Yesterday there was a rail strike which “derailed” our plans for getting from Edinburgh to Gloucester efficiently where the Three Choirs Festival is being held. Instead of a 5-3/4 hour journey we had to endure a 9 hour bus ride.

I was trying to determine which was worse, a 9-hour plane ride or a 9-hour bus ride and I’ll let you decide.

1. The bus seats are more cramped, with less legroom. You can’t easily get up and walk around.

2. There are no snacks or drinks available.

3. There is no entertainment—no movies or TV shows to watch. Instead we saw lots and lots of sheep and cattle. It was raining most of the way, which meant seeing the scenery through water drops on the windows.

4. We got dropped off out in the middle of nowhere. We were hoping that there would be a bus station in Cheltenham with a taxi station but no such luck. I had to call three taxi companies to find one which would answer the phone.

The “good” news was that our bus tickets were way cheaper than our train tickets and we arrived in time to attend most of a special reception for the American Friends of the Three Choirs Festival, sponsor of the opening evening concert. The free drinks and canapés were our only food since getting breakfast in a bag from the Edinburgh hotel this morning.

Unfortunately we missed the afternoon concert for which we had bought tickets, and the first evensong but I for one absolutely drank in the musical deliciousness of last night’s concert.

The concert was called “The Holy City,” after the second piece on the program, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Sancta Civitas,” an oratorio for tenor and bass solo, chorus, semi-chorus, distant chorus and orchestra. I felt I was totally enveloped in layer after layer of lush harmonies, and in the rich, reverberant acoustics of Gloucester Cathedral, music making is magical. The musical forces were huge, which included the Three Cathedral Choirs of Gloucester, Worcester and Hereford; the Three Choirs Festival Chorus which includes people from the surrounding community, and the Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Adrian Partington.

The concert opened with a stunning commissioned work by a Jamaican composer, Eleanor Alberga (b. 1949), which set us up for an ocean of musical colors.

The second half of the program was the “Violin Sonata in B minor, op. 61” by Edward Elgar with a German-Hungarian violinist, Zsolt -Tihamér Visontay, who to me embodied musical perfection, absolutely incredible!

This is my fifth Three Choirs Festival and I’m so glad to be here!