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Peter Nardone directs the Three Choirs Festival Chorus and Philharmonia Orchestra in a problematic yet thought-provoking opening concert at Worcester Cathedral.

As Britain prepares to celebrate the centenary of World War One, Britten's War Requiem brings a remarkable start to the Worcester Three Choirs Festival.

Over the centuries, the Three Choirs Festival has developed a commendable trait in presenting the very best in English choral music; in more recent years the Festival has been committed to resurrecting once popular works that have been considered worthy of reassessment and, following on from last year’s performance of George Dyson’s Canterbury Pilgrims, this year the lot fell to Samuel Coleridge-T

A second scorching day in Hereford at the Three Choirs Festival concluded with another excellent concert.Before an audience that filled the cathedral to capacity, the Philharmonia Orchestra assembled on the platform and a warm welcome was given to conductor Peter Nardone.The concert opened with John Ireland’s evocative orchestral opus A London Overture.

The ‘semi-opera’ was an English musical and spoken theatre hybrid which by the end of the 17th century had begun to scrape the bottom of Restoration drama’s literary barrel, and by the 18th had been rendered obsolete by efforts to introduce the English to formal opera from the continent.