VoxCarnyx

St Mary’s Church, Whitekirk

The other St Mary’s Church in the Lammermuir list of lovely venues is a gem of building half way between North Berwick and Dunbar, now in the care of the community. It returned to the festival this year with a programme of music by Stuart MacRae that perfectly suited its resonant acoustic.

Those who know MacRae mainly from his big Scottish Opera commissions would have recognised his signature in much of it, but it was perhaps just as well that the young mezzo-sopranos due to sing big roles with the company in the Haddington St Mary’s that evening could not hear Lotte Betts-Dean, the singer whose remarkable voice was showcased here.

MacRae tailor-made much of this repertoire for the UK-based Australian, having heard her perform one of his songs, and this recital drew substantially on the 2023 Delphian disc with string duo Sequoia (violinist Alice Rickards and cellist Sonia Cromarty) and the composer himself on harmonium. If the language is “classical” – these are contemporary art songs, setting ancient texts alongside those of Christina Rossetti and Emily Bronte – there is a rich seam of traditional and indigenous music being mined in the work of everyone involved.

Betts-Dean has an extraordinary range, from rich, full alto to soaring soprano, and just as wide in timbre and tone. She is as accurate and controlled as she is expressive, but those technical capabilities are allied to colours that recall such diverse antecedents as Robin Williamson of the Incredible String Band and Nina Simone.

MacRae’s familiarity with Gaelic song ran throughout the programme, not just in his setting of one of those, but also in his instrumental writing for the strings, both evocative of landscape, notional and specific, and part of an environmental focus that is key to Sequoia’s practice.

With Norse and Middle English part of the textual fabric, and birdsong and electronics in the soundscape, there were a lot of ingredients in the mix but ample space for Betts-Dean to demonstrate her a cappella abilities as well. Not only was the material radically re-ordered from the recorded version, it was also substantially revised in some arrangements. The sense of a growing, organic project was clear.

That was obviously so with the world premiere that ended an enthralling 80 minutes, setting Bronte’s The Prisoner. The central song of The Captive was sung unaccompanied, and was MacRae’s superb word-setting at its finest, while the bracketing narrative Prologue and Epilogue added the instruments and a very seductive melody. The 5-tone falling figure on the word “liberty” at the end of the former was emblematic of the fruitful relationship between the composer and his muse.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Lotte Betts-Dean by Matthew Johnson