THE THREE CHOIRS FESTIVAL: A History

Anthony Boden, Paul Hedley

Boydell & Brewer ISBN 978-1-78327-209-9 475pp (hb) £25.00 rrp

Newly revised and updated in collaboration with Paul Hedley, Anthony Boden’s scrupulously detailed history of The Three

Choirs Festival is part chronicle of concert life over 300 years, part social record, and, given the cathedral backdrop in triplicate

(step forward Hereford, Worcester and Gloucester), a real-life story of ecclesiastical manoeuvring to rival Trollope’s Barchester Chronicles. It’s a festival whose content inevitably attracted fierce doctrinal scrutiny. Even Elgar’s

The Dream of Gerontius, that latter-day iconic staple, could only initially be admitted to the fold with references to the saints and the Virgin Mary discretely airbrushed. And as recently as the late 1990s, Delius’s Mass of Life was frozen out on account of its indebtedness to Nietzsche – only to be scheduled for 2001 thanks to a new arrival at the deanery. What a difference a Dean makes!

Intent on history rather than hagiography, Bowden and Hedley commendably don’t suppress the inconvenient. It’s easy to reproduce a 19th-century critic’s dismissal of music by Hereford’s John Clarkewhitfield as ‘sapless twaddle’. Braver not to duck Times critic William Mann’s 1967 article wondering what the Festival was for – a question now largely resolved thanks to a reinvigoration stretching back two decades and more.

For West Country regulars the book provides a fulsome souvenir of concerts past. But it does more. Noting such developments as the coming of the railways or the 2008 financial crash, it injects context – as well as a fund of tasty anecdotal titbits. Who knew that Vaughan Williams and ping-pong weren’t exactly a match made in heaven? Or that, desperate to ‘play in’ a replacement string before performing the Elgar Violin Concerto, Fritz Kreisler slipped into the back desk of fiddles and sightread his way through the premiere of Vaughan Williams’s Five Mystical Songs in 1911? Priceless!

Paul Riley