Three Choirs Festival

The Welsh composer William Mathias died in 1992, aged 57. I was a teenager at the time, and the loss felt personal as well as premature. Not that I knew him; and nor was he regarded – in the era of Birtwistle and Tippett – as one of the A-list British composers (John Drummond, the Proms controller of the day, was particularly snobbish about Welsh music). But Mathias was a composer whose music I had played; whose music, indeed, me and my peers actually could play. His Serenade was a youth orchestra staple. It felt good to know that its creator was alive and well and working in Bangor, and

The Proms have started but there is a world elsewhere, and in Worcester Cathedral the 296th Three Choirs Festival set sail with a concert that couldn’t have happened anywhere else. A few years back I caused grave offence when I described the Three Choirs as a ‘home of lost causes’; as if, coming from The Spectator, that could ever be anything but a compliment. In truth, there’s still no classical music festival that provides such a sense of being plugged into a vital and ancient tradition – of being so close, as Elgar put it to ‘the living centre of music in Great Britain’. So here we were with the