‘As regards the Cathedral – it is, to my mind essentially a stage piece & I said I wd not allow it in a hall or church till it was…
Tag: Three Choirs Festival
The Faerie Bride: sensuousness and mysticism at the Three Choirs Festival
This programme by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by Martyn Brabbins, on the second evening of this year’s Three Choirs Festival presented three works that were prevailingly sombre…
Richard Blackford’s Pietà at the Three Choirs Festival
The Stabat Mater is a Latin hymn, probably dating from the 13th century, which commemorates and mediates upon the sorrow and grief of the Virgin Mary at the Crucifixion, as…
Dyson’s Quo Vadis at the Three Choirs Festival
George Dyson began composing his nine-movement ‘cycle of poems’, Quo Vadis, in 1936 and completed it as the Second World War was ending, in 1945, but if it the grand…
Beyond the Garden: a haunting one-act opera by Stephen McNeff
Theodor Adorno called her ‘the monster’; the wife of the writer Friedrich Torberg derided her as ‘a grande dame and at the same time a cesspool’. Yet, Alma Mahler was…
Post-Straussian sumptuousness at the Three Choirs Festival
For many, Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs (1948) represent the last great flowering of German Romanticism. 84 years of age, worn down by the tribulations and devastation of the Second…
Coleridge Taylor: The Song of Hiawatha, Three Choirs Festival
The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor at Gloucester Cathedral, highlight of this year’s Three Choirs Festival.
The Three Choirs Festival presents Vaughan Williams’ The Pilgrim’s Progress: in conversation with Charlotte Corderoy
As an inscription to his 1925 oratorio Sancta Civitas, Ralph Vaughan Williams drew on the words of Plato: ‘A man of sense will not insist that things are not exactly…