The Three Choirs Festival has appointed Gavin Higgins its composer-in-association for the next three years which will involve him contributing to the artistic life of the festival as well as composing major commissions.
Returning to his birthplace of Gloucestershire, Gavin will open the festival with the UK premiere of his composition Fanfare Americana
Gavin will also premiere a new setting of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis during this year’s festival which will run from 25 July to 1 August in Gloucester.
In November 2026 Gavin will release a new album with Lyrita on CD, Download and Streaming which includes his Concerto Grosso for Brass Band and orchestra recorded by Tredegar Town Band and BBC NOW with conductor Ryan Bancroft which was premiered at the Proms.
The Album will also feature Monstrous Little Suite (extracted from his opera Monstrous Little Child) and Cortege for a Coal Mine, which was commissioned by Radio 3 and reflects on the closure of the last coal mine in the UK and the devastating social impact this had on working class and mining communities.
Gavin said: “I see the work as a funeral march for the communities and music that was formed alongside Britain’s coal pits and collieries. There is a nod to the brass bands that grew and developed across the UK’s coalfields which is where I first learned to play and compose.”
In November 2026 Lyrita will also record Gavin’s Speak of the North, a song cycle about place, landscape, borderlands, identity, and belonging. Set to poems by a range of Northern poets such as the Bronte sisters, Michael Symmons Roberts, Zoe Mitchell, Tony Williams, Katrina Porteous, and Katie Hale, the cycle looks at what it means to be Northern.
With songs about the Peak District, Manchester as seen from above, coal mining landscapes, an argument between Hadrian’s wall and the sycamore gap tree, and some Northumbrian folk songs, Speak of the North is a sprawling journey through both the physical and imagined landscape of Northern England and will feature soprano Claire Booth, violinist Tamsin Waley-Cohen and pianist Chris Glyn.