Category Archives: NEWS

2026 Cumnock Tryst Revealed

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This year’s Cumnock Tryst, which runs from 1-4 October, will conclude with a major tribute to John Wallace, the trumpeter, composer and former principal of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland who died earlier this year.

“We mark his memory and his legacy for Scottish music this year in a special way”, announced Festival director James MacMillan, whose own trumpet concert, Epiclesis, was written for Wallace in 1993. “John attended last year’s Tryst festival and was looking forward to participating in this one,” he added. 

Instead, the final two days of this year’s event will not only feature Wallace’s eponymous brass ensemble, The Wallace Collection, but will see them team up with The Cooperation Band in Wallace’s own arrangement of Giovanni Gabrielli’s 1615 Canzoni et Sonate. For this Venetian-style spectacular Festival finale (4 Oct) the massed players will be spread around the encircling galleries of Cumnock’s Old Church. “It will be the ultimate surround sound experience,” promises MacMillan.

On the previous day, The Wallace Collection teams up with The Cumnock Tryst Festival Chorus and local young singers in the town’s Barony Hall for an ambitious programme under the baton of Eamonn Dougan. Besides music by Vaughan Williams, John Rutter and Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds, there’s the world premiere of a new work by American composer AJ Harbison.

Thursday’s opening concert (1 Oct) showcases the talents of the young blind Scots pianist Ethan Loch, who came to prominence winning the keyboard category of the BBC Young Musician competition in 2022. He has since appeared as soloist with the RSNO, BBC SSO and Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. His recital in Cumnock’s Trinity Church features some of his own music alongside that of Gluck, Liszt, Debussy and Chopin.

Other visiting classical artists include the high-profile saxophonist Jess Gillam and virtuoso euphonium player David Childs. Both feature in the Festival’s only orchestral concert (2 Oct) by the BBC SSO: Gillam taking front stage in MacMillan’s own Saxophone Concerto; Childs in the same composer’s Where the Lugar Meets the Glaisnock, a work MacMillan describes as a “love-letter to the town where I grew up”. 

Childs also teams up with pianist Christopher Williams in Trinity Church for a Saturday morning recital (3 Oct), while Gillam presents a colourful spread that afternoon with her own Jess Gillam Trio in music ranging from Corelli and Sidney Bechet to Nadi Boulanger and George Gershwin. 

The overall Festival template remains familiar. The Cumnock Hour (2 Oct), in partnership with the Boswell Book Festival, sees writer and broadcaster Stephen Johnson discuss his new book – Music Lessons: Seven Composers and What They Taught Me – which explores how “dark” music helped him during difficult times. Earlier that day The Unbroken Thread showcases care and share initiatives undertaken by the Riverside Centre with pupils from Hillside School in collaboration with Drake Music Scotland and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

Artists appearing at the late night Festival Club include contemporary folk from the Hannah Rarity Trio (1 Oct), a tribute to Stéphane Grappelli by the Seonaid Aitken Quintet (2 Oct), and music theatre cabaret, CAMPS After Dark!, from Cumnock’s own theatre group.

This year’s Promenades at Dumfries House (4 Oct) are given over to local young talent, including Kilmarnock pianist Ethan Chan.

The 2026 Cumnock Tryst runs from 1-4 October. Full details at www.thecumnocktryst.com

RSNO Appoints New Music Director

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The Royal Scottish National Orchestra has announced the appointment of its first ever female Music Director. 

Lithuanian-born conductor Giedrė Šlekytė, 37, who debuted with the RSNO only last December in a critically-acclaimed performance of Mahler’s First Symphony, takes up her new position at the start of the 2027-28 Season. She will meanwhile assume the role of Music Director Designate with immediate effect. 

Šlekytė succeeds Thomas Søndergård, whose successful 18-year partnership with the RSNO – leading to his appointment as Principal Guest Conductor in 2012, then as Music Director from 2018 – will nonetheless continue through his new role as Music Director Emeritus. During the 2027-28 Season Søndergård will return to lead four concert programmes.

Based in Austria, Šlekytė has enjoyed a growing reputation in the fields of both symphonic repertoire and opera. Besides guesting with such major orchestras as the Vienna Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Staatskapelle Berlin, she served as Principal Conductor of the Staadtheater Klagenfurt from 2016-18, and later as Principal Guest Conductor of the Bruckner Orchestra Linz from 2022-25.

In the opera world, Šlekytė has conducted productions at some of the most prestigious opera houses, including the Wiener Staatsoper, London’s Royal Opera House and the Staatsoper Berlin. She returns to Deutsche Oper Berlin to conduct a new production of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer later this year, before undertaking Beethoven’s Leonore with MusikTheater an der Wien in early 2027.

Although still relatively unknown to Scottish audiences, Šlekytė made a powerful impression in her only appearance thus far with the RSNO, when she conducted Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto alongside her very distinctive Mahler One. 

VoxCarnyx’s review of the performance noted that “where Šlekytė had exerted an impressive command over the orchestra in the concerto, she had the field to herself for Mahler’s First Symphony and took full advantage.” It spoke too of “the clarity Šlekytė brought to this [Mahler] performance, her no-nonsense baton technique and instinctive pacing.” 

Announcing Šlekytė’s appointment, RSNO Chief Executive Alistair Mackie said: “There are weeks in rehearsals when something shifts. A buzz starts, momentum builds. You can feel it coming from the musicians themselves. And when it does happen, our audiences can feel it too. That’s what happened with Giedrė.

“When she joined us last year, her musical ideas and the way she works with players spoke for themselves. Giedrė gives the orchestra room to breathe and to play. The connection – musical, cultural and personal – was there from the start. She is the right person to carry forward what Thomas has built. The foundation he created is a strong one: an orchestra that knows itself, plays with confidence, and is ready for what comes next.”

Šlekytė inherits an orchestra that, under Søndergård and in increasingly straitened fiscal times for arts companies, has enjoyed international success through major tours of the USA, Europe and (later this month) China, while at home demonstrating remarkable versatility in the range of work it has undertaken, from major focuses on Richard Strauss and Mahler to high-profile film track recordings undertaken at the RSNO’s state-of-the-art recording facilities in Scotland’s Studio. 

Recognising the opportunities that affords, Šlekytė said: “It is a great joy and honour to be appointed as Music Director of the RSNO starting with the 2027:28 Season. I got to know the RSNO as an orchestra of musical excellence but also curiosity, versatility, open-mindedness and great energy. 

“Lots of exciting concert programmes and recordings are in the planning, and I can’t wait to join the RSNO family, grow together and inspire the audiences in Scotland and beyond.”

(Photo credit: Simon Pauly)

All Rise for EIF 2026

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After a thinner programme last year, the Edinburgh International Festival boasts a return to full strength on the road to its 80th anniversary celebrations next year, writes KEITH BRUCE.

Orchestral residencies from the Los Angeles and Berlin Philharmonics and Wynton Marsalis’s Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, and the world premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s new post-pandemic opera The Galloping Cure are headline attractions in the full Edinburgh International Festival programme for August 2026, unveiled today.

The Mazzoli opera follows the acclaimed Breaking the Waves at EIF 2019 and reunites the composer with librettist Royce Vavrek, stage director Tom Morris and conductor Stuart Stratford in a production from Scottish Opera and Opera Ventures.

The cast is headed by Argentinian mezzo Daniela Mack, British soprano Susan Bullock and German baritone Justin Austin.

It joins the already-announced Zurich Opera production of Verdi’s A Masked Ball, a revival of Adele Thomas’s acclaimed 2024 staging, as the staged operas bookending the programme at the Festival Theatre.

Operas in concert at the Usher Hall are Mozart’s Don Giovanni from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Maxim Emelyanychev, with Konstantin Krimmel as Giovanni, Louise Alder as Donna Anna and Brindley Sherratt as the Commendatore, and Strauss’s Elektra from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and conductor Karina Canellakis with Irene Theorin in the title role, Vida Mikneviciute as Chrysothemis and Nina Stemme as Klytamnestra.

The Festival has a focus on work from across the Atlantic and its theme, All Rise, is the title of Marsalis’s epic Symphony No 1, whose 12 movements will be the Opening Concert at the Usher Hall on Saturday August 8, teaming the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and its founder, featured soloist and composer with the RSNO, the Edinburgh Festival Chorus and the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers, under the baton of James Gaffigan.

During the following week, the orchestra plays Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige with conductor Chris Crenshaw and then gives two concerts on the evening of August 12 with Yuja Wang at the piano in what is a world premiere collaboration. Marsalis, who is married to Festival director Nicola Benedetti, with whom he has a daughter, has recently announced that he will step down as artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in the summer of next year.

The LA Phil residency comes in the final year of its conductor Gustavo Dudamel’s tenure as Music Director. Three concerts include two Beethoven symphonies, Nos 7 and 6, and a family concert teaming the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles with Sistema Scotland’s Big Noise musicians.

Zurich Opera brings Verdi’s A Masked Ball

The Berlin Phil and conductor Kirill Petrenko close the Festival on Sunday August 30 with Scriabin’s Symphony No 3, preceded by Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with soloist Augustin Hadelich. The previous evening the programme is Elgar’s Enigma Variations and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 4. A sextet from the orchestra gives the Queen’s Hall chamber music recital on the morning of Saturday August 29.

Other highlights at the Usher Hall include two concerts by the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal, the first of which is a rare modern-day performance of the full three-hours of Coleridge-Taylor’s The Song of Hiawatha with the Festival Chorus and tenor Nicky Spence among the soloists, and Sir Donald Runnicles conducting his old friends the BBC SSO and the Festival Chorus in Mahler’s Das klagende Lied, with soloists including mezzo Catriona Morison.

The Royal Scottish National Orchestra is in the pit at Edinburgh Playhouse for the visit of San Francisco Ballet. The European premiere of choreographer Aszure Barton’s Mere Mortals is danced to a score by Floating Points (Sam Shepherd), conducted by Martin West.

Colin Currie and his group play an all-Steve Reich programme, John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London celebrate the Golden Age of Hollywood, and Jordi Savall and Hesperion XXI perform an Atlantic-spanning early music programme.

A day of Bach at the Usher Hall on Saturday August 22 starts with an invitation to “Come and Sing” Chorales, and has Alisa Weilerstein playing all the cello suites and pianist Vikingur Olafsson giving a late evening concert.

There is a tribute to the late Scottish trumpeter John Wallace from the band he founded, The Wallace Collection in partnership with the Cooperation Band and musicians from all three Scottish orchestras under conductor Clark Rundell, and the Queen’s Hall programme includes a tribute to pianist Alfred Brendel in three recitals of music associated with the great stalwart of Festivals past by Steven Osborne, Paul Lewis and Pierre-Laurent Aimard.

Debuts at the Queen’s Hall include those of mezzo Beth Taylor and guitarist Sean Shibe and that series opens with Dunedin Consort performing Tansy Davies’s new work Passion of Mary Magdelene with Anna Dennis and Marcus Farnsworth. Scottish Ensemble combines forces with small-pipes virtuoso Brighde Chaimbeul in another world premiere collaboration.

A full jazz, traditional music and folk programme at the EIF’s Royal Mile home, The Hub also includes Benedetti’s Classical Jam and a return visit from the global stars of the Aga Khan Music Programme.

Introducing her fourth Festival, Benedetti said: “Marking 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, we put America firmly in the spotlight. The American story is filled with innovation and ingenuity, perseverance and prejudice – tensions that have fuelled some of the most extraordinary artistic achievements in history.

“Our 2026 Festival is an invitation to All Rise together, and in doing so we celebrate not only artistic excellence but the resilience and flourishing of the human spirit.”

Tickets for EIF 2026 are on sale from noon on Thursday March 26 with priority booking for members and friends opening a week earlier. Full details at eif.co.uk

Picture of Zurich Opera’s A Masked Ball by Herwig Prammer; Nicola Benedetti and Wynton Marsalis by Carl Bigmore

John Wallace

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Trumpeter John Wallace, who has died at the age of 76 following treatment for cancer, was one of the most dynamic musicians of his generation. Following a career on the front desks of three London orchestras and the founding of his own brass ensemble, the Wallace Collection, he was appointed principal of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in 2002.

His tenure at the institution, which ran until his retirement in 2014, was transformative, including the name change to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland to reflect the expanded range of the teaching portfolio, and the opening of the Wallace Studios next to Scottish Opera’s rehearsal space at Speirs Wharf.

Born in Methil in Fife, John began his musical career playing cornet in his father’s works band, the Tullis Russell Mills Band in Glenrothes. In more recent years he performed alongside current players as one of a series of engagements at the East Neuk Festival.

After the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, he studied music at King’s College, Cambridge, the Royal Academy of Music and York University.

A recipient of an OBE in 1995 and a CBE in 2011, he was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Music in 2021. He had been a featured soloist alongside Kiri Te Kanawa at the wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer in 1981. He was made a Honorary Member of the Royal Philharmonic Society last year.

Professor Jeffrey Sharkey, who succeeded him as RCS Principal, said yesterday: “John Wallace was a legend in the music world – one of Scotland’s own who gave so much to the world as a performer, educator and leader. He was also incredibly warm and approachable.”

During his cancer treatment, John Wallace returned to his first study of composition and gave one of his last interviews to Vox Carnyx last year to publicise a concert featuring his own arrangements in aid of Glasgow’s Beatson Cancer Charity.https://voxcarnyx.com/2025/02/13/inspired-by-adversity/

2025 Cumnock Tryst Launched

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Sir James MacMillan’s Cumnock Tryst Festival enters its second decade this October, a sure sign that the award-winning East Ayrshire festival – most recently recipient of a Sky Arts Award and a second Royal Philharmonic Society Award – has earned its spurs. 

It was a proudly relaxed MacMillan last Saturday who revealed the 2025 Festival Programme in Cumnock’s St John’s Church before handing over to the a cappella vocal ensemble The Sixteen, whose concert of Renaissance and contemporary repertoire played no small part in attracting the capacity, in some cases well-travelled, attendance. 

Harry Christophers’ precision-engineered choir are not actually appearing at this year’s Festival, but its long association with The Tryst made a perfectly legitimate case for its hybrid presence at the weekend. Having appeared in the 2014 inaugural Festival and several others since, MacMillan’s own close association with the group and their joint ongoing support from the London-based Genesis Foundation, represents a bond that has spawned numerous projects geared at supporting emerging artists, especially young composers.

Saturday’s concert, Voices of Angels, highlighted one of these initiatives. Alongside seraphically-inspired Renaissance gems by Palestrina, Victoria and the biographically-colourful Francisco Guerrero (who twice survived attacks by pirates while on pilgrimage to the Holy Land), were genuinely exultant works by three young composers – Lucy Walker, Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade and Millicent B James – clearly having benefitted from MacMillan’s mentorship and such immersive performances by Christophers’ crack choristers.

It’s with voices, in fact, that the forthcoming Festival, which runs from 2-5 October, kicks off. What began with a mega-choral day for young singers throughout the various Ayrshire regions this Spring, conducted by incumbent choral gurus Eamonn Dougan and Andy McTaggart, reaches its apotheosis as the opening Three Ayrshires Choral Day on 2 October. The same day sees an evening appearance by the recently-formed Cumnock Tryst Ensemble, with music by Judith Weir, Villa-Lobos, Jay Capperauld and the UK premiere of MacMillan’s In Memoriam, all part of a programme that will now pay tribute to the cellist Christian Elliot, a founding member of the Ensemble who died recently.

In other key classical events, baritone Roderick Williams makes his Cumnock debut with the Carducci Quartet in his own arrangement of Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin. The BBC SSO and Cumnock Tryst Festival Chorus present the Scottish premiere of Texan-based Taylor Scott Davis’ Magnificat alongside MacMillan’s Benedicamus Deum caeli from The Strathclyde Motets. The National Youth Orchestras of Scotland Camerata present a wind ensemble version of Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier. Perth-born pianist Alasdair Beatson plays Beethoven, Benjamin and Debussy at Dumfries House. The Festival ends with a Nordic finale from vocal collective Sansara with music exploring Scandinavian and Celtic connections.

There’s also a rare chance to hear the fruits of a relatively unsung project, Musicians in Exile, which has been running for some time now in Glasgow, spearheaded by the conductor Paul MacAlindin under the umbrella of his Govan-based orchestra The Glasgow Barons. Made up of asylum seekers now living in Scotland, these instrumentalists perform music that integrates the styles of their respective homelands, resulting in a unique stylistic fusion (4 Oct).

The less formal side of The Tryst continues with late-evening jazz from Bill Jones’ Renaissance Swing Band (2 Oct), traditional music from fiddler Alasdair Savage & Friends (3 Oct), and the conversational Cumnock Hour (3 Oct) in which poet Michael Symmons Roberts and Hebrides Ensemble artistic director Will Conway dig deep into the story of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, which the composer wrote while detained in a World War II prison camp. 

The relevance of that? The Hebrides will perform the Messiaen in one of the Tryst’s extended series of year-round concerts on 1 February 2026 at Dumfries House. 

Full programme and booking details for the 2025 Cumnock Tryst are at www.thecumnocktryst.com

Scottish Opera’s new season

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The new season unveiled by Scottish Opera marks a decade in post for Music Director Stuart Stratford, and it has been one of company stability and notable artistic successes. Before talking about what’s to come, he identified his own highlights of those ten years.

“I always feel there is still so much to do, but Puccini’s Il trittico was a highlight for the whole company. It was a major project for us. There are also the collaborations which produced Greek, Breaking the Waves and Ainadamar, which has gone to Detroit, Houston, the Met and Los Angeles but originated here.

“Then there are the community pieces, like Pagliacci in Paisley, Candide at Edington Street and Oedipus Rex at the Edinburgh Festival – those are the kind of projects we’re really interested in as a company.

“And there are the rare operas. It was great to have given the Scottish premiere of Daphne by Richard Strauss, and Scottish Opera should always be championing unusual pieces as well as the core repertoire.”

That said, the 2025/26 season, unveiled as the company opens a new production of The Merry Widow at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal, has just the one show that really ticks the boxes for innovation and adventurousness. Like this year’s Edinburgh Festival programme and the coming season from the RSNO, it has all the hallmarks of being signed off in straitened times.

The exception is the world premiere of The Great Wave, a new work by Japanese composer Dai Fujikura and Scots librettist Harry Ross, best known in his native land previously as the producer of the award-winning presence of the British Army at the Edinburgh Fringe – “a foil to the Edinburgh Military Tattoo” as The List magazine put it.

Fujikura’s previous successes include an operatic version of  the Stanislaw Lem novel Solaris, and The Dream of Armageddon, based on an H G Wells short story, both of which involved Ross.

The new piece is the story of Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai and his daughter, Oi, and is being co-produced with KAJIMOTO, who will present the work in Kyoto and Tokyo.

Says Stratford, who will conduct: “Fujikura’s music is quite eclectic, avant garde meets Japanese mimimalism, and in this piece there is a big role for the shakuhachi, a Japanese flute, which gives it  a really interesting sound-world.”

The other main house shows in the season are revivals: the Barbe and Doucet La boheme from 2017, which the pair will return to direct, with Hye-Youn Lee also returning as Mimi, and Sir Thomas Allen’s The Marriage of Figaro, back for another run but sung in English this time.

As with The Barber of Seville, Stratford believes the production will be reinvigorated by the change.

“There we saw a development in the performances and a renewed connection with audiences in the refreshed version. Boheme, on the other hand, I think loses some of its attraction if it’s not in Italian.”

Earlier next Spring, the Theatre Royal will also see a Saturday afternoon concert performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, repeated during the following week at Edinburgh Usher Hall, and Stratford says that is a taster of a new commitment.

“It was 2013 when we did The Flying Dutchman, so it is high time we tackled some Wagner, especially as the orchestra is playing as well as it has ever played – so you’ll see more in the coming years.”

As has become its custom in the past decade, the company starts its new season in Haddington at the Lammermuir Festival. This year that is a double bill, pairing comedies of infidelity, Walton’s The Bear and Ravel’s l’heure espangnole, which will be part of the festival’s commemoration of 150 years since the birth of the French composer. As has happened only more recently, the operas will also be seen later in both Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Although there is no staged community production this year, that work goes on, in primary schools as part of the Glasgow 850 celebrations, with the building of a children’s chorus that will feature in main stage shows, and with the establishment of an Edinburgh branch of the adult community chorus, mirroring the Glasgow one and following on from the work for the EIF Oedipus Rex.

Full details of the new season can be found at scottishopera.org.uk

RSNO Launches 2025-26 Season

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The RSNO 2025-26 Season Launch on Tuesday at the “New Auditorium” at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall? It looked more like the studio recording of an old-style Parkinson Show. 

On a rear platform soft seats awaited the RSNO’s cheery “mein host”, chief executive Alistair Mackie, and a line up of player guests. In place of Parky’s Harry Stoneham Five, an RSNO string nonet acted as the luminous backing to solo spots by showcased colleagues. A comic double act by smooth-talking principal trumpet Chris Hart and loopy sidekick, principal double bassist Nikita Naumov, broadened the showbiz vibe. Choreographed lighting and interwoven video clips projected a slick tech dimension. 

If presentation counted for anything, the assembled “studio audience” – “our payback to you, our supporters”, announced RSNO chairman Gregor Stewart – were amply rewarded.

In essence, this was a clever shop window exercise, reflecting a key area of activity the RSNO has turned to in its hour of need – the lucrative recording of film, television and video games soundtracks that has helped them allay the serious funding pressures all arts companies are currently facing – and the development of state-of-the-art studio facilities within its Glasgow Royal Concert Hall home. “Over the past year we’ve undertaken 37 such projects,” Mackie informed us, among them the soundtrack to Tom Cruise’s next Mission Impossible movie.

In line with that, previous seasons have seen a significant uptick in the inclusion of live film screenings – RSNO at the Movies – as part of the main concert portfolio. 2025-26 goes big screen in Glasgow and Edinburgh with Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Ghostbusters, Home Alone, How to Train Your Dragon and Gladiator. Add to that a couple of Pops concerts – a joint cross-cultural extravaganza by composer Rushi Zanjan’s Orchestral Qawwali with the RSNO and RSNO Chorus (Glasgow only), and Richard Kaufman conducting The Music of John Williams – and the broadest of tastes are well-catered for.

So much for the razzmatazz; what about the symphonic meat and veg? Central to the season’s 17 Classical Concerts is what music director Thomas Søndergård described, in a prerecorded message, as a theme exploring how music “Feels Like Home”. He cited Bruckner’s Symphony No 8 as one, how it “holds a place in my heart as the last concert I performed in [as a timpanist] during my studies”. 

In his six appearances with the orchestra during 2025-26, he’ll open the season with Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, later appearances bringing us Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Mozart’s Great Mass in C minor and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth. In the same programme as the Bruckner, he’ll be joined by the astonishing horn soloist Felix Klieser – born without hands, but plays using his feet – in Richard Strauss’ Horn Concerto No 1. A link-up with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland sees RCS soloists perform in Ravel’s mini-opera L’enfant et les sortilèges, and the fine young Scots pianist Ethan Loch venting his inner jazz in Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

This will also be a year in which principal guest conductor Patrick Hahn makes his mark with the orchestra, not least in a Season Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and in Elgar’s Cello Concerto with soloist Kian Soltani. More intriguingly he stars as pianist/conductor in a jazz/classical interchange playing solo in George Antheil’s 1955 A Jazz Symphony before moving to the podium for Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F (spotlighting pianist Frank Dupree and his jazz trio) and Rachmaninov’s nostalgic Third Symphony.

Among the season’s newer conducting faces is featured artist Anthony Parnther, music director of the San Bernardino Symphony Orchestra, whose broad-based experience across the film medium, family concerts and the championing of underrepresented voices is reflected in a trio of October programmes that ranges from an all-action Family Concert – Fright at the Museum – to the world premiere of Matthew Rooke’s Tamboo-Bamboo Concerto for Timpani and Orchestra with charismatic RSNO timpanist Paul Philbert in the solo spot.

Philbert isn’t the only orchestral principal stepping into the limelight. Chris Hart performs Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto in November, while Nikita Naumov’s plays Koussevitzky’s Double Bass Concerto in one of the three RSNO Comes to Play concerts presented by Gillian Moore that sees the orchestra perform in wider community venues.

“We’re celebrating the sights and sounds of home,” Mackie reaffirms, which includes appearances by Nicola Benedetti (Elgar’s Violin Concerto) and mezzo soprano Karen Cargill (Beethoven’s Ninth and James MacMillan’s Three Scottish Songs). A Glasgow Sunday afternoon Chamber Series highlights RSNO and guest musicians, including an arrangement for string trio of Bach’s Goldberg Variations (trailed in part at Tuesday’s launch event), and the world premiere of Ethan Loch’s Fantasy of the Sea, performed by the composer with ballet dancer Antonia Cramb.

Other main season highlights include pianist Sir Stephen Hough, returning with conductor John Wilson to perform Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 1, soprano Anna Dennis who premieres a new work by Elena Langer with Estonian conductor Kristiina Poska, Lithuanian Giedrė Šlekytė conducting Mahler’s First Symphony and teaming up with Serbian soloist Nemenja Radulović for Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, and the impeccable James Ehnes as soloist in the UK premiere of James Newton Howard’s Violin Concerto No 2.

Full information on the RSNO’s 2025-26 Season is available at www.rsno.org.uk

A Perth-wide festival

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Tickets are now on sale for the full programme of the 2025 Perth Festival of the Arts in May, which promises to be a presence in the Fair City on an even wider scale.

The festival’s opera production of Puccini’s Suor Angelica is in St Ninian’s Cathedral, the cast led by South African soprano Sarah-Jane Brandon (pictured). Opera Bohemia’s Alistair Digges (conducting) and Douglas Nairne (directing) team up with the Glasgow-based Amicus Orchestra for the performances on May 27 and 28.

The more-often-used St John’s Kirk launches the music programme on Thursday May 22 with a rare visit north of the border by the Ora Singers, directed by Suzi Digby. Their programme features the ancient and modern Misereres of Gregorio Allegri and Sir James MacMillan, Renaissance polyphony from Victoria, Lassus and Palestrina and contemporary composition, including a new commission from Isle of Arran-based Electra Perivolaris, setting William Drummond’s A Cypress Grove.

St John’s also has a concert by gypsy jazz group Rose Room on Sunday 25 and a duo of classical accordionists, Melia Simonot and Sofia Ros, on the morning of May 31, as well as a full programme of schools and amateur music-making – and there’s more of that in the mixed arts programme at St Matthew’s Church.

Perth Concert Hall has a visit from the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra on Saturday May 24, with a concert packed with Classic FM favourites, including Carmen, Swan Lake, The Lark Ascending and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The Festival week ends in the same venue with brass orchestra Mike Lovatt’s Brass Pack and a music from the movies show with vocalist Anna-Jane Casey.

Perth Theatre has a visit from Children’s Classic Concerts with Peter and the Wolf on the afternoon of May 24 and tenor Jamie MacDougall’s musical biography of Harry Lauder on the afternoon of Sunday May 25.

Traditional musicians, including Ali Hutton and Patsy Reid, are part of the package in a new initiative at Perth Art Gallery, showcasing up and coming poets working in Scotland, curated by Perthshire’s Jim Mackintosh. The free early evening show is on Thursday May 29.

Edinburgh’s gap year

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Funding austerity has shaped this year’s International Festival, writes Keith Bruce

Politically-astute EIF director Nicola Benedetti prefaced the media briefing revealing her third Festival programme with an enthusiastic acknowledgement of the recent funding announcement from Creative Scotland.

It increased support for an expanded list of client organisations and assured many more arts companies of multi-year funding. Far and away the largest sum goes to the Festival itself, £3.25m in the coming financial year, rising to £4.25m in 2027/28, and Benedetti described the news that came at the end of January as “pivotal” for the whole sector in Scotland.

It did, however, come too late for this year’s Festival, which she would later describe as “more compact” than those of her first two years, and which clearly took shape in a restricted financial climate.

The black cover of the 2025 programme has a cut-out in it that reveals the theme the director has given to this year, The Truth We Seek, printed on page three inside. That gap at the front is, unfortunately, mirrored by the holes in the grid at the back of the brochure that everyone uses to plan their Festival-going.

A new play starring Brian Cox, Make It Happen, is the first event, at the Festival Theatre, but  after its run nothing happens there for nearly a week, until Scottish Ballet unveils its new Mary, Queen of Scots for four performances, which is followed by another four days with no Festival programming in the theatre.

The smaller Lyceum is also “dark”, in terms of International Festival shows, for over a week of the EIF’s three. Its shows include three performances in this year’s much-reduced opera programme, of Huang Ruo’s Book of Mountains and Seas, directed by the Olivier Award-winning designer of My Neighbour Totoro, Basil Twist. The other staged opera, three performances of an Australian staging of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, is the only use the Festival makes of Edinburgh Playhouse this year.

That makes for a lot of gaps on the fold-out venue grid in the brochure. The only venues without big empty spaces in their calendar are the Usher and Queen’s Halls and the EIF’s Hub home.

There are two more operas in concert at the Usher Hall, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and conductor Maxim Emelyanychev continuing their journey through Mozart with La clemenza di Tito and a residency by the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Antonio Pappano including Puccini’s Suor Angelica.

The EIF’s new Head of Music, Nicolas Zekulin, told Vox Carnyx that the event’s commitment to presenting opera hadn’t changed but the year-to-year reality always showed fluctuations.

“The opera offer this year fits in to what had been an ebb and flow. Last year’s was significant and substantial but the year before was less, so there has been a natural ebb and flow and I think this year fits into that pattern.

“Opera has multiple facets and this year has two unconventional productions, and sometimes those are the ones you want to show. The production in the Playhouse is about opening up that repertoire in a new way.”

It is the European premiere of the Opera Queensland production, made with the acrobatic troupe Circa, whose reputation was built at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This incarnation will have the SCO in the pit, Iestyn Davies as Orpheus and the Chorus of Scottish Opera, prepared by Susannah Wapshott.

In fact, as Benedetti noted in her presentation to the press, the 2025 Festival features all five of Scotland’s directly-funded national companies: the National Theatre of Scotland is Dundee Rep’s producing partner for playwright James Graham’s new Make it Happen and the RSNO performs both the Opening Concert of John Tavener’s epic The Veil of the Temple and the Closing Concert of Mendelssohn’s Elijah, where Scots mezzo Karen Cargill is one of the soloists.

Both of those also feature the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, which celebrates its 60th anniversary with a total of five concerts. It joins the LSO and Pappano for two concerts, performing in Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony and the Puccini opera, and the BBC SSO under Karina Canellakis for Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms.

With the National Youth Choir of Scotland’s now-regular contribution to the Festival being that Opening Concert and one with the London Philharmonic under Edward Gardner and the RSNO Youth Chorus also involved in Suor Angelica, there is no shortage of local talent in this year’s line-up – perhaps a case of thrift, rather than charity, beginning at home.

Zekulin said that he was under no illusions about the realities of the Festival’s position when he took up his post.

“I was aware of the constraints from the start, and the need to be creative within a budget. Working within certain parameters is something we all do all the time, but this is an international festival so I still get to do amazing stuff – I can’t complain!

“What’s a gift for us with the recent funding announcement is that 2027 is the 80th anniversary of the Festival. That’s a signature moment and works out well for us. We can look at ’26 and ’27 in parallel and think about what that anniversary means.”

Other musical visitors this year include residencies by the youth orchestra from New York’s Carnegie Hall, NYO2, and Poland’s  NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra from Wroclaw, with whom Benedetti will appear as violin soloist. There are also concerts by the orchestra of the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing, Ivan Fischer’s Budapest Festival Orchestra, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the Monteverdi Choir with the English Baroque Soloists and the Aurora Orchestra under Nicholas Collon.

The Queen’s Hall programme kicks off with the intriguing combination of percussionist Colin Currie and The King’s Singers and includes an equally promising programme from mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo, as well as more familiar names including baritone Florian Boesch, Benedetti’s former trio partners Leonard Elschenbroich and Alexei Grynuk, the Dunedin Consort and the Belcea Quartet.

Public booking for EIF 2025 opens at noon on March 27 eif.co.uk

Picture of Nicola Benedetti in the Usher Hall by Ryan Buchanan; Orpheus & Eurydice by West Beach Studio

SSO has new Principal Guest Conductor

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Bulgarian-born Delyana Lazarova is to be the new principal guest conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra from September 2025. The former assistant to Sir Mark Elder at the Hallé Orchestra will succeed Ilan Volkov, who held that position from 2009 and is now creative partner. She will be joining an artistic team at the SSO led by chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth.

The SSO appointment is one of two principal guest conductorships Lazarova takes up this year. In December it was announced that she would assume a similar role from mid-2025 with the Utah Symphony Orchestra. To date she has collaborated with such leading orchestras as the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Orchestre National de France, BBC Symphony Orchestra and CBSO, and makes her debut this season with both the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Minnesota Orchestra. 

Lazarova’s growing reputation in recent years followed on the back of several important competition successes, winning the Bruno Walter Conducting Scholarship at California’s Cabrillo Festival in 2017 and 2018, the 2019 NRTA International Conducting Competition in Tirana, and in 2020 the James Conlon Conducting Award at the Aspen Music Festival and Siemens Hallé International Conductors Competition. 

In her SSO debut last March she hugely impressed audiences and critics alike. One review claimed that “Delyana Lazarova’s chemistry with the SSO, loaded with common purpose and a mission to excite and enchant, was exhilarating from the start”.  Of that same performance of Stravinsky’s The Firebird, VoxCarnyx concluded that “Lazarova, one hopes, will be back before long.”

Commenting on her SSO appointment, Lazarova said: “I am deeply honoured and thrilled to join the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra team. From our very first rehearsal, I was impressed by the artistry and exceptional range of expression of the BBC SSO musicians, whose commitment and passion for the music captured my heart from the start. 

“I eagerly look forward to this exciting journey together, as we explore a diverse repertoire – discovering hidden gems, as well as bringing fresh perspectives to some of the most beloved masterpieces. I cannot wait to reconnect with the wonderful members of the orchestra, hear their beautiful playing once again, and create inspiring music together.”

Welcoming Lazarova’s appointment, BBC SSO Dominic Parker said: “With a keen sense of storytelling in her programming and an impressive breadth of repertoire, audiences can look forward to an enriching and enjoyable musical journey with her on the BBC SSO podium.”

Scotland’s new arts funding landscape

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Creative Scotland, the arts funding body, has acted to ensure that arts organisations spend less of their time making application to Creative Scotland (CS) for money.

In a widely-welcomed, if overdue, comprehensive realignment of its grants portfolio, making use of £34m increase in the Scottish Government’s budget allocation to culture, a total of 251 organisations now benefit from Multi-Year Funding, 141 of them for the first time. A further 13 are in a “Development” queue with a view to their inclusion in years to come.

The announcement puts a much larger proportion of Scotland’s arts sector on a stable financial footing, with the assurance of CS support for the coming three financial years. It also frees up staff time from the rigours of annual application to the quango, potentially to seek support from other sources.

Among those awarded multi-year funding for the first time were classical music festivals Sound in Aberdeen, Fife’s East Neuk Festival and Ayrshire’s Cumnock Tryst, founded by Sir James MacMillan. Music education initiatives The Benedetti Foundation and Sistema Scotland also now receive a multi-year award, as does the Govan-based Glasgow Barons.

There were increases in support for Orkney’s St Magnus Festival, Scottish Ensemble, Red Note, Paragon and Dunedin Consort.

The largest award goes to the Edinburgh International Festival, whose grant is increased to £3.25m in 2025/26 and will rise to £4.25m in 2027/28. One of the Festival’s most significant partners in recent years, the National Youth Choir of Scotland, also receives an increase of over 70% in its CS award, which is increased to £346,635 annually.

Francesca Heygi, EIF Chief Executive said yesterday: “We are grateful for the International Festival’s uplift in funding, which recognises the unique role we play in connecting Scotland to the world, and gives us a firm foundation from which to build.”

The core grant to the Festival had not been increased since 2008.

Creative Scotland has been unable to match the ambition of Scotland’s arts organisations  as outlined in their funding applications, but those already in receipt of Multi-Year Funding see an average increase of 34% in the coming year, rising to 54% in years to come.

Two classical music organisations, the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland and Hebrides Ensemble, were named among 13 recipients from a separate £3.2m Development Stream Fund, with a view to them joining the Multi-Year Funding list in the future.

The loser in the announcement was Cumbernauld’s Lanternhouse Theatre, where Dunedin Consort has developed recent productions and Scottish Opera premiered its latest Opera Highlights tour last week, which has lost its long-term funding, a decision described by chief executive Sarah Price as “devastating”.

Picture: No more cuts? – National Youth Choir of Scotland performing at EIF 2024 (credit Jess Shurte)

East Neuk turns 20

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Tickets are now on general sale for the 20th East Neuk Festival, on Fife’s picturesque Forth estuary shoreline, which includes a celebration of the Elie Church concert that inspired its first programme, featuring some of the players involved in that event. A group led by violinist Alexander Janiczek, former leader of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and including ex-SCO players Ursula Leveaux on bassoon and Alec Frank-Gemmill on horn and current SCO first cello Philip Higham, plays Beethoven’s Septet on the festival’s closing day, June 29. The 2025 performance is at noon in St Ayle’s, Cellardyke.

The main threads of this summer’s bill of fare are the late quartets of Beethoven, the compositions of Schubert and the versatile musicianship of festival regular Sean Shibe.

The Edinburgh guitarist is the soloist for the opening Bowhouse concert by the SCO under principal guest conductor Andrew Manze on the evening of Wednesday June 25. Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez is followed by Schubert’s Sixth Symphony. Shibe also gives three intimate recitals in Anstruther venues on Saturday June 28, playing lute, classical guitar and electric guitar.

Three Schubert song cycles are performed over three days in Crail Parish Church, pianist Joseph Middleton accompanying baritone James Newby for Die Schone Mullerin, tenor Mark Padmore for Wintereise and both for Schwanengesang.

The Beethoven quartets are in the hands of the Elias, Castalian, Belcea and Pavel Haas Quartets, all four of whom come together for the closing concert at the Bowhouse, which includes a new commission from composer Sally Beamish, written for four string quartets.

Other attractions include festival debuts for London saxophonist Tom Smith and his Septet and traditional musician Katherine Tickell with her band The Darkening, oud virtuoso Nizar Rohana and jazz pianist Euan Stevenson.

Full details and booking information is available at eastneukfestival.com

Perth Festival 2024

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The range of this year’s Perth Festival of the Arts may embrace Rory Bremner’s comedy and the funk and soul platter-spinning of Craig Charles but classical music and opera is still at its heart, with performances running right through its 11-day programme at the end of May.

The performance programme opens at Perth Theatre on the evening of Wednesday May 22 with a return visit from the Scots Opera Project, festival debutantes last year with Granville Bantock’s The Seal Woman (Perth Festival / The Seal-Woman | VoxCarnyx). This year the Project revives its Scots language version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, with a further matinee of the production the following Sunday.

Making their first appearance at the festival this year, somewhat surprisingly, are cellist Will Conway’s long established Scottish chamber group Hebrides Ensemble. Their programme visits an idea that has proved strangely popular in the post-Brexit era, celebrating the “Auld Alliance” between Scotland and France and mixing 20th century French music with the work of composers from, or at one time based in, Scotland.

The following week’s chamber music highlight is a visit from the pan-European Il Giardino d’Amore, founded and directed by Polish violinist Stefan Plewiak. Celebrating the tercentenary of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, the group will play, from memory, that Baroque favourite alongside the more recent responses to it from Astor Piazzola and Max Richter.

The Czech National Symphony Orchestra is at Perth Concert Hall on Saturday May 25 for the festival’s flagship concert. Regular touring orchestra with tenor Andrea Bocelli under the baton of its American conductor Steven Mercurio, the soloist for this concert is violinist Chloe Hanslip, playing the perennially popular Bruch Violin Concert No 1.  The rest of the programme is equally box office: Smetana’s Overture to the Bartered Bride, Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

There is a thread of brass music running through the 2024 Perth programme that may well have its roots in the enthusiasm of chairman Craig Dennis. Children’s Classic Concerts, presented as usual by the ebullient Owen Gunnell, give two performances of Big Top Brass, featuring the Thistle Brass Quintet, and the following Saturday afternoon (June 1) The Fairey Band add a live soundtrack to the Aardman animated film starring Wallace & Gromit, The Wrong Trousers.

The Fairey Band also closes the classical programme with a performance of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition in Elgar Howarth’s superb arrangement, and that comes with its own visuals in the from of animated interpretations of the music created by Ion Concert Media with USC School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles.

Nigel Short’s first-class vocal group Tenebrae is in the splendid acoustic of St John’s Kirk on Friday May 24 with a programme that teams Herbert Howell’s Requiem with a new work by Joel Thompson, A Prayer for deliverance. In the same venue the following Monday duo New Focus, pianist Euan Stevenson and saxophonist Konrad Wiszniewski, bring their clever show exploring the relationship between classical music and jazz, The Classical Connection.

Scottish Opera’s Pop-Up Opera is at St Matthew’s Church for its regular visit to the festival, with two of Derek Clark’s half hour condensed versions of classics of the repertoire, The Merry Widow and Don Giovanni, narrated by Alan Dunn.

For full details and booking information visit perthfestival.co.uk

The Kings’ Swingers

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Rather than murder the moment with a seasonable catastrophe from the office choir at VoxCarnyx – that’s Keith and Ken – we thought it more in the spirit of things to respect our readers’ good taste with a Yuletide link to this year’s Christmas Single from the hybrid musical world of Earthtones.

They’re the classy genre-fluid trio established in 2019 by eminent jazz pianist Euan Stevenson in collaboration with two familiar frontline stars from the classical world: the RSNO’s principal flautist Katherine Bryan and her orchestral colleague, associate principal cellist Betsy Taylor. 

In the past they’ve given us a heart-warming God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen and a restoratively goo-free O Holy Night, This year, they offer pageantry with a swing in We Three Kings, another classic Stevenson arrangement in which sophisticated cool meets seasonal cheer.

It’s straight out of the Earthtones playbook. “We got going as a trio just before Covid,” Stevenson recalls. He and jazz saxophonist Konrad Wiszniewski had been doing a project with the Glasgow String Quartet, in which Taylor is cellist. “That’s how I got to know Betsy and we began to do some duo pieces together. I thought we should add a treble voice to the mix and Betsy suggested Katherine. So I started writing music for that line-up and it was an instant hit. We first performed together in 2019.”

We Three Kings is a mastery of blend. Stevenson sets the scene with a smooth Satie-esque intro, its short-long rhythmic heartbeat the springboard to blossoming flute-cello conversations that ebb and flow with constantly refreshed narrative. Bryan adds a natural jazz swing to her easeful signature virtuosity; Taylor offers penetrating character and flexibility to a role that combines the lyrical with the fundamental. Stevenson meshes everything together, the fluid instigator of scene shifts and mood swings. 

There’s an unceasing flow of sensory exhilaration from music that is complex yet intimate, which  throws in snapshots of Brahms without ever becoming pretentious. Ultimately we’re invited to bask in the fireside familiarity of a well-known carol animated through pure class and imagined pleasures. These biblical monarchs appear to enjoy a few laughs along the way, some cheeky moments, maybe an imagined stop-off to pick up those precious gifts. 

Guided by their own star, Earthtones have produced yet another Christmas cracker.

Watch it here.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

Further information at www.earthtonestrio.com

Lammermuir Funding

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Scotland’s arts funding body Creative Scotland is under fire after the Lammermuir Festival revealed that it has been refused an award from its Open Fund for this year’s Festival.

In a robust statement, the chair of the Lammermuir trustees, Sir Muir Russell, outlined the threat to the future of an event that began in 2010 and was awarded a Royal Philharmonic Society Award in 2017. Displaying a candour that is unusual in Creative Scotland supplicants, the festival has outlined the lengthy and time-consuming process involved in the grant application, the encouragement it received to continue with it, the stated reasons for its rejection at previous stages, and the evident disagreement within Creative Scotland itself about the festival’s attainment of certain criteria.

With a model balance of income between box office (currently running at 80% of target), support from sponsors, benefactors and charitable trusts, and government money (with just 23% of its budget requested from Creative Scotland), Lammermuir is able to demonstrate a high level of engagement from local people as audience and participants in its community programme, as well as substantial economic benefit to East Lothian.

“To deliver this year’s Festival as planned – with what is already being acclaimed as an outstanding artistic programme – we shall be obliged to use a significant proportion of our reserves which we have judiciously built up over many years,” the statement continued. “Without Creative Scotland support the Lammermuir Festival’s future is under threat.”

As well as messages from participants in this year’s community opera, Catriona and the Dragon, the statement came with a long list of supporting quotes from prominent musicians, including Lammermuir’s Patron Steven Osborne, his fellow pianists Jeremy Denk, Danny Driver and Malcolm Martineau, violinists Elena Urioste and Maria Wloszczowska, accordionist Ryan Corbett and Maxwell Quartet cellist Duncan Strachan.

The statement concluded: “We urge Creative Scotland to reconsider their decision and secure the future of Lammermuir Festival. In order to make plans and commitments for 2024 and beyond we need the financial stability which Creative Scotland has provided over the past 13 years. We are determined to save the Lammermuir Festival for the future.”

Lammermuir 2023

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With its programming including a concert staging from Scottish Opera as well as music performed by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the Royal Northern Sinfonia and the BBC SSO, Lammermuir Festival has outgrown any impression of it as a showcase for small-scale chamber music in pretty East Lothian churches, although it is that as well.

All of its dozen venues bar one, Garvald Village Hall, still fit that description, but Dunbar Parish Church has joined St Mary’s in Haddington as capable of accommodating larger ensembles and performances – most recently April’s community opera Catriona and the Dragon. Just as Lliam Paterson’s work demonstrated the range of Lammermuir, the September Festival runs from a first Scottish performance of Richard Strauss’s late opera Daphne to an enticingly diverse sequence of solo and duo recitals.

They include this year’s Artist in Residence, harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani, playing Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier as well as more recent music pairing his instrument with live electronics. Both JS and CPE Bach feature in his recital with violinist Antje Weithaas and then in a concert with the SCO.

The box office violin and piano partnership of Alina Ibragimova and Festival Patron Steven Osborne play Debussy, Prokofiev and Part, and Osborne returns a week later to close the Festival with the SSO and Ryan Wigglesworth, playing Michael Tippett’s Piano Concerto alongside Beethoven’s Third Symphony. A duo of tenor Nicholas Mulroy and Ryan Corbett on accordion promises a programme ranging from Monteverdi to Joni Mitchell.

Return visitors from last year include French string quartet Quatuor Agate and the NYCOS Chamber Choir and other chamber music ensembles include a debut from international group Spunicunifait, playing Mozart (whose made-up word gives them their name), and three concerts by Kaleidoscope, whose Tom Poster and Elena Urioste will also be revisiting their Juke Box lockdown selections, live.

The Maxwell Quartet begin a three-year association with Lammermuir, working with baritone Roderick Williams and pianist Christopher Glynn in the second of their two performances, and Dunedin Consort continues its association with soprano Nardus Williams in a concert of music by women composers of earlier years.

With Fretwork and Gesualdo Six celebrating the 400th anniversary of William Byrd in St Mary’s, Rory McCleery’s Marian Consort and historian Lizzie Swarbrick combine forces to celebrate the venerable venue and its musical heritage on the festival’s first Saturday, marking the 50th anniversary of the restoration of the building.

Lammermuir Festival runs 7-18 September. General booking opens on Friday.

Dunard Centre chief

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Impact Scotland, the body behind the building of the new Dunard Centre in Edinburgh, has announced the appointment of Jo Buckley as Chief Executive Officer.

Buckley leaves the Dunedin Consort, where she has worked for over five years and is currently Chief Executive, to take up the new role at the start of September, overseeing the development of the new facility that will be a home for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

Impact Scotland chair Ronnie Bowie said: “Jo is an exceptional leader with countless strings to her bow: visionary company manager, in-demand music writer and scholar, and tireless champion of emerging musical talent, not to mention an experienced contributor to Scottish arts policy and assessment.

“Delivering Edinburgh’s first 21st century venue will require both experience and fresh thinking, and in Jo we’ve found an overwhelming supply of both.”

Jo Buckley said: “The Dunard Centre is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build a musical hub for a city that already hums with artistic possibility and talent, and which is ready to demonstrate to the world what it can do, all day, every day. 

“Like many colleagues and peers, I’ve watched the plans for the Centre develop over these past few years, and grown increasingly excited about the possibilities this one-off, intimate space will create: not just for classical musicians, but for artists of all styles, traditions and career stages.”      

She added: “It has been an extraordinary privilege to work with John Butt and the wonderful musicians and colleagues that make up the Dunedin Consort, and I’m determined to make the most of every last moment with the team.

“It’ll be a wrench to leave such fantastic colleagues, but I’m consoled by knowing our paths will cross again, not least in the auditorium of this wonderful new home for music!”

Scottish Opera’s new season

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As its 60th anniversary celebrations wind-up with a new staging of Bizet’s Carmen, Scottish Opera has unveiled its 2023/24 season, with a new production of Jonathan Dove’s Marx in London! and revivals of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and Verdi’s La traviata the mainstage offerings.

Chief executive and general director Alex Reedijk acknowledges that the activity level of the birthday year could not be maintained.

“On the back of a tremendous 60th anniversary we’ve put together what we hope is an interesting season for our audiences,” he said. “The 60th anniversary season was a combination of new productions and a big commitment to finishing off work that had been in the pipeline pre-Covid. Now a new economic reality is dawning – not particularly for Scottish Opera, but more widely across the performing arts in the UK and in Scotland. 

“We are focussed on maintaining the momentum we’re building with audiences returning to our productions after the pandemic. Carmen’s advance sales are as strong as we’ve ever seen, so Barber and Traviata are us trying to maintain that momentum. Our average attendance has been very good for our 60th anniversary, 85 to 90 per cent of capacity, and we’ve seen a change in where that audience is coming from, with an uptick in metropolitan areas.”

Sir Thomas Allen’s staging of the Rossini will be sung in Amanda Holden’s English translation, with Samuel Dale Johnson in the title role, opening in October. This time next year, Sir David McVicar’s 2008 La Traviata will also tour from Glasgow to Inverness, Aberdeen and Edinburgh, with Hye-Youn Lee as Violetta.

Following a year that featured four new productions in Candide, Ainadamar, Il trittico and Carmen, much attention will focus on next February’s unveiling of director Stephen Barlow’s new staging of Dove’s Marx in London, superseding Scottish Opera’s investment in the original German production at the end of 2018.

“It’s a proper helter-skelter through Marx’s life,” said Reedijk, “delivered in one day of his life in London. It had its world premiere in Bonn and then lost a bit of momentum, but like Flight [a hit for the company earlier in 2018] it takes characters with humour and pathos through a very intense period.

“On reflection we decided to start afresh with the production, taking a different visual direction because we loved what Stephen Barlow did with Flight. It seemed right to bring his focus and sense of humour to bear on Marx.”

Reedijk adds that much of what has happened in the UK in the intervening years gives the director material to draw upon.

“There has been much to say about capitalism, London life and how someone’s public face relates to their chaotic private life. We have seen that in one or two of our more recent leadership models – some of whom have delivered chaos both publicly and privately!”

The show will play Glasgow and Edinburgh, with David Parry conducting and company favourite Roland Wood, mostly recently seen in McVicar’s Il trittico, as Karl Marx.

“Roland has revealed, in both Tosca and Falstaff, the capacity to find humour as well as pathos in a role, as well as a degree of physical menace. He’s become a really rich performer, and we love using him,” said Reedijk.

The 23/24 season will open with a concert performance of Richard Strauss rarity Daphne, the company’s contribution to the Lammermuir Festival, but having a preview performance at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal before visiting St Mary’s in Haddington and then later repeated at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall. Music director Stuart Stratford conducts that and both the Rossini and Verdi revivals.

“Lammermuir Festival has been a wonderful provocation for us,” said Reedijk. “It has enabled us to consider what repertoire would appeal to a particular audience, and for Stuart to continue to find work that has either rarely or never been presented in Scotland. By also presenting that in Glasgow and Edinburgh we are sharing that with other audiences.”

Elsewhere in the year, alongside regular features like the Opera Highlight tours, Scottish Opera Young Company has a mini-tour of Glasgow, Largs and Stirling with a double bill of new work Maud by Henry McPherson, a winner in the company’s 2018 Opera Sparks initiative, and Kurt Weill’s Down in the Valley.

“The stories that underpin those operas are centuries apart but both have resonances for communities in Scotland,” said Reedijk.

“It was always the intention that the Young Company would be part of a pathway into the world of opera – not necessarily Scottish Opera, but the artform – just as the Emerging Artists programme is about preparing younger, post-grad singers for life in the opera world.

“One happy outcome of Covid was the amount of attention we were able to give to that programme, and the singers came out of that experience even more operatically muscular, and we’ve been able to find them work in main-stage productions as well as in Opera Highlights and other projects.”

Pictured: Jonathan Dove

EIF 2023

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As the first Edinburgh Festival programme from new director Nicola Benedetti is announced, KEITH BRUCE delves into the musical treats in store

The question new Edinburgh International Festival director Nicola Benedetti poses on the front of her first programme brochure derives from the recently-republished last book Reverend Martin Luther King wrote before his death. However, she also describes “Where do we go from here?” as a challenge to the Festival itself as it moves on from the celebration of its 75th anniversary last year.

Sharing the platform at the media briefing launching this year’s event with Creative Director Roy Luxford and Head of Music Andrew Moore was a clear indication of continuity, and her stated intention of making the most of the talent the virtuoso violinist and passionate music education advocate found in place in the organisation. Significantly she has not taken on Fergus Linehan’s role of Chief Executive, now filled by Linehan’s Executive Director, Francesca Hegyi.

And there is much about that brochure, and the shape of the programming, that will be familiar to regular Festival attenders, no doubt reflecting the fact that many of the building blocks of the 2023 programme were already in place when Benedetti was appointed. What is very different is the way the events are listed, not by genre or venue, but in sections that continue her engagement with the philosophy of Dr King: Community over Chaos, Hope in the Face of Adversity, and A Perspective That’s Not One’s Own.

That makes perusal of the print a different experience, but not radically so, and it is clear that the new director’s pathways to engagement with the work of the artists invited to this year’s Festival have followed the programme, rather than shaped it.

What’s there to see and hear – the actual meat of this year’s event – will please a great many people, and perhaps even fans of the most hotly debated element of any recent Edinburgh Festival. Opera magazine speculated in the editorial of its May issue that there would be “no major staged opera for the first time in decades” and those precise words are probably strictly true. However, there will be many for whom the UK premiere of a Barry Kosky-directed Berliner Ensemble production of Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera in the Festival Theatre is more than just the next best thing, and Theatre of Sound’s retelling of Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle as a contemporary two-hander with the Hebrides Ensemble at the Church Hill Theatre in the Festival’s final week looks most intriguing.

Concert performances of opera, a regular highlight of recent Edinburgh programmes, maintain their high standard. It is perhaps surprising that Wagner’s Tannhauser will have its first ever performance at the Festival in the Usher Hall on August 25, with American tenor Clay Hilley in the title role as local hero Sir Donald Runnicles conducts Deutsche Oper Berlin.

A fortnight earlier, Maxim Emelyanychev conducts the orchestra to which he has just committed a further five years of his career in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Andrew Moore introduced this as the first of a series of concert performances of Mozart operas by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra with its ebullient Principal Conductor. The same orchestra undertook the same project under the baton of Charles Mackerras in the 1990s – although The Magic Flute was not part of that series.

It was also in the last decade of the 20th century that Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra first wowed Edinburgh audiences and that team provides the first of this Festival’s orchestral residencies. Beginning with an evening of music presented in a transformed Usher Hall with beanbags replacing the stalls seating, the orchestra also plays Bartok and Kodaly with Sir Andras Schiff and the National Youth Choir of Scotland’s National Girls Choir. Benedetti is involved as presenter of the first of the orchestra’s concerts, and also joins the BBC SSO and Ryan Wigglesworth on stage on the Festival’s first Sunday for a concert of new music that poses the question on the brochure cover. The young singers of NYCoS have their own concert, with the RSNO, at the Usher Hall on August 13, preceded by a demonstration of the Kodaly music teaching method that is pivotal to its success.

If those events clearly reflect the new director’s commitment to access and education, her use of the EIF’s home, The Hub, below the castle at the top of the Royal Mile, is another crucial ingredient. She intends The Hub to be the Festival’s “Green Room” but open to everyone and “a microcosm of the whole Festival” and it has events programmed most nights, most of them music and often drawing in performers who have bigger gigs in other venues.

They include players from the London Symphony Orchestra, which is 2023’s second resident orchestra, playing Rachmaninov and Shostakovich under Gianandrea Noseda and Szymanowski and Brahms with Sir Simon Rattle before turning its attention to Messiaen’s epic Turangalila-Symphonie, prefaced by a programme of French music that inspired it, with Benedetti again wearing her presenting hat.

The final residency is of the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela with conductors Gustavo Dudamel and Rafael Payare, prefaced by a concert by some of the musicians at The Hub. The Usher Hall also sees two concerts by the Oslo Philharmonic with conductor Klaus Makela and its programme begins with Tan Dun conducting the RSNO and the Festival Chorus in his own Buddha Passion and closes with Karina Canellakis conducting the BBC SSO and the Festival Chorus in Rachmaninov’s The Bells. Outside of the concert hall there will be free music-making in Princes Street Gardens at the start of the Festival and in Charlotte Square at its end, details of which will come in June.

With a full programme of chamber music at the Queen’s Hall as usual, a dance and theatre programme full of top flight international artists and companies also includes works of particular musical interest, specifically a new revival of choreographer Pina Bausch’s work using Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which premiered in Edinburgh in 1978, and Deborah Warner’s staging of Benjamin Britten’s Phaedra.

More information at eif.co.uk, with online public booking opening on May 3, and in-person booking at the Hub available now.

SCO’s half-century and other seasons

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The Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s jubilee caps a promising orchestral programme for the year to come, writes Keith Bruce

In the run-up to its 50th anniversary, the SCO is understandably cock-a-hoop to be able to preface its new season announcement with the news that Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev has extended his contract with the orchestra to 2028.

As the young Russian’s reputation continues to grow globally, and his dizzying schedule takes him to the most prestigious concert halls and opera houses, he has clearly established an important mutually-supportive relationship with the Edinburgh-based ensemble. In the coming season that is as diverse as ever, opening with a seven date Scottish tour of Beethoven’s “Eroica” and a new work by the orchestra’s Associate Composer, Jay Capperauld.

Emelyanychev’s SCO season ends with Mendelssohn’s Elijah, which he, the orchestra and the SCO Chorus will perform in this summer’s newly-announced BBC Proms season.

The RSNO also kicks off with Beethoven, with Lise de la Salle the soloist for the Third Piano Concerto, when Music Director Thomas Sondergard also conducts Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben. Sondergard’s season ends with Berlioz’s Grande Messe and also features two concerts including piano concertos by Saint-Saens with the season’s Artist in Residence Simon Trpceski, and an evening of French music with Scots mezzo Catriona Morison the soloist.

At the BBC SSO, Chief Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth continues to make an individual mark, opening with a concert that includes his own Piano Concerto with Steven Osborne the soloist, alongside Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, with soprano Sally Matthews. He also focuses on Elgar, with the Symphony No 1 and Dai Miyata playing the Cello Concerto, and continues his exploration of Stravinsky’s ballet music with Orpheus and The Fairy’s Kiss, with Principal Guest Conductor Ilan Volkov adding Petrushka in January 2024.

Wigglesworth also conducts the Verdi Requiem next March as the SSO continues its association with the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, and there is much for lovers of choral music to enjoy elsewhere as well.

The RSNO Chorus is celebrating its 180th anniversary in style, including a “Come and Sing” Verdi Requiem in January and Jeanette Sorrell conducting the annual New Year Messiah following an end-of-November concert of Sir James MacMillan’s Christmas Oratorio, conducted by the composer. As well as that Berlioz Grande Messe, it also features in a John Wilson-conducted concert of Ireland, Elgar and Holst – and the RSNO Youth Chorus has an equally busy concert year.

The SCO Chorus can boast a MacMillan premiere with his Burns-setting Composed in August, and Capperauld gives them another first performance with his setting of Niall Campbell’s The Night Watch. It also sings Bach’s B Minor Mass, under conductor Richard Egarr, and Schubert’s Mass in A-flat.

Mezzo Karen Cargill joins the SSO and conductor Alpesh Chauhan for Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and is the soloist for a Scottish Chamber Orchestra programme celebrating the Auld Alliance with France. The SCO’s big birthday line-up of soloists also includes percussionist Colin Currie directing an evening of Steve Reich, Julia Wolfe and Arvo Part, Steven Osborne playing Ravel and Pekka Kuusisto returning for three concerts, one in partnership with Emelyanychev.

Violinist Nicola Benedetti, whose first programme as director of Edinburgh International Festival is unveiled on Monday, plays the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the SCO at the end of the year and gives the much-delayed Scottish premiere of Mark Simpson’s concerto written for her with the RSNO next March.

Full details of all the seasons at sco.org.uk, rsno.org.uk and bbc.co.uk/bbcsso

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