Three Choirs Festival The event is now established in the last week of July. The 300th anniversary of the original Three Choirs Festival was celebrated during the 2015 festival, which took place from 25 July to 1 August in Hereford (the landmark 300th meeting of the Three Choirs does not fall until 2027 due to there being no Three Choirs Festivals for the duration of both WW1 and WW2). The festival is closely identified with the musical careers of British composers Edward Elgar and Ralph Vaughan Williams. The organists of the three cathedrals (who act as artistic director and festival conductor when it
Herbert Howells following year by the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, and completed in 1956 by the "Office of Holy Communion". "Collegium Regale", the "Gloucester Service" (for Gloucester Cathedral, 1946) and the "St Paul's Service" (for St Paul's Cathedral, 1951) remain the best known and most admired of the many settings of the Anglican liturgy written by Howells for particular choirs and buildings over the next thirty years. In 1949, the organist Herbert Sumsion asked Howells if he had anything that could be performed at the 1950 Three Choirs Festival to be held at Gloucester. Howells decided to bring out the incomplete choral