A warm advance welcome to the 2011 Three Choirs Festival in Worcester which promises to be another week packed full of entertainment and cultural excitement.

There is, of course, a great deal of remarkable English music on the menu, from Handel’s Dixit Dominus to Elgar’s Caractacus and Vaughan Williams’ An Oxford Elegy, two rarely-heard works which deserve to be heard more often.  Around these pieces is woven a thread of other works from around the globe. From Europe we present works by Beethoven, Bruch and Mahler and Mozart, as well as Brahms’ endearing masterpiece Ein Deutches Requiem.

We remember the 10th anniversary of the tragedy of 9/11 with John Adams monumental cantata, On the transmigration of souls, commissioned in 2002 and recalling the fall of the World Trade Center in New York. This theme is reflected too in our Wednesday evensong which will feature the first performance of a newly commissioned anthem Still, in remembrance by Jackson Hill of Pennsylvania, USA. Guest conductors this year include the inspirational Finnish conductor Susanna Mälkki in Mahler’s Third Symphony, as well as the effervescent and ever-popular Sir Andrew Davis.

For early music enthusiasts, we are delighted to welcome back Florilegium with their concert of Bach’s 'A Musical Offering' (transcriptions of his organ trios for 5 instruments) and Piers Adams who will allure audiences out to the Baroque splendour of Great Witley Church. The Academy of Ancient Music return to perform with the Three Cathedral Choirs in a virtuoso display of music by Charpentier, Bach, Vivaldi and Handel while, on a slightly different tack, The Sixteen offer an evening of music from the Orthodox tradition (Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, Chesnokov and Kalinnikov) interspersed with Tavener, Holst, Eben and Part.  There is a range of chamber music too, spanning the elegance and poise of the Melchior Ensemble, the “knockout talent”(BBC Music Magazine) of cellist, Jamie Walton and 2009 Classical Brit Female Artist of the Year trumpeter, Alison Balsom, to mention but a few.

The Festival aims to offer a range of opportunities for young people, both in performance and in educational projects. The National Youth Orchestra of Scotland make its first appearance at the festival with a programme of Mahler, Ravel and James Macmillan. The Times described the Chapel Choir of Royal Holloway College as “truly fabulous”: they will perform their debut programme at the Festival in Tewkesbury Abbey which will include music by Peter Phillips and John Bull accompanied by Sagbutts and Cornetts. The Eton Choral Course has become an established and hugely popular part of the programme, a position in which it will surely soon be joined by our own Festival Youth Choir. The Brass Masterclass, led by members of the Philharmonia Orchestra, will doubtless be oversubscribed and there is a wide range of talks and lectures for all tastes.

For the more ecclesiastical audience-goers, there will also be the usual run of musical excellence from the three Cathedral Choirs of Hereford, Gloucester and Worcester, both individually and together, while the much-praised Kenneth Tickell organ plays host to Italian organist superstar, Paolo Oreni. We look forward to seeing you at the Festival.

Adrian Lucas, Artistic Director