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
Three Choirs Festival he co-featured with Elgar as a central prop to the musical repertoire. Sumsion fostered a relationship with Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály and programmed Kodály's works at six Gloucester festivals. Other names include Gustav Holst, Arthur Sullivan, Herbert Howells, Gerald Finzi, William Walton, Arthur Bliss and Benjamin Britten and recently, Lennox Berkeley, John McCabe, William Mathias, Paul Patterson and James MacMillan. A timeline of some of the more significant events in the festival's history from 1709 until the present day has been compiled by Anthony Boden: Three Choirs Festival timeline In 1995, a Festival Society was established to provide a means