Public booking for the 3 Choirs Festival started earlier this month. I had priority booking as a chorus member, though my account has been disabled and no one is able to reinstate it. I managed to grab some tickets when public booking opened (the system was able to handle demand, unlike, say the ROH’s) but by then the nave of Gloucester Cathedral was sold out for five of the six concerts I’m singing in (not the one with Carmina Burana in). Possibly it had been sold out for a while, so it would have made little difference if I’d used priority booking. This is, let me remind you, over three months before the festival itself.
I’m delighted to be singing to a packed Cathedral night after night, but at the same time I wonder why, if choral concerts sell out so easily, why the Bath Festival isn’t reinstating its chorus? I can think of several reasons:
- Bath Abbey is smaller than any of the 3 Choirs Cathedrals and can’t really accommodate a full-size orchestra. Wells Cathedral can, but it is some distance away and has become harder to hire in recent years
- The concerts are expensive to put on, and may not make much profit even if they sell out
- The 3 Choirs Festival has been running for over 300 years and has a dedicated body of supporters, many of whom go each year and buy up the tickets. I’m not sure the Bath Festival has anything like that sort of following
- Choral music has always been at the heart of the 3 Choirs Festival (the clue’s in the name). The Festival Chorus has rather come and gone during the Bath Festival’s history