritone might have been lost beneath the surface of the orchestration if he hadn’t been so eagerly attentive to the articulation and colour of the words.
