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General Ticketing Help

In order to buy tickets using our online interface, either click on the 'Book Tickets' link in the top left hand corner of the screen, or find the event for which you wish to buy tickets using the menu on the right hand side of the main Gloucester pages, and the click on the 'Buy Tickets' button. This will open up the Ticketing interface, which expands down from the top of the page, allowing you to still view the page you were originally on.

The Ticketing Interface is split into 4 sections:

1. Select an Event

2. Select Seat Category

3. Choose your Seats

4. Confirm your selection

Each section has further help.

Three Choirs Festival Logo

Opening Service

Opening Service

11.30am
Opening Service
Three Cathedral Choirs
Festival Chorus Philharmonia Brass
Worcester Cathedral

Howells Te Deum & Jubilate - Collegium Regale
Vaughan Williams - Lord, Thou hast been our refuge

Philharmonic brass sectionThe Cathedral Choirs of Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester have been at the heart of the Festival from its inception. The Cathedral Lay Clerks still form part of the Festival Chorus, and services remain central to each annual festival. This opening service draws the festival chorus together with the three Cathedral Choirs to celebrate this powerful combination of forces.

Howells's unique contribution to the music of the Anglican Church began in earnest in 1944 when he won a bet (one guinea!) from the Dean of King's College, Cambridge which provided the College choir with a new setting of the Te Deum. This laid down a template in sound which was to see cathedral organists queuing up to secure their own ‘piece' of Herbert Howells.

Composed in 1921, Vaughan Williams' Lord, Thou hast been our refuge combines a setting of Psalm 90 with Issac Watts's metrical version of the same Psalm - ‘O God, our help in ages past' - and the fine tune ‘St Anne', to which the latter is commonly sung. As an organist Vaughan Williams would certainly have been aware, in this context, of Bach's so-called ‘St Anne' Fugue, the first phrase of whose subject is identical with the first phrase of the ‘St Anne' tune.

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