Tag Archives: Lammermuir Festival

Lammermuir: SCO / Poska

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St Mary’s Church, Haddington

Like the Formula 1 calendar and the soccer season, the itinerary of the Scottish orchestral musician now lacks much in the way of clear holiday breaks.

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra visited Lammermuir on the last lap of its extensive summer touring schedule, with concerts of music by contemporary women composers aimed at school students in Musselburgh, Ayr and Dumfries to come next week before Nicola Benedetti launches the new season, premiering James MacMillan’s Second Violin Concerto at the turn of the month.

The woman in charge on Wednesday evening was the Estonian chief conductor of the Flanders Symphony Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor of the Latvian Symphony, Kristiina Poska. Her programme majored on Beethoven, opening with the Overture “Coriolan” and closing with Symphony No 2, with Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony and a contemporary work from Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tuur in between.

Compact enough in duration, it was a rich, if often rather bleak, mix in a Lammermuir Festival that has found room for all three of Scotland’s orchestras – although perhaps not an enormous amount of room for the BBC SSO in Dunbar Parish Church this Friday.

On both the overture and Beethoven symphony, the SCO sounded like a larger outfit in this space with its reverberating acoustic. Nonetheless Poska, a very precise and clear conductor, had the playing edgy and keen, and the dynamics of the string sections particularly precisely graded. The Coriolan was powerful and the Second increasingly colourful as it went on, the SCO winds as dependable as ever, and guest first flute Daniel Pailthorpe (from the BBC Symphony Orchestra) a star turn. Poska really ratcheted up the performance as she built towards an explosive finale.

The works in the middle were more exercises in focused intensity, almost frighteningly so in the case of the Shostakovich, on which leader Michael Gurevich shone from the start, and principal cello Christian Elliot later. The composer’s amplification of his Eighth String Quartet for string orchestra is all about specifics of tone on the instruments, and the range of brooding notes they can produce. The balance Poska achieved was ideal.

Tuur’s Flamma also demands prodigious technique from a smaller string ensemble, particularly in the bowing, although there was some lightning fingering to appreciate as well. Commissioned by the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the composer’s programme note references the indigenous people’s relationship with fire as a purifying as well as a destructive force, and the emphasis sounded to be on the former. As much as the Shostakovich, it is a work specifically tailored to the forces it demands, constantly switching between ensemble and solo voices, which sometimes echoed one another in minimalist fashion. The overall effect, however, was much more expressive and pictorial.

Keith Bruce

Programme repeated this evening in Blair Atholl and on Saturday (September 17) in Greenock.

Picture of Kristiina Poska by Kaupo Kikkas

Lammermuir: Hammond & Uttley

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Dunbar Parish Church

Tenacity has proved a crucial virtue in the precarious world of music promotion in recent years, and the appearance of pianists Clare Hammond and Richard Uttley at this year’s Lammermuir was another fine example of that.

Festival co-director Hugh Macdonald proposed this re-visiting of the repertoire of the husband and wife duo Ethel Bartlett and Scots son-of-the-manse John Rae Robertson pre-pandemic, and it proved an idea well worth clinging on to. Bartlett and Robertson met as students at the Royal Academy of Music and married in 1921, after his service in World War 1, going on to huge success on both sides of the Atlantic in the inter-war years and beyond, until his death in 1956.

Not only did Bartlett & Robertson create a repertoire of transcriptions for two pianos in addition to playing the established classics, they also commissioned and premiered new music by Martinu, Bax and Britten. Hammond and Uttley steered an expert path between honouring their legacy and doing their own thing with a programme that began with one of the couple’s “greatest hits”, Bach’s soprano cantata, Sheep may safely graze, and concluded with the party-piece lollipop of De Falla’s Spanish Dance from La Vida Breve.

Those are akin to the sort of repertoire of classical chamber pops from last century that have been rediscovered by Elena Urioste and Tom Poster, and it is revealing that young players are doing that – some might say that the chances of the “crossover” populist recordings, and stadium-filling “classical” artists, of our own age are rather less likely to be worthy of the attention of future generations.

The meat of this programme was substantial indeed, and covered composition specifically for two pianos by Mozart, Debussy, Rachmaninov, and Arnold Bax – all with its own story attached, and introduced by the artists as well as in Macdonald’s programme note.

The Bax, from 1928, proved colourful, picturesque and impressionistic, while the Debussy of a decade earlier is the composer at his darkest, its slow central movement clearly coloured by composition in Normandy during WW1. It was bracketed by Mozart’s 1781 D Major Sonata, a perfect introduction to the interplay and exchange of ideas between two stylistically-different performers, and Rachmaninov’s 1901 Suite No.2, perhaps just as worthy of dedication to his therapist as the Second Piano Concerto that followed it. Its second movement Waltz and third movement Romance are the composer at his unbeatable melodic best, and would have justified the considerable expense of bringing the two top-quality Steinways to the Dunbar platform on their own.

Keith Bruce

Portait of Clare Hammond by Philip Gatward

Lammermuir: NYCoS Chamber Choir

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Loretto School Chapel

Featuring a full complement of the Scottish orchestras, the presence of Scottish Opera, quality string quartets and more top drawer pianists than is quite decent, one of the few things the 2022 Lammermuir Festival is not about is debuts. Or perhaps it is.

With The Marian Consort, Sansara, The Orlando Consort and Dunedin Consort still to come in the chamber choir line-up, that strand began with the first public concert by the newest ensemble under the capacious umbrella of the National Youth Choir of Scotland.

Long in the planning, or at least in the aspirations of NYCoS founder and artistic director Christopher Bell, the NYCoS Chamber Choir takes his example of the pursuit of excellence with the young musicians of Scotland to another level. If the full forces of the senior choir have already impressed some of the world’s top conductors in performances in Edinburgh, London, Europe and the United States, this elite unit of between 20 and 30 young voices is a refinement of that success.

What Bell has done with the formation of the Chamber Choir is select the finest voices within the current cohort – and possibly recent graduates who are beyond the stipulated age-range in future incarnations – and created a group that can tackle specific repertoire. Who knows what that might be in the future, but this first concert set bold, contemporary parameters – putting, perhaps quite deliberately, clear distance between the NYCoS Chamber Choir and the other vocal groups at this year’s Lammermuir.

With Michael Bawtree at the organ for Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb, which opened the recital, and the piano for Jonathan Dove’s The Passing of the Year, which concluded it, the other two works were a cappella – James MacMillan’s Culham Motets and Caroline Shaw’s And the swallow.

Only the Dove, which dates from 2000, could be described as a secular work, although some of the poetry he sets – Blake, Dickinson and Tennyson among the texts – is faith-inspired. It was an especially appropriate work, not just for an unintended allusion to the death of the Queen, but also because the setting of Dickinson’s Answer July seemed to be a mature version of the sort of songs NYCoS has commissioned as part of its invaluable training of young musicians over its 25 years.

That coming to maturity of the organisation is perfectly celebrated in the birth of this choir. If Britten’s fascinating 1943 work – commissioned by the same clergyman responsible for Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and setting texts by troubled 18th century poet Christopher Smart – is not heard very often, it is because it is far from easy. Here too, though, step-outs from soprano Emily Kemp and alto Olivia Mackenzie Smith take the listener into a child-like world of cat and mouse, while tenor Alexander Roland and bass Christopher Brighty each made powerful solo contributions.

Kemp then supported fellow soprano Lorna Murray in the exquisite close harmony passages of the MacMillan, while all the female voices provided an ethereal underscore to solo tenor Lewis Gilchrist. With alto Morven McIntyre and tenor Jack Mowbray the solo voices in the Dove, this was a chance for individuals to shine, but mainly about the meticulous performance of the ensemble of young men and women whose musical abilities far transcend any “youth choir” or “non-professional” categorisation.

The group also gives Bell access to a whole realm of repertoire, including the newest piece in this programme, the setting of verses from Psalm 84 by America’s composer-of-the-moment, Caroline Shaw. And the swallow is a gorgeous piece which seems to take the sound-world of Whitacre or Lauridsen into a more sophisticated sphere, not least in the imaginative and specific vocal techniques it demands.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Stuart Armitt

Lammermuir: Jeremy Denk

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Dunbar Parish Church

It is, as the Lammermuir Festival’s James Waters pointed out, unusual to see a musician selling their books rather than their recordings at performances. As a hardback is less concealable than a CD, it was also obvious how many were bought, but then Jeremy Denk’s Every Good Boy Does Fine is well worth the read – and “a love story in music lessons” that is tailor-made for his faithful following at the Lammermuir Festival.

By dint of being the star visitor of the event’s return to live operations last year, Denk has swiftly become Lammermuir’s golden boy, and this was the first of five appearances (including a non-playing book-plugging one) in the 2022 programme, two as an orchestral soloist (Brahms on Saturday with the RSNO, Beethoven a week on Monday with the Royal Northern Sinfonia) and one with violinist Maria Wloszczowska, playing Bach.

For the book-buying fans, his opening solo recital was the most personal and idiosyncratic. As he probably says everywhere, his promise to write programme notes had again come to naught (although Lammermuir programme editor David Lee provided another view of the works) so he chose to deliver his thoughts verbally, which is part of the attraction of his appearances. These are a mixture of historical context and musical illumination, and always worth hearing, but his personable delivery and wit are as important – Denk makes his listeners want to open their ears before he plays a note.

He’s some player though, which is the important thing. Opening with Mozart’s A Minor Sonata, K310, here was a reading of the rollercoaster of the composer’s emotions, the register of mood and pitch in constant flux. Perhaps there are pianists with more delicate Mozart, but few with Denk’s passion and commitment – or speed at some points.

The technically-challenging is meat and drink to him, as the full-on pianism of Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, which followed, demonstrated. It’s a huge piece, but not short on humour when the gloomy tolling of Le Gibet is followed by the mischief of the gremlin Scarbo. Denk has a habit of turning to the audience at such moments, the expression of the music written on his face, and sometimes almost with an open-eyed look of surprise that the audience is still there.

The pianist spoke less after the interval, but his choice of programme said more. Concluding with Beethoven’s big Opus 109 Sonata, which references the Baroque keyboard style of Bach in the last movement, it began with a Toccata by the earlier composer, played on the Steinway in an expressive style that Bach could surely never have imagined. Between those two sat the recent American Pianist’s Association competition piece Heartbreaker, by Breaking the Waves composer Missy Mazzoli, and the fiendish Ligeti Etude, The Devil’s Staircase, both demonstrations of the capabilities of a modern grand – in the right hands.

It was show-off stuff, but delivered with something approaching no-sweat New York nonchalance. The bulk of the music was played from memory, but Waters found himself called upon to turn the electronic pages of Denk’s tablet computer for the dense modern works. Plaudits to him for being just as relaxed.

Keith Bruce

Lammermuir: Therese

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St Mary’s, Haddington

There will, inevitably, be those who think otherwise, but the decision to press ahead with Scottish Opera’s Lammermuir Festival performance of lost Massenet opera Therese an hour after the news was announced of the death of the Queen was the correct one. The audience stood for a minute’s silence and listened to a (rather good) playing of the National Anthem by the orchestra before the show, but it was the work itself that turned out to prompt thoughtfulness about the monarch’s legacy.

Of course, as Chinese premier Zhou Enlai is alleged to have said of the French Revolution: “It is too soon to tell”. Massenet and his librettist Jules Claretie, biographer of Moliere and director of the Theatre Francais, were making a similar point in the first decade of the 20th century about the events of the last decade of the 18th in France.

If “Marianne” is the female symbol of the revolution, Therese is a more realistic depiction of French womanhood, caught between loyalty to her Girondist partner Andre Thorel, offspring of a lower-middle-class working man, and memories of her previous lover, Royalist nobleman Armand de Clerval.

Those three are the story, and Scottish Opera’s recent deft form in casting is continued here with Lithuanian mezzo Justine Gringyte ideally suited to the demanding range of the vocal line of the titular heroine, baritone Dingle Yandell looking as well as sounding the part as Andre (were he to consider slumming it in Les Mis, he’d be Jean Valjean), and former Scottish Opera Emerging Artist Shengzhi Ren having a welcome opportunity to show off his powerful but relaxed tenor voice.

Credit should go to the work of the language coach on the production, Florence Daguerre de Hureaux, for what is very fine diction of the text by all three – outstanding in Yandell’s case – as well as from everyone on stage, including the smaller roles and compact men’s chorus.

There are also surtitles, and that clarity (as the well-named librettist would surely concur) is important, because the background debate of ideas is as crucial as the love triangle onstage.

Yandell’s early aria, and duet with Gringyte, declares that “we must love to live” – condemning revolutionary hate, despite his loyalty to the cause – while Gringyte’s Act 2 opener of longing for the open meadows of rural France is a recognition of the values of the ancien regime in the face of the Terror outside the Paris apartment in which she – and, secretly, Ren’s Armand – are holed up.

Idealists in their own way, Massenet and Claritie are arguing, during La Belle Epoque, for pragmatism instead of extremism – an accommodation of the strengths of France’s Royalist past within the egalitarianism of the Third Republic.

The composer – a tunesmith and orchestrator of proven skill, whose work we hear too little of and whose vast catalogue is scarcely covered in most opera guides – provides a sumptuous score to this debate. That early baritone aria comes with lovely pealing winds and the most captivating orchestral scoring accompanies the romantic memories of both male characters in Act 1.

The music does the work again in the move to Paris from the chateau near Versailles at the opening of Act 2, but staff director Roxana Haines contributes with eloquent simplicity in the staging, replacing the often-sung-about stone bench in the chateau garden with a covetable chaise (courte, rather than longue). The costuming is similarly stylish and pithily expressive, Gringytye elegant in black, blue and mauve, the chorus of revolutionaries in caps, Andre sporting the inevitable neckerchief, and Armand, amusingly, an aristocratic Barbour coat.

The sightlines may not be ideal in St Mary’s but the acoustic is wonderful, and guest conductor Alexandra Cravero, who is immersed in this repertoire and had the orchestra playing superbly, produced a balance that was ideal, every detail of the music emerging with clarity and the singers always perfectly audible.

Keith Bruce

Repeated at Perth Concert Hall tomorrow, Saturday September 10, at 7.30pm

Pictures by Sally Jubb

Simply the Best

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Choir supremo Christopher Bell tells KEN WALTON about the exciting new NYCOS initiative he’s launching at the Lammermuir Festival 

No sooner has the buzz of the Edinburgh International Festival dissipated than the Lammermuir Festival bursts into action with a programme of equal calibre. From 8-19 September all the big Classical Music action is in East Lothian, opening on Thursday with the compelling pianism of Jeremy Denk in Dunbar, and an operatic rarity – Massenet’s Thérèse – courtesy of Scottish Opera in St Mary’s Church, Haddington.

Elsewhere over the next 12 days regular morning coffee concerts include a series of song recitals by various star vocalists partnered with pianist Malcom Martineau; the chamber music programme ranges from string quartets Quatuor Mosaïques and Quatuor Agate to such invigorating couplings as cellist Laura van der Heijden and pianist Tom Poster; larger scale events extend from Bach cantata performances by the Marian Consort and Spiritato to orchestra programmes by the RSNO, SCO, Royal Northern Sinfonia, and the BBC SSO.

Among this cornucopia of delights, however, there’s one event that deserves special mention. It’s at Loretto School Chapel this Sunday (11 Sep), and it might take a second glance at the billing to appreciate that this isn’t just by any old National Youth Choir of Scotland (NYCOS) ensemble, but a brand new initiative that its artistic director Christopher Bell expects will personify excellence. Bell makes no apology for the selectivity of its 24 members. “They have to be at the top of their game to be chosen,” he says.

This is NYCOS’ “First XV”, singers taken from the current flagship National Youth Choir who are deemed the star players. Bell recognises that such a strategy goes against the inclusive brigade who’s view is you shouldn’t be leaving people out. “I’m quite surprised that 25 years on from founding NYCOS I’m still making the argument that to get the vey best results you have to have the very best singers,” he says. 

His methods are tried and tested. The current lead ensembles – which also include the National Girls and National Boys Choirs – have performed at the highest level, from the BBC Proms and Edinburgh Festival to highly-acclaimed appearances in the USA. They have even been the choir of choice for Sir John Eliot Gardner and his Orchestra Révolutionnaire et Romantique. 

To get them to that level, Bell’s preferred model is pyramidal. At its base are the 14 regional choirs that eventually feed the national ones. But there are also parallel strands that address inclusivity. “Everybody at school should experience singing, which is why we run a programme of general access educational work where we’ll do singing days and teach teachers through workshops. Alongside that there’s the progressively-structured choir activity. 

“But it’s like when a school wants a winning football team. Yes, everyone’s done PE, but you want the players that will get the ball in the net. When it comes to choosing a choir, particularly when it’s outside school, you want the best singers.”

One of the express aims of the new Chamber Choir is to tackle some of the most testing and varied repertoire. Sunday’s recital will include Britten’s slightly mad cantata Rejoice in the Lamb, James MacMillan’s Culham Motets and Jonathan Dove’s Passing of the Year. “Jonathan’s piece is really brilliant, very thoughtful, but joyful too,” he explains. “It’s about the arc of the year expressing the arc of life in symbolic terms. The funeral march near the end will break your heart.”

For this, Bell has been very specific in the voices he has recruited. They have to suit the repertoire of a given programme. “But it will be horses for courses,” he adds. “”It won’t necessarily be the same 24 people all the time. If we decide to do a more operatic programme, we choose the right voices. For a more churchy programme, a kind of Tenebrae meets Tallis Scholars, again we choose the best voices for the job. I even reserve the right, if there isn’t the right level within the group, to bring some NYCOS alumni back to ensure it’s of a decent level.”

“There’s capacity for the new choir to do really hard music, for us to make recordings of very different repertoire. This concert is the official launch of that idea: an idea we put to the Leverhulme Trust who came up with a very nice amount of money, which means that for the next three years we will be able to do it.”

The Chamber Choir sneaked in a soft launch recently in St Andrews and will do the same in Helensburgh this Saturday. But Sunday is the big moment when Bell introduces his newest choral initiative to a discriminating Lammermuir Festival audience. Thereafter it has a Scottish tour planned and recordings that include one for the BBC. “What we are not looking to do is crash in on already existing ensembles,” Bell stresses. “We’re looking to find maybe a niche, one that gives the really experienced NYCOS singers a chance to do yet more detailed and high level work, and not to stand on anyone’s toes!”. 

The new NYCOS Chamber Choir launches at the Lammermuir Festival on 11 Sep (3pm) in Loretto School Chapel, Musselburgh. The Festival runs in venues around East Lothian from 8-19 Sep. Full details on www.lammermuirfestival.co.uk

New paths for Dunedin

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The foundation stones are still firmly in place, but following its celebration of 25 years in the business of quality music-making, Dunedin Consort announces a 2022/23 season that sees it introducing new faces and welcoming familiar ones in new roles, forging new partnerships, and taking up residence in a New Town forty-odd miles from the one in Scotland’s capital.

Those building blocks first, which begin with an Edinburgh Festival concert in the Queen’s Hall, directed by John Butt and featuring the voice of Associate Director Nicholas Mulroy. The tenor will be in charge of the choral tour next May, which is a programme of Marian music, early and modern, that visits Aberdeen, Perth, Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Butt also directs the group’s December Messiah performances in Glasgow, Lanark and Edinburgh, and an Easter outing for Bach’s Matthew Passion in Edinburgh and Glasgow with Andrew Tortise the Evangelist and Neal Davies as Christus. Wigmore Hall concerts of music for Christmas and New Year are also under the baton of the Artistic Director.

Of the new directions, a three-year partnership with the RSNO has already been revealed. It begins in October with Elim Chan conducting side-by-side concerts in Edinburgh and Glasgow that bracket soloist Jorg Widmann’s concerto Echo-Fragment with Haydn and Beethoven.

There’s more Haydn in February when Peter Whelan directs concerts of three early symphonies and CPE Bach’s Cello Concerto in A, with Jonathan Manson as soloist. Performances in Perth, Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Benjamin Bayl is guest director for an all-Handel programme in March with Nardus Williams the soprano soloist, and in June the solo female voice is featured again in what are thought to be the first ever UK performances of the cantatas of seventeenth century composer Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre.

With its continuing Bridging the Gap initiative providing a step on to the career ladder for young singers, Dunedin is now joining forces B’Rock Orchestra and Concerto Copenhagen to offer similar mentoring for instrumentalists in a new scheme entitled Intrada. The ensemble’s other outreach initiatives are joined by a new partnership at Cumbernauld’s Theatre’s new home, Lanternhouse, with family concerts, cinema screenings, open rehearsals and events for children all on the bill.

After the Edinburgh Festival, the season opens with Dunedin’s biggest venture of the year, performing Mozart’s C Minor Mass in a new completion by Clemens Kemme at Lammermuir Festival, in Perth Concert Hall and in Saffron Walden, as well as recording the work for a Linn label release. John Butt directs and Lucy Crowe, Anna Dennis, Benjamin Hulett and Robert Davies are the soloists.

Full details at dunedin-consort.org.uk

Portait of Nardus Williams by Bertie Watson

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Scottish Opera fighting fit

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Alex Reedijk and Stuart Stratford tell Keith Bruce about the company’s new season

Recognising the nation’s collective slow recovery after Covid, Scottish Opera’s General Director Alex Reedijk emphasised the rude health of his company, in its 60th anniversary year, when he launched its first full season following the pandemic.

His words were peppered with metaphors from the gym, as he talked of “new muscles” built during the health emergency that bring confidence to work presented outside conventional theatres, and of ScotOp being happy to undertake the “heavy lifting” in developing new productions on which other companies are happy to come aboard as co-producers.

The two shows he was referring to are the boldest projects on the new slate of work, which opens with the current revival of Don Giovanni in Sir Thomas Allen’s 2013 production, touring to Inverness, Edinburgh and Aberdeen after the Glasgow performances.

It is followed in August by Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, performed in a specially-constructed tented venue behind the company’s production studios in Glasgow’s Edington Street, on a space now styled “New Rotterdam Wharf”. The production’s precursor in the company’s repertoire is the promenade staging of Pagliacci in Paisley in July 2018 rather than either of the Edington Street car-park operas, La boheme and Falstaff, it mounted while theatres were closed.

“We are using what we’ve learned about the robustness of the art form, on a piece that occupies a really important place in the life of Scottish Opera,” said Reedijk.

The “Scottish Opera version” is regarded as the go-to score of Candide. It was made in the 1980s with the approval of the composer, who was present in Glasgow, by his student John Mauceri, the company’s music director at the time.

“It is about displaced people and we are working with the Maryhill Integration Network to recruit members of the community chorus, which will team 80 volunteers with 20 professional singers,” added current music director Stuart Stratford.

Stratford has plenty of experience in this type of work, having worked with director Graham Vick in Birmingham Opera and with Tete-a-Tete Opera. Freed from the restrictions of Covid regulations, the potential audience for each of Candide’s half-dozen performances will still be limited to 400, that being the number that Vick demonstrated could reasonably be shepherded and stewarded to each of the performing stages without slowing the action.

“I loved working with Graham Vick on those shows,” said Stratford, “and hopefully there are people who will feel able to come to something that is well-ventilated and semi-outdoors who might still have misgivings about visiting a theatre.”

Reedijk has plans to have a performance filmed, although no specific platform is signed up to broadcast it. That was a tactic the company used for the recent production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers, recently transmitted on BBC Four and watched by over a quarter of a million people around the world.

November sees Scottish Opera back in the Theatre Royal and Festival Theatre with what will be the UK’s first staged production of Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar.

“It premiered in 2003, and is a series of reflections on the life of Federico Garcia Lorca,” said Stratford. “It has been done in static way as an oratorio in London, but the music is unbelievably dramatic.”

With Latin-American percussion in the pit and flamenco dancers on the stage, choreographer Deborah Colker will direct a show that has been developed in partnership with Opera Ventures, who were also involved in Greek in 2017 and Breaking the Waves in 2019.

“Those shows have made possible co-production partnerships with New York’s Metropolitan Opera and Detroit Opera as well as with Welsh National Opera,” said Reedijk.

Like much of the season Scottish Opera can now unveil, Ainadamar was in the works before the pandemic.

“The Gondoliers was delayed because of Covid, and the opening for A Midsummer Night’s Dream was stopped because of it. Ainadamar we had been cooking up with Opera Ventures, and Il Trittico we’d been talking about with David McVicar since before the lockdown,” said Reedijk.

The Puccini triple-bill will reach the Scottish stage in March, before which Sir David McVicar’s last two Scottish Opera productions will have opened in Santa Fe (Falstaff) and Los Angeles (Pelleas et Melisande).

Also a co-production with WNO, Il trittico has never been staged in its entirety in Scottish Opera’s 60 years, nor has McVicar previously directed it. Il tabarro (The Cloak), Suor Angelica (Sister Angelica) and the comic Gianni Schicchi are distinct and contrasting stories, but McVicar is adopting an ensemble approach with a cast that includes company stalwarts Roland Wood, Sinead Campbell-Wallace and Karen Cargill and shared elements in the set design by Charles Edwards.

With a dinner-length interval before the concluding tale of the trilogy, Scottish Opera is selling Il trittico as an epic night out, a visual theatrical feast and a big work out for the orchestra. As with all but the last of the staged productions in the new season, Stratford is conducting.

For that final show in May 2023, Australian-Chinese conductor Dane Lam is on the podium for Bizet’s Carmen. Sung in English, it will be directed by John Fulljames, director of the much-lauded 2020 staging of John Adams’ Nixon in China, with that show’s Madame Mao, Korean soprano Hye-Houn Lee, in the cast, and Justina Gringyte in the title role, as well as parts for four of the company’s current Emerging Artists: Zoe Drummond, Lea Shaw, Osian Wyn Bowen, and Colin Murray.

“Coming out of Covid we wanted to demonstrate ambition,” said Reedijk. “So there is work that we know audiences will be interested in like Carmen and Don Giovanni, but also something of the scale of Trittico, the artistic diversity of Ainadamar, and the curiosity of Candide for people to respond to.”

Nor is that the full story of course. Already announced are new dates for the company’s travelling outdoor shows, Pop-Up Opera, and two tours of Opera Highlights to community halls across Scotland. Building on the success of the Puccini Collection concert in Dundee’s Caird Hall, which incorporated long scenes from the composer’s operas in concert, The Verdi Collection will play in Aberdeen, Inverness, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Stratford will direct the Orchestra of Scottish Opera and sections of Otello, Don Carlos and La Forza del Destino will feature.

There will also be a staged concert performance of Massenet rarity Therese at East Lothian’s Lammermuir Festival and in Perth Concert Hall in September, directed by Roxana Haines with Estonian Anu Tali conducting. Haines also directs the Scottish Opera Young Company’s summer show, Rubble, composed by Gareth Williams with a libretto by Johnny McKnight, and Young Company Artistic Director Chris Gray conducting. And Gray MDs a touring revival of the Lliam Paterson’s opera for babies, BambinO, with Charlotte Hoather and Samuel Pantcheff.

All of which means that Scottish Opera will more than achieve the aim of its CEO that it visits 60 places in Scotland to mark that anniversary year. “We are in good order, and in good health,” said Reedijk.

General booking for Scottish Opera’s new season opens on Tuesday, May 31. More information is available at scottishopera.org.uk.

Picture: Scottish Opera’s 1988 production of Candide

Lammermuir Festival: SCO/Denk

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St Mary’s, Haddington

Only a couple of years separate Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 14 and No. 23, but there can be few better illustrations of the development of his composition. As pianist Jeremy Denk put it in his introductory remarks to the closing concert of this year’s Lammermuir Festival, and his residency in East Lothian, the earlier work is one of by “the mad scientist in his laboratory”, while the A Major is the work of the mature talent who was also writing The Magic Flute.

My guess is that Denk and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra devoted more of their rehearsal time to the less-performed work. The E-flat Major was a certainly played by the composer, but it was the first of two written for his talented pupil Barbara von Ployer, “Babette”, the daughter of a Viennese councillor. With just 14 strings and minor roles for pairs of horns and oboes, this performance was historically-informed in its detail and precision-honed in its balance, particularly in the Andantino second movement. With his back to the audience and the lid off the Steinway, around which the players were assembled, Denk was a hands-on director of the music here, which meant that we were denied his charismatic facial expressions, now directed to them, and especially first violin Stephanie Gonley.

This mix of spare ingredients was marginally less successful in the more familiar work where bassoons, clarinets and a flute are added and the reverberant acoustic of the kirk meant things were less distinct. Denk treated his first movement cadenza less as a solo than as piece of plot exposition on the road to the Adagio, where he shared one of Mozart’s best tunes with the clarinet of Maximiliano Martin. By the finale it was clear that this was a piece of larger conception in every department but it lacked some of the finesse of the programme’s opener.

Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No 12 in E Major was a well-chosen partner to the concertos, and Gonley guided her colleagues expertly through a work that was breaking new ground twenty years earlier, in both its key and a central movement with bold rhythms and modulations. The lower strings had more of a voice here, and the SCO’s leader was always in firm control of the dynamics in the space.

Keith Bruce

pictured: Stephanie Gonley

Lammermuir: Navarra Quartet

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Dunbar Parish Church

The Navarra Quartet like to do things their own way. At least that was the impression taken from the second of their two appearances at this year’s Lammermuir Festival, in which they teamed up with BBC SSO principal viola Scott Dickinson for Dvorak’s “American” String Quintet, but not before marking their pitch big time in Mozart’s String Quartet No 16 in E-flat.

The latter was subjected to a show of bravado bordering on assault. It was, I am sure, entirely well-meaning, given the unsettling questioning and ambiguities which Mozart piles into his intriguing score. But in over-egging these – as in the lurching semitone slides that veered towards parody – what was perhaps intended as illuminating exaggeration transmitted more as mischief.

Whether the resulting instability of tuning and confusion of pulse was symptomatic is a moot question. It was a brave and challenging approach, but one that ultimately shot itself in the foot. 

Before the Dvorak, Ivan Moseley’s Ah Robin, which takes 16th century composer William Cornysh’s original song and puts it through a 21st century wringer, transforming it – rather beguilingly – out of all recognition, afforded a moment for recovery. Moseley’s ingenious transformations, ending in a whimsical puff of smoke, sat perfectly with the Navarra’s gauche demeanour. 

And it laid the ground for an easier acceptance of their Dvorak, which was again subject to spontaneous bursts of eccentricity, but this time in a piece that could easily support it. The finest moments were towards the end, the gorgeous sonorities of the two violas and cello in the Larghetto variations, and the irresistible thrills of the final Allegro giusto. 

The encore brought yet another unconventional touch, the haunting chromatic non sequiturs of the 16th century reactionary Carlo Gesualdo recast for string quintet. It was a rare treat, utterly surreal and a far stronger case for the Navarra’s pugnacious individualism than the Mozart they began with.

Ken Walton

Lammermuir: BBC SSO/Whelan

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St Mary’s Church, Haddington

The former SCO principal bassoonist Peter Whelan is forging a formidable reputation as a conductor, not just with his own group Ensemble Marsyas, but with a growing number of orchestras that recognise the spark he brings to the podium. The coming season adds to his conquests a Vivaldi opera the Royal Opera House and a guest appearance in Finland with the Lahti Symphony Orchestra.

On Saturday, Whelan took charge of the BBC SSO in a programme that reinforced his natural affinity with the clinical panache of the Classical symphony and the ultra-fine sensitivity of Benjamin Britten.

He began with Haydn, and the joyous adventuring of the 1760s’ Symphony No 35 in B flat. It features the composer in a mood of relaxed excitability, and in this performance, as rhythmically taut as it was expressively supple, Whelan allowed its myriad surprises to surface gleefully within a framework of logic and symmetry. 

The SSO horns made light work of Haydn’s stratospheric demands. The strings evoked a warmth that only once – in the exposed violin melodies of the Andante – seemed to waver, perhaps due to the players’ continued social distancing. The curt ending, a kind of “that’s all folks” dismissal, was entirely in keeping with the tempered humour Whelan elicited from its four movements.

Britten’s 1958 Nocturne for tenor and small orchestra, written as a companion piece to the more familiar Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings and dedicated to Alma Mahler, transported us into a giddy world of dreams as expressed through selected texts from Shelley, Coleridge, Middleton, Wordsworth, Owen, Keats and Shakespeare. 

Tenor Joshua Ellicott expressed Britten’s continuous sequence exquisitely and intimately, the penetrating purity of his voice capable of harnessing intense passion as well as serene mysticism, and everything in between. The result was a performance of compelling poeticism and powerfully controlled tension, further enhanced by the strings’ gossamer precision and evocative wind solos.

Mozart’s popular Symphony No 40, cheeriness in a minor key, gave a final pleasing symmetry to this programme. It was fast and fearless, with just an occasional blurring of the edges in these generous ecclesiastical acoustics. As in the Haydn, Whelan revealed a willingness to hand much of the responsibility to the players, economic in his gestures, but always at hand to bring down a decisive beat and keep the outer skin firmly in place. 

There was real chemistry in this performance. The SSO should further this conductor relationship.

Ken Walton

Lammermuir: Jeremy Denk

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Dunbar Parish Church

Had Jeremy Denk’s second solo recital as artist-in-residence at this year’s Lammermuir Festival consisted solely of Bach’s Partita No 5 in G Major and Beethoven’s remarkable final piano sonata, the Opus 111 in C Minor, few would have complained.

Both works are, in their very different ways, explorations of the nature of time. Denk strode on to the platform and was straight down to business with the Bach, although piano-playing for him is clearly more on the “pleasure” side of the equation – and he is eager to share the joy. His internal metronome is calibrated precisely enough that he can ease the strict tempo as the work unfolds and allow a little elasticity in movements that may be based on dance rhythms but were never intended for dancing.

The Beethoven, on the other hand, was eloquently introduced, its contrasting movements, in the pianist’s phrase, “a vision of one thing, and its antidote”, a remembrance of the past and a picture of the future so bold that there was nothing more the composer could say in this form. Denk gave the work an unforgettable probing performance, constantly moving with the fluid currents of the writing with an obvious reluctance to give in to any obvious “hook” in mere repetition.

However, it was what came between these two masterworks that elevated the concert to classic status. The suite of four pieces that Denk had assembled, in the wake of last year’s Black Lives Matter protests around the globe, began with London-born Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s treatment of the African-American tune They will not lend me a child and culminated in Frederic Rzewski’s Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues from the late 1970s. It is an astonishing piece of post-minimalist expressionism that uses the full power of a grand piano in its motorik exploration of the dignity of labour as well as its trials.

The Coleridge-Taylor was followed by another remarkable work in “Blind Tom” Wiggins’s The Battle of Manassas, which re-creates, with samples and dialogue, an event in the American Civil War and, while more of a music-hall turn, is only slightly less creative in the use of the instrument, yet was written a full century before.

The cacophony of the battlefield was still dying away when Denk segued into Heliotrope Bouquet by Scott Joplin and Louis Chauvin, the latter being a black ragtime composer who has the dubious honour of beating bluesman Robert Johnson to membership of the “27 Club” by 30 years, and Jimi Hendrix by more than another 30.

The earlier works were all effectively a pathway to the Rzewski, whose work is surely now ripe for reappraisal following his death at the end of June this year, at 83. Denk’s timely and thoughtful placing of it here was the ideal start.

Keith Bruce

Lammermuir: Così fan tutte

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St Mary’s Church, Haddington

As artistic life opens up and opera makes its gradual stage comeback, it’s vitally important to witness such a predominance of youth in Scottish Opera’s production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte, which received its live premiere at this year’s Lammermuir Festival. Roxana Haines’ ballsy new production – created initially for last December’s filmed version – lends itself well to such bright young things and the refreshing open-mindedness that comes as a consequence.  

They are what makes a scintillating success of this opera, despite the convoluted nonsense that is its plot, and despite the fact that transferring Haines’ clever production ideas for the filmed format to live stage diminishes to an extent its previous edge. Rationalising the unlikely love entanglements  as a modern-day reality TV show was, in the original media concept, a convincing hit. In the vastness of St Mary’s Church, and without the camera tricks to reinforce the message, its impact seemed diluted, at least visually.

The positive consequence was the immediacy of the performance. Here were singers responding as much to the audience’s close presence, its spontaneous applause, as to Mozart’s theatrical score. It helped that they were out front as first point of visual contact, the orchestra and chorus under music director Stuart Stratford stretching far into the darkened distance behind. Minimal props on a raised stage sharpened the central focus.

Rarely will you find a more integrated team for Così than this one, eliciting a spontaneous camaraderie that informed every action and reaction, but equally triumphed in the opera’s memorable ensemble numbers. But here was individuality too, each character richly coloured with his or her own demeanour and personality. 

Margo Arsane (Dorabella) and Charlie Drummond (Fiordiligi) played the sisters like two sides of the same coin, Arsane’s juicy flippancy and vocal delicacy an affectionate contrast to the glowing maturity of Drummond’s wholesomely versatile soprano. The tender, passionate tenor of Shengzhi Ren (Ferrando) proved the perfect foil to Arthur Bruce’s fast-acting Guglielmo, his rich lyrical baritone finding natural resonance in the church acoustics.

The playmakers – Michael Mofidian as the tricksy Don Alfonso (the game show host in Haines’ production) and the characterful Catriona Hewitson as the colluding Despina – were an artful pairing. 

If there was an inevitable sense of distance from the orchestra and chorus, Stratford’s punchy direction captured the lively spirit of the piece, but also accommodated its many poised and beautiful moments.

Ken Walton

Lammermuir: An Italian songbook

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The Brunton, Musselburgh

Renaissance man Jeremy Sams is as likely to be found working in the West End as at Garsington or Grange Park Opera, and while his soundtracks feature on works for the large and small screen as well as the stage, his translations of Italian libretto and, more recently, German Lieder, have done more to make music accessible than any number of arts council initiatives.

In the context of his vast back catalogue, this brilliant little show looks like the sort of thing he might knock off in an afternoon, but I am sure that its deceptive breeziness masks a vast amount of work. It is also a rather larger show than it appears, featuring five developed roles for five fine singers with finely-honed acting skills, and a demanding shift for the pianist (co-creator of the show, Christopher Glynn).

Taking its cue from Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte – which Lammermuir had happily featured in a compact Scottish Opera version a few days previously – this staging of Hugo Wolf’s combination of German and Italian influences in something that is not a million miles from the stories of Garrison Keillor, Armistead Maupin or The Archers, is rather more carefully plotted than the original. Crucially, however, Sams and Glynn (and co-director Louise Shepherd for this staging) do not labour either the parallels with Da Ponte’s tale of fickle lovers or their own narrative. The structure is there – and the performers have great fun with it – but the music is never in second place.

This cast, which tours the show to Liverpool, Bristol and London, has tenors Robert Murray and James Wray teamed with Kathryn Rudge and Rowan Pierce, and baritone Roderick Williams as the notebook-wielding Don Alfonso figure. He’s a manipulative rather than malevolent figure, but still destined to come a cropper, and the playfulness with such stereotypes also embraces the cynical soprano and tempestuous mezzo while the chaps juggled “innocent” and “hapless”. There was no social distancing on stage, but the performers had great fun with their characters’ gaps of understanding.

All five sang superbly, relishing the intimacy of the occasion with a huge range of dynamics, and making the most of Sams’ delicious wordplay, which fully realises the humour of Wolfe and his librettist Paul Heyse as well as adding a good deal of wit of his own.

There have, perhaps, been many similar shows, from Ned Sherrin’s Side by Side by Sondheim through to the format Graham Vick invented for Scottish Opera to reach remote parts of Scotland, which, as Scottish Opera Highlights, opens in its umpteenth touring incarnation this week, but few have been as slick and clever as this one.

Keith Bruce

Pictured: Rowan Pierce

Lammermuir: Jeremy Denk

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Dunbar Parish Church

Having long been a fan of New York-based pianist Jeremy Denk’s thoughtful recordings for the Nonesuch label, and learning only recently that I had missed three chances over the past decade to see him perform a mere 30 miles from my home, his arrival as artist-in-residence at this year’s Lammermuir Festival is a particular delight.

It turns out that Denk, who is becoming as noted a wordsmith as he is a musician, is a wonderfully characterful performer. His opening concert, of Book One of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, may technically have been his first public performance of the work from memory, but his opening remarks made clear that these are pieces he has known since childhood. The parallel he drew between his own stern father over-seeing his keyboard practice and Papa Bach’s position as the architect of Western music may have been personal, but it perfectly set up his playing of what are some of the best-known opening bars of music in the canon. For those whose first re-acquaintance with live music this was, they could not fail to be especially moving.

Playing this music is also a perfect match for the memoir of music lessons and teachers that Denk has been working on. Even listeners much less musically-literate than him can hear in Bach’s progression through the notated keys, and in playing that progressed from intimate to expansive over the course of the evening, the building blocks of composition. For the young pianist the Preludes and Fugues develop mental agility as much as manual dexterity as themes swap between the hands, or span both. It is like listening to Lego in the hands of a master-builder.

And if that suggests a certain playfulness in Denk’s approach, that is exactly correct. He found intimations of the cartoon music of Raymond Scott and Carl Stalling at points, as well as reminders that pianists from Jacques Loussier to Brad Mehldau have found jazz inspiration in Bach’s works.

More than that, and although he is far from being a flamboyant performer, Denk is apt to cast a knowing glance at the audience to be sure we are not missing a little musical joke, and his facial expressions are often in limpid contrast to the frenetic fingering going on. Technically brilliant, his playing is never “clinical”, as the sports-reporting cliché would have it, with an occasional buzzing string or foot stomp all part of the evening.

Having waited a while to see him live, the other pianist Denk occasionally brought to mind was the late Dudley Moore, who may be better known for his comedy and films, but was a damned fine jazz piano-player. In a very similar way, Denk is clearly entirely in his element at the keyboard.

Keith Bruce

Think Denk

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Pianist Jeremy Denk talks words and music with Keith Bruce on the eve of his residency at the Lammermuir Festival.

Pianist Jeremy Denk has just had a negative Covid test and is cleared to fly to Scotland when I connect via Zoom to his New York apartment. He has also survived, unscathed, the storm and flooding that recently hit the city. “I stayed in that night and shut the windows, in a very New Yorker fashion,” he deadpans.

Denk is artist-in-residence at this year’s Lammermuir Festival, giving four concerts that cover the range of his musical practice, from solo Bach (The Well-Tempered Clavier) and a more varied solo recital, to chamber music with violinist Maria Wloszczowska and members of the SCO and the festival’s concluding concert with the full orchestra, playing two Mozart concertos.

Like British pianist Stephen Hough, however, Denk’s artistic life also embraces writing, which began as a blog, “Think Denk”, and will soon see the publication of a memoir that expands on a celebrated article about his piano teachers for New Yorker magazine.

That meant he was not idle when the worldwide spread of the coronavirus brought the music industry to a standstill.

“I used it as a work retreat. I had this book that I was supposed to finish, so I used a fair amount of the early pandemic to write and I was lucky to have that outlet, which was all-consuming for a while. 

“I also learned a bunch of newish pieces and I was working on The Well-Tempered Clavier. I did a video version of that earlier this year and it is a piece that is still in that nice honeymoon phase – every day it is different. I played it twice before the pandemic started, both with the music, but this will be the first time I play it from memory.”

The pianist is delighted that his brief for Lammermuir was simply to do things that he enjoys doing. Playing Mozart concertos is one of those, the two that feature in the East Lothian festival coming just days after the release of a different pair on his latest recording for the Nonesuch label.

“Mozart concertos work much better for me when they feel like chamber music and you get to talk to the winds, and sympathise with them, and bring the contact closer.

“One of the problems is often they are sitting way back on the stage, when they are really proxy opera characters, if you think of Mozart himself as at the piano. He often wants to cede the stage to the oboe or the rapscallion bassoon, and when I rehearse with an orchestra I look for the freedom to find that.”

Piano Concerto No 23, which will close Lammermuir at St Mary’s Parish Church in Haddington, has been very much on Denk’s mind. 

“In my book I was writing about that A major K488, which was the first Mozart concerto I learned when I was 12 years old, so it has a Proustian element for me.

“The piece for the New Yorker had lots of gaps and missed out lots of teachers who helped me. I was a clueless kid; I went to college a little young and I had to do a lot of growing up in a very short time. During the pandemic I found I could access those memories more directly than in the past.

“So it goes from my first musical memories with my father and the neighbourhood piano teacher, aged five, through to my New York debut when I was 26.”

What, I wonder, had prompted the urge to commit those memories to publication?

“Piano players spend a lot of time on their own,” he suggests, “so we have a lot of thoughts we have to unburden. I am extremely grateful to my teachers and I often feel regretful that I don’t follow their advice as closely as I should, so it didn’t take any particular prompting.

“And I have always been a looker-backer; even when I was six years old I had a premature nostalgic streak. Books were always my great refuge, along with the piano, so writing is a very natural outlet. Even if I watch more Netflix than I read now, I still wish it wasn’t so!”

Denk writes very eloquently indeed about music, and the new album, recorded with Minnesota’s St Paul Chamber Orchestra, has a fine booklet note, especially on Concerto No 25 in C Major, K503.

“The C Major is one of Mozart’s greatest achievements, it has this weird ecstasy which is unlike any other Mozart piece,” he tells me. “It is a love letter to harmony. Mozart has found two elements of beauty in the world of harmony, the seventh chord and the instability between major and minor, and he explores them in such profusion. I like obsessive pieces and that is an obsessive piece.”

So too, says Denk, is Beethoven’s final Piano Sonata, Opus 111, also in C major, which will conclude the pianist’s third concert in Dunbar Parish Church, and which was on a Nonesuch release in 2012, bracketed, brilliantly, by Ligeti Piano Etudes.

“It takes a rhythmic principle and adds a weird asymmetry. There is an element of chaos theory there that is also obsessive. Beethoven was obsessed by reinventing rhythm by destroying it. Time refuses to settle, and this continuing reinvention of time was what Beethoven was after in his later years.”

That remarkable work ends a recital that begins with a Bach Partita but takes a more modern turn in the works between.

“That suite of pieces was inspired by racial protests of last summer. Mostly, the other pieces talk to the Rzewski’s Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, which is a very powerful musical translation of an incidence of American injustice. The Blind Tom Wiggins is an account of a Confederate victory during the Civil War, and is extremely violent, while the others are more lyrical.”

If there is a narrative there, then that is only indicative of how Denk’s mind works, both in considering his own life and the music he performs, as the latest chapter of his career plays out.

“Apart from a few scattered things, I have been doing more teaching than playing this summer, and this will be my first trip overseas. My experience of Scotland is very limited so this time I hope to immerse myself, although I am a very cautious person by nature so I will be keeping my distance! But I am so thrilled to be performing for people again.”

Jeremy Denk appears at Dunbar Parish Church on September 10, 14 and 16, and St Mary’s, Haddington on September 20. lammermuirfestival.co.uk

Mozart Piano Concertos by Jeremy Denk and the St Paul Chamber Orchestra is released by Nonesuch on September 17.