Three Choirs Festival 2025: meet Geraint Bowen

You’re the Artistic Director of the Hereford Three Choirs Festival. Can you tell us a bit more about your role and what it involves?

My primary responsibility is to put together the programme for the main cathedral concerts. This involves several different factors including choosing a balanced selection of repertoire which will be attractive to our audience and taking into account the workload of our wonderful Festival Chorus who will be singing in five of these concerts. Wearing my other hat of festival conductor in a Hereford year, I have overall responsibility for the training of the chorus, along with my colleagues, Adrian Partington at Gloucester and Sam Hudson at Worcester.

For those who might be unfamiliar with William Mathias’s This Worlde’s Joie, what is a key moment you’d suggest listening out for?

From the very start this piece is a riot of orchestral colour with particularly striking writing for the percussion section throughout. There is so much variety in the setting of the early English texts for soloists and choral forces for the audience to enjoy, and the final pages develop an irresistible momentum.

You’ve been at Hereford since 2001. What’s been the highlight of your many years as part of the Festival?

There have been many performances over the years, but I still remember a performance of Haydn’s The Creation in 2004 in Gloucester with the Philharmonia, the Festival Chorus and three wonderful soloists.

Do you have a favourite choral work? 

You’ve really put me on the spot here! From the large-scale orchestral and choral repertoire I suppose I would have to choose Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius and Brahms’s Requiem. The Elgar I have known since I was very young, because my father sang the part of Gerontius in over 150 performances in the course of his career, including at the Three Choirs. And the Brahms… well, just because!

What are you most looking forward to at this year’s Festival?

Howells’s Hymnus Paradisi hasn’t been performed in Hereford for many years and I’m looking forward to hearing Adrian Partington conduct this intensely moving work. Coleridge-Taylor’s The Atonement was first performed at the Hereford festival in 1903 and apart from a recent revival in the USA we don’t think it’s received many performances since. I’ve loved working on this with our chorus and am looking forward to hearing a complete performance conducted by Sam Hudson.

What would be your three words to describe the Three Choirs Festival?

Immersive musical celebration.