Three Choirs Festival: Stanford’s Stabat Mater

Programme

We begin our 2024 residency at the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester with music by Mason, Holst and Stanford.

Step into a magical world in Grace-Evangeline Mason’s The Imagined Forest, an enchanting musical picture of a wild woodland filled with colour, light and beauty. The mystical tones continue in Holst’s glorious The Hymn of Jesus, a call to join the joyful divine dance and a unique response to the suffering of the First World War.

Then comes some of Charles Villiers Stanford’s finest and most compelling music in the Stabat Mater. A vivid musical depiction of the Passion and the sorrows of Mary, the intensity and drama of the opening subsides into ethereal beauty at the close, telling of the hope of redemption and life in paradise.