Welcome to Hereford 2025!

Tickets on Sale April 2025.

Our eight-day feast of music opens with a performance of William Mathias’ exciting cantata This Worlde’s Joie. Mathias himself selected its sacred and secular early English texts, and its four sections reflect both the seasons and the span of human life. It is a work of strikingly colourful orchestration, which we are combining with Dvořák’s exuberant large-scale setting of the Te Deum and the overture to Ethel Smyth’s opera The Wreckers, conducted by her at the 1925 festival.

We mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor with a revival of his oratorio The Atonement, first performed under the composer’s baton at the Hereford festival in 1903. Early in Coleridge-Taylor’s career, Elgar was generous in recommending him to the organisers of Three Choirs, describing him as ‘far and away the cleverest fellow amongst the young men’, and his sad death in 1912 at the age of only 37 robbed the musical world of a distinctive voice.

In 1950, Herbert Howells was persuaded by friends and colleagues to allow the first performance of his Hymnus Paradisi, written in the 1930s in an outpouring of grief following the death of his nine-year old son, Michael, but hitherto kept private. We present this moving work together with a rarely-heard piece from earlier in Howells’ career, Paradise Rondel, first performed in Gloucester in 1925, and Arthur Bliss’ Mary of Magdala, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death.

The three cathedral choirs combine this year for a performance of Handel’s Alexander’s Feast. This sparkling work was a great success at its first performance in 1736, and a significant step in his move from writing Italian opera to English oratorio.

We will also have two exciting festival commissions for you: Richard Blackford’s The Black Lake and Bob Chilcott’s Mass in Time of War.

The rousing finale is a performance of Mendelssohn’s ever-popular oratorio Elijah, for many years a fixture at every festival.

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