1953 was a good year! It was Coronation year, -it was Gloucester’s turn to host the Three Choirs Festival and my wife and I were about to sing in our first Festival! 1953 was the start of a wonderful reign for HM Queen Elizabeth - it was also the start of 50 plus years of exciting involvement in the world famous Three Choirs Festival which proved to be almost a lifetime of singing and administration which most people could only dream about!
The first rehearsal heralded brand new royal blue copies of a new work by William Walton - his ‘Coronation Te Deum’ - which the world would hear for the first time a couple of months later at Westminster Abbey during the Coronation service. We were privileged to rehearse this before anyone else - and the copies were collected up and stored away so that no one outside the Festival would have sight of it before that great day! We gave its second performance at the Festival Opening Service under the baton of Dr Herbert Sumsion, and such was its success that we gave another unscheduled performance later in the week.
If that wasn’t enough, I was to sing under a composer who to me was then just another, albeit famous, composer: Ralph Vaughan Williams. He conducted us in an exciting performance of his own ‘Dona Nobis Pacem’, and we watched him later conducting his orchestral work ‘Job’, with the London Symphony Orchestra. VW was then eighty one and it seemed that some members of the orchestra were less than accurate in their playing. During rehearsal he stopped them, and barked “This is Job. An orchestral work by ME, and I’ll have it as I want it”. Sheepishly they took up their instruments, and the piece then began to sound as the great man had intended! What a week!
The next year was a Worcester year, and we stayed at the Training College for the week - FULL BOARD, wonderful food all for the princely sum of £7.10s! If Gloucester 1953 was something special, Worcester 1954 was even better. We were to be privileged to perform not one but two first performances: Herbert Howells’ gigantic ‘Missa Sabrinensis’ – choruses would find this very challenging even today! - and Vaughan Williams’ beautiful Christmas Cantata ‘Hodie’, both conducted by the composers. In the final rehearsal of ‘Sabrinensis’ the Chorus was finding it hard going, and Howells suddenly stopped us and said, “You know this better than I do, so I am counting you!” Little did he know.
We were very anxious whether Vaughan Williams would be physically up to conducting ‘Hodie’, and speaking to his widow Ursula three or four years ago about this performance she said, “You were worried? I had his tablets at the ready behind the scenes!". However, all went well and another VW work entered the repertoire of Choral Societies throughout the land. VW found the opening choral passage of the piece quite difficult to conduct, and David Wilcox (Festival conductor that year) and Dr Sumsion hit on an idea - each would stand at either side of the chorus platform (in the nave but visible only to the chorus) and would conduct this opening passage. We were to watch them and not the conductor for those first few bars. I reminded Sir David Wilcox of this occasion when speaking to him a year or two ago at Worcester. “How could I ever forget it”, he quipped!
That year, I was introduced to Elgar’s ‘Apostles’ for the first time and among the musicians that year were Norma Procter, Wilfrid Brown, Isobel Baillie, along with Eric Greene and the inimitable Boris Ord on the Harpsichord for the Bach ‘Matthew Passion’.
1956 would be the last year that we were to see VW on the conductor’s rostrum at Gloucester, as he died shortly before the Hereford Festival in 1958. It would be a memorable occasion though. Perhaps we had had an inkling that we might not see him again in front of us, and just before he came to the platform some of us – led by the late George Lewis – decided that we would stand as a tribute to this great man. This we did and the whole cathedral audience followed suit. What a tribute! He then went on to conduct a beautiful performance of ‘The Lark Ascending’ played by Frederick Grinke.
These were golden years in the Three Choirs history. Gerald Finzi was a regular visitor, and it was always a pleasure to sing his beautiful ‘Intimations of Immortality’ with him in the audience, as well as reading his caustic comments on the chorus notice board afterwards!
Composers are not always good conductors, but Benjamin Britten was the exception when he came to Three Choirs with Peter Pears, to conduct us in his ‘St Nicholas’ at Hereford. Lead by his crystal clear beat , we produced a lovely performance on the night.
To sing Elgar with Sir Adrian Boult was also always an experience, and he prefaced one rehearsal of his favourite Elgar work, ‘The Kingdom’, with what amounted to a spiritually moving account of what ‘The Kingdom’ meant to him, and what it should mean to us as we performed it. He treated us to a masterclass of economy of action in his conducting, and produced a performance which lives with me to this day.
The Master of the Queens Musick, Sir Arthur Bliss, arrived one year to conduct his own ‘The Beatitudes’ which was written for the opening of the new Coventry Cathedral two or three months earlier. He had an almost military appearance as he mounted the rostrum, but seemed almost humbled by being in such a beautiful cathedral, and seemed quite honoured conduct us in his own work. Oh, that some musicians would display similar humility today.
A subsequent Master of the Queens Musick, Malcolm Williamson, was commissioned to write a work in celebration of both the Queens Jubilee and the 250th Anniversary of the Three Choirs Festival. ‘Mass of Christ the King’ had many exquisite moments, but as it was incomplete at the time of the performance, final judgement of its worth had to wait until the following year. This was a magnificent Festival and a tribute to the sterling musicianship, and organising ability of John Sanders, in overcoming the difficulties involved in the staging of the Williamson work, and conducting wonderful performances of Gerontius, Verdi Requiem, Bach’s ‘Mass in B Minor’, and Holst’s ‘Hymn of Jesus’, as well as the major Festival Comission - all in one week!! He was supported, I remember, by Donald Hunt who produced a glowing performance of Howells ‘Hymnus Paradisi’, and Roy Massey who left the beauty of the cathedral acoustics and went to the Leisure Centre to conduct Elgars ‘Caractacus’. Not the best of venues, as torrential rain falling on the roof almost ruined the performance.
The following year we journeyed to Westminster Cathedral to sing (at last!) a complete performance of the ‘Mass of Christ the King’, conducted this time by Sir Charles Groves, in the presence of our beloved Queen Mother. Our voices seemed lost in the cavernous spaces of Westminster Cathedral. It made me feel how lucky we are to sing in our own three cathedrals.
It seems on reflection that this celebratory annual event contains all that epitomises the great contribution that our beloved Festival has bestowed on the Musical life of this country - and I have been part of it!! These can only be but fleeting memories of a lifetime of music centered around our Three Cathedrals, and the yearly festival, but being a Gloucester man, that festival will always have a special place. Great composers, great conductors, great music and great friendships forged with singers and visitors from all over the world are what being part of the Three Choirs is all about.
2007 (like 1977) again contains all that is best in choral and orchestral music. I think it will be quite an experience to LISTEN for the first time to all this exciting music, and soak up the atmosphere from the other side of the platform. I am really looking forward to it. Tenors beware - I’ll be listening. Yes- 1953 was a good year!
Peter Hillier
Chorus member – 1953-2006
