Three Choirs Festival: Belshazzar’s Feast

Programme

Dramatic, thrilling, magnificent – we open the 2026 Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester with a concert full of dazzling music.

Find yourself on the edge of your seat as you hear how a disembodied hand writes Belshazzar’s fate on the wall, sending him to his doom, accompanied by spine-tingling orchestral music and the sensational voices of the Festival Chorus.

Elgar’s dramatic First Symphony was the culmination of more than ten years of planning and received a rapturous response from audiences at its premiere. The powerful piece will, in Elgar’s words, leave you with “a massive hope in the future”.

Music by Gavin Higgins, the Three Choirs Festival’s Associate Composer, opens the programme.