Three Choirs Festival

Francis Pott (B.1957) is the third of our featured composer profiles for the Gloucester 2023 festival.

World renowned composer Francis Pott once again joins forces with the Three Choirs Festival, as we revive his commission from the 1999 Worcester festival, the oratorio 'A Song on the End of the World' - named after a Czesław Miłosz poem written in Nazi-occupied Warsaw.

Following training as a chorister at New College, Pott held open music scholarships at Winchester College and Magdalene College Cambridge, studying composition with Robin Holloway and Hugh Wood while also pursuing piano studies as a private pupil of the late Hamish Milne. He holds BA, BMus and MA degrees from the University of Cambridge and a PhD from the University of West London, as well as a Fellowship of London College of Music (FLCM) and a Principal Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (PFHEA).

In 2020, the Three Choirs Festival audience picked Francis Pott's 'A Song on the End of the World' as their favourite premiere in the 'Premieres League'. Pott stated:

“This was a rather unconventional kind of competition. It attracted plenty of attention and, predictably, the odd bit of purist disapproval; but it proved a wonderful way to bring music-lovers together during lockdown, in the sad absence of this year’s Festival. On one level it’s a bit of harmless fun. On another, more seriously, it lays the ground for possible revival of several deserving works that have been heard only once."

Below is a recording of Pott's setting of Balulalow by choral group Voces8. This piece was composed in 2009 and published by Oxford University Press.