Tag Archives: Lammermuir Festival

Echoes in Stone and Brass |100 Tubas at Amisfield

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Glasgow Cathedral/Amisfield Walled Garden

Substantially occasioned by the passing of John Wallace, inspirational trumpeter and former principal of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, 2026 has been a busy year for fans of music for brass. Lammermuir Festival’s contribution to his remembrance was exactly the sort of ambitiously mad event he would have taken part in himself.

The Walled Garden of the Amisfield estate at Haddington is vast, dates back to the 18th century and is now tended by an army of volunteers. It was the venue for this year’s Lammermuir project by Red Note Ensemble, previously responsible for music beneath the wings of the Concorde in the aircraft museum at East Fortune.

Perhaps there was a generous attitude to recruitment for 100 Tubas at Amisfield, but not far off that total of instruments was achieved, most of them tuba-shaped if not sized, and capable of producing a similar sound. The score they tackled was Anthony Braxton’s Composition No 19, written – for 100 Tubas – in the 1970s but, perhaps understandably, unheard until it was played in New York City two decades ago.

Like that one, this was a promenade performance, the audience bussed-in from central Haddington and then free to wander within the garden walls. On arrival, a rainbow enlivened the ever-present threat of rain which never materialised, but a less windy day would probably have allowed the sound to carry and bounce off the high walls more often than such echoes were detectable.

The tubas, sousaphones and smaller horns were deployed in four groups, each with their own conductor, moving about the garden. Repeating figures were swapped around the space, and there was the freedom, fairly strictly delineated, for some improvisation – embraced with more enthusiasm by some players than others.

Mostly the score is about ensemble sound, and the topography of the garden – which includes orchards, potagers, and a maze, as well as avenues of flowers – meant that the environment played an important role in how the ensembles sounded. Nonetheless, it might have been a very samey hour of music had the producers not added a quartet of trumpets, whose clarion calls separated the tuba excursions, with music by Benjamin Britten and Lewis Murphy on their stands.

100 Tubas at Amisfield convened on the penultimate day of Lammermuir, and two days earlier this year’s Glasgow Cathedral Festival commenced with Echoes in Stone and Brass, curated by the RSNO’s principal trombone Davur Juul Magnussen

To an extent Magnussen was also emcee of that hour of music in the nave of the Cathedral, his solo improvisation opening the sequence and also possibly – but very subtly – signalling its ending, but the designation “curator” was quite specific. This programme was a collective effort, and that was its great strength.

Although that beginning was one of a series of six “improvisations” through the programme, some were far from as free as jazz players would understand the term, the ten-strong Glasgow Cathedral Choir, for example, working with music written by Ailie Robertson and to a defined, if organic, structure.

Between those were a selection of specific compositions, two – on which Magnussen was joined by fellow RSNO trombonist Cillian O Ceallachain and the choir – originally commissioned for Nordic Music Days 2024 and composed by Drew Hammond (who added some organ playing) and Claire McCue, and two from the repertoire of the Rookh Quartet, playing Jan Garbarek on Wagner tubas, and Allisson Kruusmaa on French horns.

The sonic skills of Sam McErlean, contributing live electronics as well as the superb ambient mix in the space, were central to another pair of pieces, The Heavier it Rocks by Sofia Kiviniemi and the rendition of the Seikilos Epitaph, a very early piece of musical notation engraved on a pillar in ancient Greece.

Andrew Forbes, Director of Music at the cathedral, also played some organ and conducted the more formal choir music, while the closing commission, Things Must Pass by Neil Tomas Smith, added more brass from the Conservatoire, RSNO and The Cooperation Band. The reverberation with this sanctuary’s ancient walls launched the festival as only those instruments really can.

Keith Bruce

Pictures by Stuart Armitt (Amisfield) and Campbell Parker (Cathedral)

Lammermuir: The Diary of One Who Disappeared

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Dirleton Kirk

In the first phase of the Covid pandemic in 2020, when all gatherings were prohibited, Scottish Opera set the pace with its response to the emergency, and its contribution to a necessarily online version of that year’s Lammermuir Festival was a staging of Janacek’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared, filmed at the Theatre Royal with tenor Ed Lyon in the central role.

The history of this niche work at Lammermuir acquired another fascinating chapter this year when Nicky Spence stepped in to perform the song cycle at Dirleton Kirk, replacing Joshua Ellicott and hot on the heels of his show-stopping turn at the Last Night of the Proms in the Royal Albert Hall. If that contrast of venues was remarkable, the same applies to his piano partner Jeremy Denk, who is as familiar with New York’s Carnegie Hall as he now is with Lammermuir’s tour circuit of East Lothian churches.

What a dynamic duo they made, in a performance that treated Janacek’s ambiguous tale as opera-in-concert, ably assisted by mezzo-soprano Victoria Simmonds as the seductive gypsy girl Zekfa with the chorus of villagers provided by Edinburgh’s Robin Chapel choir: mezzo Susan White and sopranos Virginia Wilson and Caroline Trutz.

Their music, with close harmonies predicting the Andrews Sisters as much as they resemble Wagner’s Rhinemaidens, is one of the delights of the piece, in which the combination of the tenor and mezzo is less opera duet than intimate conversation, and years ahead of its time.

That intimacy reaches its fulfilment, as it were, in the only section of the work without libretto, a piano interlude labelled Intermezzo erotico, and Denk’s playing of it suggested a robust and passionate liaison as clearly as he had delicately depicted glow-worms and swallows earlier in the cycle.

Spence, who has been awarded for his performances of Janacek in the Czech Republic, was in masterly control of the material throughout, even as his love-struck farmer’s boy character is far from master of his own fate. Hearing his powerful voice calibrated to this small venue, with the tonal variations he has available at the top of his range, was a remarkable experience, especially delivered in such a natural and unaffected way.

The tenor had even brought along a nifty encore of a Janacek folk-song arrangement that involved the full sextet and appropriately hymned the joys of being a musician.

The scope of that choice of career had already been well established by Jeremy Denk in the first half of the concert, when he played Beethoven’s late Sonata in A-flat Major, Op 110, in the captivating way Lammermuir audiences have come to enthusiastically appreciate. The combination of lightning fingering and moments of still, subtly altered phrasing in the repetitions of the central Allegro, and the propulsive shaping of the whole work were the pianist at his finest.

The extent of the repertoire he carries in his memory-banks was illustrated by his apparently last-minute decision to precede it with Bach’s A Minor Partita, rather than the advertised Prelude and Fugue. Whether this was a nod to the broader programming of the festival – the D minor Partita for Violin had featured in Wednesday’s Scottish Ensemble concert with NYCOS singers – or just a personal whim, it was a virtuosic delight. It is certainly possible to play Bach more slowly, but few pianists can apply such finger-power at such pace, and still be clear and distinct.

Keith Bruce

Lammermuir: Concerto Copenhagen / Scottish Ensemble & NYCOS

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St Mary’s, Haddington/St Mary’s, Whitekirk

If he didn’t invent those two pillars of classical music – the string quartet in chamber music and the symphony for the orchestral repertoire – the prolific Joseph Haydn certainly developed both to the form with which we are familiar.

For the central concert of their residency at Lammermuir 2026, period ensemble Concerto Copenhagen, directed from the harpsichord by Lars Ulrik Mortensen, played three sequential symphonies from the start of the composer’s residency in the court of Prince Esterhazy, and the beginning of that process.

Haydn’s Symphonies No 6, 7, and 8, Le matin, Le midi, and Le soir, were written to be heard this way, as a sequence and by an orchestra of this size. What was missing from a performance by a full size modern “symphony orchestra”? Nothing at all, and in fact there was a huge amount to be gained from Concerto Copenhagen’s clarity, which came with plenty of volume and richness of tone.

The familiar face on the platform was flautist Katy Bircher, and she had much of the solo spotlight, from the dancing tune in the Menuet in Le matin through to the pacey theatrical La Tempesta: Presto finale of Le soir. Orchestra leader Fredrik From and first cello Judith-Maria Blomsterberg also had lively moments across all three symphonies, as did, perhaps more surprisingly, bassist Megan Adie, often in partnership with the bassoon of Kamila Marcinkowska-Prasad.

The way all of that detail emerged from the ensemble, signalled – occasionally a little eccentrically – by Mortensen, was delightful, while the particular character and pitch of their baroque instruments made it all sound as bright and fresh as it must have done 275 years ago.

Three decades further back, Johann Sebastian Bach had already written a number of cantatas although he had not yet begun the remarkable weekly series he composed for the churches in Leipzig. They incorporated Lutheran chorales for the congregation to join in, and musicologist Helga Thoene has shown that those chorales, and specifically ones for the consolation of the bereaved, lie behind the remarkable Chaconne that concludes his 1720 Partita in D Minor for solo violin, composed immediately after the death of his first wife.

In St Mary’s, Whitekirk, Scottish Ensemble leader and artistic director Jonathan Morton played the Chaconne while nine singers from the NYCOS Chamber Choir sang those chorales, conducted by Christopher Bell.

The virtuosic violin piece is a captivating listen on its own, but the addition of the voices, initially sparingly but cumulative, with the single tenor and highest sopranos making telling additions to the underscore, transformed the experience into something even greater.

The piece opened a programme, Bach and Blood, that the ensemble and choir is touring, with a London date at Milton Court on October 2. The “Blood” element is David Fennessy’s composition of that title, which uses a 12th century melody by Hildegard of Bingen, slowed down so that the Latin text becomes a series of extended vowel sounds for the singers, interspersed with breathy effects. Morton was, again, the violin soloist, but now joined by his Scottish Ensemble colleagues with the front desk players having their own conversations with him.

With bassist Diane Clark doubling on resonating wine-glasses, Fennessy’s composition is as much “about” the particular musical elements his score requires as anything else, but it was hard not to hear some consolation in the heavenly concluding bars of violin and vocals after the turbulence of what had gone before.

Between those two very complementary works, the string orchestra played Arvo Part’s Greater Antiphons, which recasts choral music from the Roman Catholic Advent liturgy as a seven-movement instrumental work. It is a piece absolutely tailor-made for this group, and was played with satisfying precision.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Stuart Armitt

Lammermuir: Roderick Williams / Scottish Opera

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Holy Trinity Church / St Mary’s Kirk, Haddington

A year ago, baritone Roderick Williams sang Britten’s War Requiem in Hiroshima, one of a global run of performances of the work that included Tel Aviv and Kyiv, marking both 80 years of the end of World War 2 and the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death, which falls on December 6 this year.

It was the latter that received due recognition on Friday at the Lammermuir Festival, with Williams on his best form in a late night recital with pianist Christopher Glynn in Haddington’s Scottish Episcopal Church.

Ironic self-deprecation is the lingua franca of musicians, but few deploy it with the charm of this singer and his was the most personal of programmes, finding room for two settings of Blake that he wrote as a teenager to follow Britten’s Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, composed for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in the mid-1960s.

Williams, who made his own excellent recording of the cycle, knows the work inside out, and delivers the crucial proverbs with as much panache as the more familiar songs, like The Tyger and the psychological A Poison Tree. His own early works may be musically naïve in comparison but they are very lovely.

As are the four songs by Britten’s mentor Frank Bridge that followed, all from the early years of the 20th century, and appealing art songs that are often very nearly show tunes.

Britten found his own way with traditional and familiar material in the quartet Williams ended with, including The Salley Gardens and a knowingly-delivered The Foggy, Foggy Dew. Williams’ own Bach-inspired arrangement of A Red, Red Rose made a perfect encore.

The recital was presented by Lammermuir as a coda to Scottish Opera’s contribution to this year’s programme, a showcase for three Emerging Artists singing Britten with the orchestra.

These recruits to the company will all shortly be seen in the company’s touring production of Hansel and Gretel, and if their individual dramatic expressiveness in this programme is any guide, that should be well worth catching.

Conductor Douglas Boyd is possibly still remembered in his native Scotland as an oboe player, but he has been exclusively a conductor for 20 years and artistic director at Garsington Opera for much of that time, bringing a memorable Rusalka to the Edinburgh International Festival four years ago.

Directing the Orchestra of Scottish Opera, he began, appropriately, with Arvo Part’s Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten, a brief work that has exceeded its original inspiration (Part admired but never met the British composer) to become a concert hall favourite. It worked brilliantly here not just for its dedication but also its suitability to the acoustic of St Mary’s – Boyd allowing the orchestra’s carefully calibrated strings to build incrementally – and the obvious parallel Part intended with the tolling bell opening of Britten’s final composition, the Phaedra cantata he wrote for Janet Baker.

Almost a mini-opera in itself, mezzo Charlotte Clapperton projected the confessional mix of recitative and song in a committed characterisation. Britten clearly appreciated the story-telling of Robert Lowell’s English version of Racine, and that narrative directness balances the emotional torment conveyed by the music, scored by strings with percussion and harpsichord.

From forty years earlier in the composer’s career, the song cycle Our Hunting Fathers  employed the fullest edition of the Orchestra of Scottish Opera, the winds (including alto saxophone) and brass essential to its effectiveness. The challenge it presented to soprano Avery Lafrentz was immense and she dealt with its tricky libretto, assembled and partly written by W H Auden, with aplomb.

There is much in this complex early work – which baffled some in 1936 – that prefigures the War Requiem, but it is structurally much less easy to decode. The scoring for the orchestra, which uses some of the sonic palette of contemporary dance bands, and the demands on the singer, grappling with overlapping texts and exclamations, are virtuosic however, and it made a terrific climax to the concert.

It was the other soprano, Charlotte Jane Kennedy, who had the programme’s most appealing and often-sung work. Les Illuminations, setting a selection of texts by Arthur Rimbaud to string orchestra accompaniment, has the undoubted advantage of being in mellifluous French and is Britten on the road to being a great opera composer.

As often heard sung by a tenor, following Peter Pears’ adoption of the work, the brightness of a soprano – and Kennedy has that quality along with power at both ends of her range – is arguably best suited to the piece, regardless of the homo-erotic message in Being beauteous.

It was noticeable, too, that Kennedy referred less to the music-stand in her performance, but then she had the work that could prove the most useful repertoire addition to a blossoming career.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Sally Anderson

Return of the Prodigal

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Nicky Spence has swapped the hustle and bustle of London for quieter family life in a Renfrewshire manse, but the versatile Scots tenor is still in global demand. Coming up, the London Proms and Lammermuir Festival, and a promise to pick and choose. KEN WALTON reports  

At 43, Dumfriesshire-born tenor Nicky Spence has reached a point in his busy and successful career where he can call the shots. Not in an arrogant celeb-kinda way. Spence is unquestionably at the top of his tree, larger-than-life, cuts an ostentatious profile, and just as comfortable singing the noblest of Wagner in the world’s top opera houses as camping it up in popular music theatre. But in essence he’s a genuinely nice guy, enjoying family life with his pianist husband Dylan Perez, three-year-old son Baird and the assortment of pets that roam the former Paisley manse they now call home.

The recent move to Scotland was as much about work-life balance as Spence’s yearning to reconnect with the country of his birth. The time was right, he reckoned, to get out of London where he’d been for the past 25 years. “We wanted to find a big hunky building with some space to let animals and children roam free, idealogical images of my own childhood. We’d lived in Deptford which is quite gentrified but certainly still quite stabby, so we were quite happy to leave that behind and find somewhere where Baird will hopefully be reciting some Burns poetry.”

More importantly, it’s five minutes from Glasgow Airport, which means Spence’s international commitments remain perfectly viable in terms of juggling family life. “Opera companies are really family unfriendly so you often get your schedule at 7pm for the next day, then suddenly you might have a day off, so that’s when I can whizz home being so close to the airport.”

The move also opens up greater possibilities for Spence to throw some home gigs into the globetrotting mix. Take this month alone, where on Saturday (12 Sept) he’s starring in the Last Night of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, leading the nation (broadcast live on BBC television) in Rule Britannia. Fast forward seven days (19 Sept) and he’s on a rescue mission to East Lothian’s Lammermuir Festival, standing in for an indisposed Joshua Ellicott in Janacek’s dramatic song cycle The Diary of One Who Disappeared. Moreover, it’s only a few weeks since Spence was at the Usher Hall starring in the Edinburgh International Festival’s performance of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s epic curiosity The Song of Hiawatha.

With the Montreal Symphony at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival

When we met at his home last week he’d just returned in the nick of time from a fitting for Saturday’s Proms. Are we to expect a dazzling extravaganza for that ritually outrageous Rule Britannia moment? “It’s pretty hush hush,” says Spence, who’s everyday attire leans invariably towards the colourful. “Many people have tried to wriggle information from me. I could give you an exclusive, but I won’t!” 

Saturday, he discloses, will involve five costume changes. “I was looking through the annals to see how previous singers have produced a flag in the past for Rule Britannia. It’s quite hard to come up with a novel idea. There are really only so many ways you can do it………..but we’ve come up with something!” 

As to his wider brief for the evening, which also features pianist Yuja Wang, Spence says it’s like a little celebration of the person chosen to sing. “So it’s going to be a bit cheeky – some of it anyway. In the first half I’m doing some very noble, operatic Czech [now revealed as the Prince’s Aria from Dvorak’s Rusalka]. But for the second half there might be some Scottish stuff – weird if there wasn’t – and maybe something dance-related as well.” 

Subsequent updates to the BBC Proms website confirm a newly commissioned Scotch Snap arranged by Stuart Calvert featuring “various artists”, and “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat” from Guys and Dolls. 

Where there’s capriciousness and mirth at the Last Night of the Proms, Spence’s Janacek in Haddington next week will demand (alongside mezzo soprano Victoria Simmonds and pianist Jeremy Denk) a performance soaked in theatrical intensity. It’s not a work that lies in the repertoire of many tenors, so the Festival (which began earlier this week and runs till Sunday 20 September) breathed a sigh of relief when they discovered that Spence knew, and had recorded, it and was available to step into the breach. “It’s something I’ve got in my back pocket, so I was really happy to do it,” he explains. 

The Diary of One Who Disappeared is about forbidden love, a subject painfully close to Janacek, tortured in later life through his unrequited passion for a much younger woman, Kamila Stösslová. “It falls between the stools of song cycle and opera,” Spence argues. It’s got a lot of shame and vulnerability about it. Maybe that’s why I like Czech music, especially Janacek. It’s almost this kind of judgment of the outside world, which I kind of recognise from growing up in Scotland”. Suddenly our window view of the Paisley church, to which Spence’s manse was once spiritually attached, looms large. “It’s my echo chamber,” he confirms. Spence experienced his own vulnerability, deserted by his father at an early age and brought up by a doting mother. 

In an operatic career that nearly never was – Spence embarked on a major, lucrative pop-classical crossover deal with Decca in his early twenties only to walk out mid-contract to return to serious opera studies – Janacek’s operas have proved a winner for him. “I’ve pretty much ticked all of them off apart from Osud,” says Spence. “I love that they’re not too operatic, but genuinely dramatic. There’s an economy, similar to Britten’s operas, that really appeals to me. I’d say to any first time opera goer, go see something like Jenufa rather than [Mozart’s] The Magic Flute, which is quite problematic in being bloody boring in the second half, all the trials and stuff, all the patriarchy shite.”

Singing Noel Coward with husband and pianist Dylan Perez (photo: Robin Clewley)

A busy schedule this season includes Janacek performances in Bamberg and at London’s Covent Garden. But what gives Spence the greatest satisfaction is that Czech directors keep calling him back. Later this autumn he’ll be in Brno to star in three Janacek productions: The Adventures of Mr Broucek, Jenufa and Sarka. “In the past I’ve even sung The Diary of One Who Disappeared in Hukvaldy where Janacek was born. So in that sense I’ve been selling ice to the eskimos.”

With Spence’s move to Scotland, however, there are clear signs he’ll be careful about what he says yes to in the pursuit of broader challenges. He recently pulled out of an engagement with Hamburg State Opera for the simple reason “I just wasn’t enjoying the ride”.

“I like to spread the joy wherever I’m going, but will probably try to be a bit more specific about it. I was president of the ISM [Independent Society of Musicians] where I learnt a lot about advocacy and governance, and that may come into play. I’d love to run a vocal department, equipping young singers with what they need to succeed. But mostly I’m keen to do more collaborating with people I really enjoy working with. It’s a daily challenge trying not to work with arseholes any more. There are still some conductors out there who act like they come from another century, That’s always interesting!”

There are, however, some operatic roles he has in his sights. “I’ve pretty much done the ones I wanted to, but I haven’t done Captain Vere in [Britten’s] Billy Budd and I think I’d make a really interesting Aschenbach in Death in Venice.” He also hopes to do more work with his husband Dylan, “if we can stop arguing about the dishwasher”. One 2027 date firmly in the duo’s diary is the May recital in Cumnock that traditionally launches the programme for that year’s Cumnock Tryst Festival. 

Given his own challenging childhood, what aspirations does Spence have for young Baird? “We just want him to be a happy human being. He’s so friendly, loves dancing, and we learn so much from him all the time – such a great ballast amid the stormy seas of performing. He gives us context.”

Nicky Spence stars in this weekend’s Last Night of the Proms, broadcast live on BBC One & Two on Saturday 12 September. Full details at www.bbc.co.uk/proms

The Lammermuir Festival runs till 20 September in East Lothian. Full details at www.lammermuirfestival.co.uk

Lammermuir: Van Baerle | Ridout

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Dunbar Parish Church | Crichton Collegiate Church

The first thing to note about the Van Baerle Trio is that they share the honours. Whether in the blissful ease of late Haydn, the seismic profundity of mature Brahms, the poignant tragedy of a young Lili Boulanger or the exotic Basque-flavourings of Ravel, this splendid Dutch threesome evoked generosity, luminosity and shared conviction in every one of Sunday afternoon’s enthralling performances.

First, however, we had to deal with the prospect of the government’s emergency alert system test, Festival director James Waters holding the start back a few minutes to avoid a clash between Haydn and a screaming chorus of mobile phones. A wise decision, given the random reality of the latter. 

After that momentary reminder of how dangerously unstable the world currently is, Haydn’s Piano Trio No 30 in E flat returned us instantly to a more halcyon frame of mind. Not for nothing did the composer describe his trios as sonatas for keyboard with violin and cello accompaniment, a quality self-defined by pianist Hannes Minaar’s liquid performance, his dominance beautifully tempered so as not to overstate, the refined and expressive support of violinist Maria Milstein and cellist Gideon den Herder respectful but never shy in making its mark. It was forever a joyous journey that ended in the disarming depth, courtly elegance, and ultimately unbridled vivacity of the Finale.

If the sudden grandiosity of Brahms’ C minor Piano Trio, Op 101, thrust us into a very different world, one reeling from tumultuous outbursts of passion and richly-flavoured textures, there was still a deep-seated eloquence in these musicians’ delivery. Even in the two fast opening movements – the first momentously discursive, the second energetically succinct – the interplay was incisively neat, profound but never thick-set. The Andante grazioso found a solid piano presence deliciously offset by liquid exchanges between the strings, paving the way for Finale’s unquenchable, optimistic volatility.

The focus turned to France for a second half that opened with two moving works by Lili Boulanger – the equally talented younger sister of composer Nadia – who died from tuberculosis in her mid-twenties. D’un soir triste and D’un matin de printemps were composed towards the end of her life, and in them you sense an ambivalence of hope and despair. This Van Baerle performance captured beautifully their indebtedness to Debussy – soft-scented harmonies and supple melodic shaping – but also those delicate flecks of dissonance that were the composer’s distinctive hallmark. 

No mistaking the vibrant personality of Ravel that shines through his Piano Trio in A minor, which served as a sparkling conclusion to the ensemble’s official programme. Beyond the mind-blowing delicacy of the opening bars and fluid rhythmic argument that followed, the Spanish-fuelled Pantoum presented a sunburst moment before the calm, plaintive intricacies of the Passacaille. The final Animé, surging and incandescent, was breathtaking. A tender Haydn encore brought us back to earth.

Timothy Ridout performed solo at Crichton

Equally impressive, earlier on Sunday, British violist Timothy Ridout performed solo in the remarkable acoustics of Crichton Collegiate Church, a venue that transported this Lammermuir audience momentarily out of East Lothian and into Midlothian. It was a journey well made, Ridout’s performances outstanding for their effortless virtuosity and opulent musicianship.

The main diet of works were by German Baroque contemporaries Telemann and Bach, in both cases viola versions of their respective canons for solo violin/cello. If Telemann’s Fantasies without Bass are less well-known than Bach’s Sonatas and Suites, they are no less challenging and fulfilling. Ridout’s exceptional facility and robust tonal mastery elicited a characterful charm from the Telemann pieces, and from the Bach – whether negotiating the complexities of a fugue or the suavity of a dance – a powerfully flexible composure. 

Especially interesting, though, was his opener, in manus tuas, by American Pulitzer-prize winning composer Caroline Shaw, conceived like a ghostly snapshot of the Tallis motet it is based on. Magically evocative in its use of the human voice – Ridout adding the odd sung note to a chord like some divine intervention – it’s a piece that sat perfectly in this ecclesiastical setting, its spiritual nuances all the more poignant as a result.

Ken Walton

The Lammermuir Festival runs till Mon 15 Sep. Full information at www.lammermuirfestival.co.uk

Lammermuir: I Fagiolini

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St Mary’s Church, Haddington

Around twenty years ago, I Fagiolini – Robert Hollingworth’s quirky high-calibre vocal ensemble –  presented Monteverdi madrigals to a puzzled Glasgow audience: puzzled because the setting in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall restaurant was literally gastronomic and, unbeknown to us, the singers were interspersed like fifth columnists among the diners, erupting mid-course into songs and actions of spurned love or unfettered passion. We sank our coffees with a renewed insight into Monteverdi.

Fast forward two decades, and over last weekend the same group, with the same quasi-theatrical flair plus period instrumental guests, reawakened such memories through two idiosyncratic evening performances of Purcell and Monteverdi. Both took place in the historic spacious sanctuary that is Haddington’s St Mary’s Church, which served to accommodate an intriguingly contextualised Dido and Aeneas (Purcell’s uncompleted opera prefaced by other miscellaneous Purcellian titbits) on Saturday; then, on Sunday, Hollingworth’s highly-personalised (neatly and entertainingly argued) take on Monteverdi’s monumental Vespers, his virtuosic collection of liturgical engine parts published in 1610.

The Purcell programme was fundamentally intimate, the team-spirited singers underpinned by a lithe but lightly-hued band of gut-stringed strings (one to a part) and fluid continuo. A first half taster journeyed from the gossamer luminosity of Purcell’s Soft Music and Dance of the Furies from Dioclesian to the same semi-opera’s Triumph, Victorious Birth, by way of assorted arias and the instrumental interludes. 

Highlights included some wild fiddling, verging on rock improv, emerging from the ground bass aria Mark, How Readily, and the instrumental sunburst piercing through The Sparrow And The Gentle Dove from the 1683 wedding ode From Hardy Climes.

When it came to Dido, we were firmly in the groove. An eight-strong singing troupe took to the task like touring minstrels, doubling parts, costumes simple and adaptable such as the Hallowe’en witches’ noses and googly-eyed glasses, the general acting style a mix of Disney-type hero (a cool, contemporary Aeneas) and heroine, and comic grotesquerie. Rather than jar with a serious tale, this rather emphasised the entertainment dimension of the piece, a kind of character reference for a composer known for his latent bawdiness and barstool wit.

More importantly, nothing got in the way of Purcell’s engaging music. Julia Doyle’s regal Dido, the gorgeous resignation of her famous Lament, rang true with Frederick Long’s molten Aeneas, who was given an extra aria (sourced from Purcell) that made so much more sense of his strangely curtailed presence in the plot. Rowan Pierce, her ever-active eyes as dramatically captivating as the unflinching purity of her voice, was mesmerising as Belinda. The witches cackled and spat, the sailors (looking a bit like Pontins bluecoats) came and went. Dances were generally avoided, to no great cost. Hollingworth’s laissez-faire musical direction allowed the evening to flow effortlessly, the performers happily owning their own show.

Sunday’s Monteverdi was more of a set-piece experience, though a modicum of stagecraft served to validate the music’s adaptable construct and extremes of utilised personnel. Thus an opening wall of reverberant sound saw the singers amassed behind instrumental forces that included the pungent tutti of the English Cornett and Sackbutt Ensemble. The ensuing cocktail of psalms and motets – from such wonderfully flagrant numbers as Nigra sum to the ecstatic escalating female voice suspensions in Duo Seraphim – required much coming and going front stage to suit the endless combinations of voices, occasionally reminiscent of school concert choreography but coming together cathartically in the final Magnificat with the full choral contingent now purposely to the fore.

Roger Hollingworth conducts Monteverdi’s Vespers

Typical of Hollingworth, he had something new to offer in what marked the start of a new project for I Fagiolini (due to be recorded soon). He drew our attention to the raised pitch of certain settings based on recent research, which, true to his word, gifted the numbers affected with a rare piquancy. He adopted more leisurely tempi, sourcing nuggets of unexpectedly enriched sentiment and expression. 

Ultimately, though, it was the extraordinary ability of these singers to deliver individuality as soloists, while merging as one homogenous body in ensemble, that raised this performance beyond the ordinary. In the wrong hands, Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine can so easily become a challenge of endurance. This one never failed to enthral.

Ken Walton

I Fagiolini perform their final Lammermuir programme, A Life In A Cappella – We’re Not Dead Yet, in Aberlady Parish Church on Tue 9 Sep at 3pm. Information at www.lammermuirfestival.co.uk

(Photo Credits: Sally Anderson)

Lammermuir: Kaleidoscope Collective

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Dirleton Kirk, East Lothian

The Lammermuir Festival has a fine track record of bringing musicians together in interesting combinations to explore new repertoire. When it invites the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, the group arrives with much of that work already done.

The regular cellist with Kaleidoscope, Laura van der Heijden, is the festival’s artist in residence this year and she will appear with other groups of friends and as a soloist with the Royal Northern Sinfonia before it ends. She began the commitment more gently, as a member of the ensemble founded by pianist Tom Poster and his violinist partner Elena Orioste.

Poster is a pianist of formidable relaxed skill who wears his musical erudition lightly, but the second of Kaleidoscope’s recitals at Dirleton Kirk demonstrated his special programming ability.

It was designed to showcase the virtuoso flute playing of Adam Walker, and thus immediately suggested a focus on French music of the last century, where and when composers were especially attracted to writing for the instrument.

Of the four works featuring Walker, however, only the Poulenc Flute Sonata was at all familiar, and few if any of the capacity audience would have known the earlier pieces played.

Intriguingly, they each teamed the flautist and piano with one of the string players, beginning with Urioste in the Suite en trio by Mel Bonis. Another triptych, the Trois femmes de Legende, has already brought the almost forgotten Bonis to Scottish attention, with both the RSNO and BBC SSO playing the orchestrated piano pieces recently, and this chamber work was similarly finely-wrought. A salon conversation with the listening violin responding to the flute’s lead, the work becomes more muscular in the closing Scherzo, driven by the keyboard.

Philippe Gaubert is also little remembered as a composer, although he was a well-known flautist and conductor in the early part of the 20th century. His Three Aquarelles, with cello completing the trio, are not especially pictorial but explore the full ranges of all three instruments and the dynamic possibilities of their combination in elegant style. Where  the Bonis began with a Serenade, the Gaubert closed with one, but it was the central slower section, with solos for cello, flute and piano in sequence, that was the most beguiling.

Maurice Durufle is not known as a composer of chamber music because he didn’t write much of it, and the Prelude, Recitatif et Variations from 1928 is the only piece he published. Quite different in structure from the music that preceded it, this was the composer looking back to early music from a modernist perspective, if one far from as experimental as some of his contemporaries. With violist Vicki Powell as the string addition, the unfolding of those Variations developed with building intensity, making for a powerful conclusion to the first half of the concert.

The Poulenc, it hardly needs saying, was brilliantly played by Walker and Poster. This is core repertoire for a virtuoso flautist and this one barely looked at his score in a performance of technical and expressive virtuosity. The attack he achieves on the instrument and the fluidity of his fingering is a class apart, and Poster’s rippling keyboard skills and considered dynamic control made for a perfect partnership.

The programme concluded without Walker, with Faure’s Piano Quartet No 1, a beautifully-shaped early work that followed on from the works that Poster and the strings had played on Friday evening.

If this was young Faure expressing his broken heart after being jilted by Marianne Viardot, that melancholy is most eloquently expressed in the cello-led Adagio. The Scherzo that precedes it was particularly enticing, with bright pizzicato strings and sparkling keyboard playing.

As the growing number of Kaleidoscope fans had surely hoped, Poster revealed one of his bespoke arrangements for all five musicians by way of a unique encore. If Henry Mancini’s Moon River might appear to have little relationship with the rest of the programme, Urioste pointed out the composer was a flute and piano player who honed his arranging skills with the US Air Force Band, serving in France in the Second World War.

Keith Bruce

Pictured: Laura van der Heijden

Lammermuir: Scottish Opera Double Bill

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St Mary’s, Haddington

Perfect though the use of Haddington’s Corn Exchange proved for Britten’s Albert Herring at last year’s Lammermuir Festival, Scottish Opera’s return to St Mary’s for its 2025 contribution was both necessary and welcome.

Primarily that was for musical reasons, and the superb playing of the full Orchestra of Scottish Opera for Maurice Ravel’s L’heure espagnole and William Walton’s The Bear, under the energetic baton of Alexandra Cravero. The Ravel, of course, is packed with delightful orchestral detail. The story of the convoluted love-life of Concepcion, the fickle wife of clockmaker Torquemada, had every possible expression of the passage of time, with onstage metronome, ticking percussion and chiming bells most obvious.

The score of The Bear proved no less fascinating, and as it includes knowing nods to other composers, including Debussy and Britten, it is far from unlikely that Walton had the early work in mind as well. This is the playful Walton of Façade rather than the composer of the more problematic Troilus and Cressida.

In putting the two works together, the company was also making use of its resident company of Emerging Artists, and regular soloist Jamie MacDougall – and had the added impetus of producing a staging that will work in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal and Edinburgh Festival Theatre during the autumn season.

That will mean an expanded scenic design, but it was clear that the essential elements are already in place in Kenneth Macleod’s work for Jacopo Spirei’s production.

It paid to pay close attention to the supertitles in L’heure espagnole, which faithfully rendered the jokes being delivered in French by the cast. Lea Shaw’s knowing performance as Concepcion had the lion’s share of these and she played them to the hilt, matched by Edward Jowle’s broad portrayal of lustful banker Don Inigo.

South African tenor Luvo Maranti probably got more laughs though, for the poetic attempts by his character, Gonzalve, to play up the role of romantic lover, while baritone Daniel Barrett caught just the right tone for the naïve Ramiro, in a production that was not really about subtlety at all.

Making good use of the whole performance space in a way that was new to Scottish Opera’s work in the venue, there was a lot going on, but then that is exactly what farce is all about.

The premise of The Bear might be just as absurd – what purpose can a widow have in trying to punish her faithless husband by refusing any human interaction herself after his death? – but its source in a short story of Chekhov means we are in a very different world.

Barrett, making his Scottish Opera debut as a new recruit to the team of Emerging Artists, was superb as the titular Bear, a boorish creditor of the dead man who finds himself falling for the widow. Chloe Harris, as bereaved Yelena Ivanovna Popova, also gave a nicely-measured performance, and a definitive reading of the evening’s hit tune – the mezzo party-piece, I Was A Constant, Faithful Wife.

Keith Bruce

Repeated at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal, October 18 and 22 and Edinburgh Festival Theatre, November 15.

Picture of Daniel Barrett and Chloe Harris in The Bear by Sally Jubb

Lammermuir: Earth, thy cold is keen

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St Mary’s Church, Whitekirk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Lotte Betts-Dean by Matthew Johnson

Opposites Attract

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Director Jacopo Spirei tells KEN WALTON why his new Double Bill production for Scottish Opera, opening at Lammermuir Festival, has all the quirky trappings of a Netflix series. 

Ready for a double dose of black comedy? That’s what Scottish Opera is promising in an upcoming operatic head-to-head that packages Ravel’s waspishly satirical L’heure espagnole with the Chekhovian darkness of Walton’s The Bear. This new Double Bill production, created by Italian opera director Jacopo Spirei, takes the opening night spot (4 Sep) at this year’s Lammermuir Festival, a one-off performance in St Mary’s Church, Haddington, with later repeats in Glasgow (18 & 22 Oct) and Edinburgh (15 Nov).

Written over half a century apart – Ravel’s sensuously-scored, Spanish-flavoured one-acter was premiered in 1911; Walton’s parodic burlesque a nippy child of the mid-sixties – their mutual compatibility may not seem immediately obvious. Spirei, while absent from the initial decision to couple them, has no such qualms. “Musically there’s a good relationship, both being experiments from otherwise symphonic composers,” he argues. “And from a theatrical point of view, these are both stories of strong independent women within the context of a man’s world: women that define morals in their own very specific way. Treating them as comedies was a clever way of doing it.”

L’heure espagnole is often viewed as an Ayckbourn-style bedroom farce, a clockmaker’s lascivious wife using the convenience of her lustless husband’s clocks to conceal her multiple lovers – opera buffa reborn. The Bear occupies a darker world, the recently-widowed Popova learning of her late husband’s infidelities and mountainous debts, only to fall for the messenger, a ruthless debt collector. 

L’heure espagnole – “a world of fantasy among ticking clocks” (Photo Sally Jubb)

Spirei has previously produced both operas apart – in studio settings in Copenhagen – but never in tandem. The Bear on that occasion was paired with Bruno Maderna’s modernist 1973 chamber opera Satyricon. “That demanded a very different co-relationship which led to treating the Walton more like the Chekhov play it’s based on.”

“The trick in making it work with the Ravel is to put them in dialogue”, says Spirei. “Think of a Netflix series like Black Mirror, where similar themes are treated in completely different ways. The way I work with the designer [Kenneth MacLeod] is to emphasise the contrast. So you have one opera that is incredibly colourful and full of life, and one that moves at completely the other end, which is a funeral parlour: from colour, colour, colour to classic black comedy. In a way the humour is similar, but one is a very particular French opera, the other very English. That creates a very exciting dialogue.”

That applies equally to the music, he explains. “Walton’s is a lot more rhythmic in a way. The percussive element is much more predominant, his way of setting words is exceptional, unparalleled in the 20th century. It’s fascinating how it feels like a play, yet is an opera. And it’s very quirky, fascinatingly surreal. A bit like Fawlty Towers.

“On the other hand, a sense of orchestrated landscape distinguishes Ravel’s writing. You do feel you are suspended in a world of fantasy among ticking clocks. The way he paints the nuances, however, points to an extraordinary creative depth.”

Above all, Spirei is having fun, and Scots-based designer Kenneth MacLeod is playing along, especially where the challenge has been to create a design solution flexible enough to meet the demands both of this week’s Haddington church setting and future theatre performances. 

“To exist anywhere it sort of needed a visual environment that was valid everywhere, something universally familiar like an internet browser. We’re so used to this idea, all those streaming platforms. With the church, however, we’ve taken a slightly more site-specific approach, using the wider space to full advantage.”

The cast are up for anything, he adds, a potent mix of youth and experience. “Some are Scottish Opera Emerging Artists, some former Emerging Artists.” Then there’s Jamie MacDougall, a seasoned regular in comic roles for the company, playing duped husband Torquemada in the Ravel. “Oh my God, how can you stop him? He’s extraordinary, like a film actor,” insists Spirei.

While this production marks Spirei’s debut with Scottish Opera, it’s also a chance for the 50-year-old Italian to finally honour the memory of his close friend and mentor, Sir Graham Vick, who served as director of productions at Scottish Opera in the 1980s, creating many momentous – some highly controversial – productions in the process. 

“That’s one of the reasons I said yes to coming here,” he reveals. “I wanted to reconnect with that part of Graham’s past. For me he was a mentor as well as a teacher. I started working with him when I was 26. We worked together for a long time, then I started directing my own stuff, we became good friends and remained close till the end. He was one of these people you could exchange ideas about process, about work – a mentor in the true sense.”

Remembering Graham Vick

Vick, who went on to found the Birmingham Opera Company in 1987, establishing its award-winning policy of staging groundbreaking productions in unusual venues, died in 2021, aged 67. Did the young turk who ruffled the feathers of traditional Scots opera-goers in 1985 with his infamously lavatorial Don Giovanni temper his aesthetic in later years?

“Yes, in a way he later found a different field of research,” Spirei believes. “It was no longer about provoking audiences, more about involving the widest of audiences. His work in Birmingham, for example, oriented in that way, working with volunteers from all paths fo life. That led to a period of very aesthetic theatre in the 1990s and early 2000s, to a lot of beautiful looking shows, still always gripping and cutting, but with a slightly more pleasing edge. He just found a different path and started questioning the future of opera, how it needed to be to function within society. In that way I always found myself at home working with him.”

How confident is Spirei in opera’s future? “The art form is fine,” he insists. “Let’s face it, opera has been declared dead ever since I started in the business, yet it’s still healthy and strong, finding its way through new compositions, new repertoire. The problem is never the art form. The art form has an energy and power of its own – it just has to be released.” 

Scottish Opera presents its Ravel/Walton Double Bill at St Mary’s Church Haddington on 4 Sep as part of the Lammermuir Festival. The 2025 Festival runs from 4-15 Sep at various venues around East Lothian. Full details at www.lammermuirfestival.co.uk

(Photo Jacopo Spirei – Marco Borrelli)

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

Lammermuir: Albert Herring | Dunedin | Denk

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Various venues, East Lothian

An organisation that has never had its troubles to seek, the present difficulties of Creative Scotland may be traced to the announcement during last year’s Lammermuir Festival that the event would receive no further funding – and the festival’s robust response to that decision.

In the professional media and the free-for-all of its “social” cousin, the debate about depleted arts funding in Scotland has now become predictably polarised between those who put the blame at the door of the Scottish Government and those who condemn the quango. Meanwhile artists and arts organisations persist in producing the goods, as Lammermuir is doing.

It has some valuable friends, both in its supporters, whose lobbying produced some reversal of the Creative Scotland decision, and its creative partners.

Directly-funded Scottish Opera is one of those, and it now gives its audience elsewhere a chance to see the work it makes for Lammermuir. That means the clever production of Britten’s Albert Herring which played Haddington Corn Exchange will also be seen in repertory with Donizetti’s Don Pasquale in Glasgow and Edinburgh this autumn.

Those transfers will require some re-design because Daisy Evans’ production sat very snugly in this venue, with a 13-piece band, under conductor William Cole, playing their socks off. The ensemble cast was a little uneven individually, but terrific as a group, with some outstanding solo turns and a very accomplished performance by tenor Glen Cunningham in the title role.

What Evans’ staging demonstrated was that the social satire of Eric Crozier’s libretto still works alarmingly well almost 80 years after the work’s premiere, and in a way it might not have done two or three decades ago. It’s a shame then, that some of the business did not match the detail of the text – and Britten’s immaculately tailored music. It is easy to overlook such small anomalies in revivals of Mozart or Verdi, but it jarred here.

A Dunedin Consort visit to Crichton Collegiate Church, near Pathhead and actually in Midlothian, has become another important Lammermuir ingredient. The star vocal soloist this year was counter-tenor Alexander Chance, who is surely now at the absolute peak of his abilities.

Those who have heard Chance’s voice fill Edinburgh’s Usher Hall would know that he needed much less than full-power in this small church’s impeccable acoustic, much used for chamber recordings. In precision and detail, from the notes on the score through inspired ornamentation to perfect Latin diction, Chance was flawless on repertoire by Vivaldi and others who made their name in the Vienna of the 18th century.

He didn’t have it all his own way, however, with familiar Dunedin instrumentalists including violinists Matthew Truscott and Huw Daniel, cellist Jonathan Manson, oboist Alexandra Bellamy and Jan Waterfield on chamber organ joined by bassoonist Inga Maria Klaucke, whose circular breathing with an early instrument on a Vivaldi concerto opened a revelatory programme.

It seems remarkable now that American pianist Jeremy Denk was not very well known in the UK when he first visited Lammermuir as a bold mid-pandemic hero in 2021, because he now looks so perfectly at home in the multi-purpose arena of Dunbar Parish Church.

His solo recital there was classic Denk, a second half of Brahms and Schumann played with just the right balance of precision pianism and performative expression, preceded by a delicious smorgasbord of pieces by female composers from Clara Schumann and Louise Farrenc to Missy Mazzoli and Phyllis Chen.

Presented in pairs that matched older composers with (mostly) living ones, it was as eloquent a case for the variety of women’s musical voices as any musician has devised, and would send any players in the audience in search of the works of Cecile Chaminade, Amy Beach, Ruth Crawford Seeger and Meredith Monk.

Denk’s first appearance in Dunbar this year was a demonstration of the possibilities of the venue. It reunited him with violinist Maria Wloszczowska for all four of the sonatas of Charles Ives, to celebrate the composer’s 150th birthday.

Their performances were virtuosic and compelling, but the genius of the concert was the presence of local choir Garleton Singers, conducted by Stephen Doughty, and a wind band from East Lothian Schools and the local community. The choir, stage left, sang half a dozen hymns through the programme – melodies that appeared in different guise in the sonatas – and the instrumentalists, at the back of the space, added three John Philip Sousa marches, as played by the street bands heard by the composer, directed by his father.

The first of those was The Liberty Bell, best known in Britain as the theme tune for Monty Python’s Flying Circus. If a voice had then intoned “And now for something completely different”, it would not have been wide of the mark.

Keith Bruce

Pictures by Sally Jubb and Stuart Armitt

Maxwell Quartet, Cohen & Rabinovich

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Lammermuir Festival, Dunbar Parish Church

Few of us are likely to have heard Ernest Chausson’s Concert for Violin, Piano and String Quartet, a hybrid tour de force that may ostensibly look like a work for piano sextet, but manifests itself more dramatically as a kind of concerto grosso in which the solo violin and hard-working pianist function as the prime protagonists against the supportive function of the quartet.

Dunbar Parish Church was the perfect sounding board for this rare Lammermuir Festival performance, its resplendent acoustics remarkable in allowing a voluminous amplification of the string sound, yet still facilitating intricate and exuberant clarity. This was the first of two programmes by the Maxwell Quartet, joined for this particular work by Canadian violinist Diana Cohen and Israeli pianist Roman Rabinovich.

Prior to the Chausson, the first half had revealed the Maxwells in tip-top form and in two areas of performance they have made their own: Haydn quartets, and their own uniquely inspired arrangements of traditional Scots melodies. 

They opened with Haydn’s Quartet in F minor, Op20 No5, its crafted subtleties never too shadowy, never too brazen, furnished with enough endearing ambivalence to capture the moodiness lurking beneath the quiet optimism. Beyond a crisp but questioning opening movement and more relaxed Menuetto, the Siciliano-like lilt of the Adagio offered some nostalgic respite before the fugal directness and contained ebullience of the finale. 

Where the Haydn brought finesse, excitement, stylistic integrity and fortifying virtuosity from an ensemble currently at the height of its game, the Scots arrangements – ranging from a quirkily-scored bagpipe tune to neatly-elaborated fiddle tunes by Neil Gow and Nathaniel Gow – were as welcome for the tastefulness of their conception as the bewitching perfection of their delivery.

Then the Chausson, a lengthy but wholly satisfying glimpse into a work that surely deserves greater exposure than it has to date, and certainly throws up a realisation that this short-lived French composer had more to offer than the lazy tendency to pass him off as another French sub-Romantic touched by the influences of Massenet, Wagner and Franck. 

Yes, there are hallmarks of Franck in a dramatic opening motif that dominates the soul of the massive opening movement, which these players expressed in the most thrilling fashion. But is there not also a sense, in the evocative whole tone references and gestures of expressionist excess, that Chausson, in this 1890s work, was edging into the searching sound worlds of Debussy, perhaps even early Schoenberg? Such adventurousness was certainly captured in Thursday’s performance.

It was there again in the dreaminess of the short Sicilienne, followed by a slow movement soaked in melancholy, its descending chromatic lines gnawingly tragic. The mood lifted for a whirlwind finale, the eccentric rhythms and ferocious energy carrying a full-blooded performance to its gripping end. The prominent sweetness of Cohen’s violin playing and exhaustive virtuosity of Rabinovich’s pianism integrated seamlessly with the ever-reliable joie-de-vivre of the Maxwells. 

Ken Walton

Lammermuir: BBC SSO / Wigglesworth

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St Mary’s Church, Haddington

After 12 days of world class music making, a star-studded procession of international stars, everything from opera to symphonic, choral and chamber music, an impressive 82% box office of which 30% were new attendees, regular visitors from as far afield as Washington DC, and an Indian summer to boot, the Lammermuir Festival came to a thundering close with a potently optimistic programme by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra of Tippett and Beethoven.

Again, there wasn’t a seat to be had in the sizeable nave of St Mary’s Church. The palpable buzz was reflective of a communal warmth, friendship and exceptional quality of music-making that has embraced this 14th, and unarguably the best, Lammermuir Festival ever: an event Scotland, East Lothian, and the powers that govern this country ought to be immensely proud of.

Yet, as we reported last week in VoxCarnyx, this is a Festival that Creative Scotland unbelievably withdrew its funding from at the eleventh hour. As you’d expect from Lammermuir’s co-directors James Waters and Hugh Macdonald – two of the most skilled, experienced and globally respected classical music impresarios in the UK – the news was greeted with disbelief and puzzlement, but also a dogged determination to overcome the odds. 

In a brief speech before the final concert, Waters acknowledged the goodwill and support that had been forthcoming, stating “a determination to run a campaign to maintain the festival, to find a way of securing the funding of a festival we have grown together.” He even announced proposed dates for 2024.

With that, Festival Patron Steven Osborne took his place at the piano to perform Tippett’s Piano Concerto, a work whose combination of subliminal magic and robust Beethovenian rhetoric perhaps reflected our prevailing thoughts – music’s ability to apply utopian diversions to the grounded reality of everyday life. A metaphor, perhaps, for the incalculable value of such threatened events.

Osborne was magnificent, his tried and tested mastery of Tippett’s elusive language – there’s no better testimony to this than his Hyperion recordings – colouring this performance with a vital luminescence and mind-blowing virtuosity. His interaction with the SSO was as instinctive as it was authoritative, those moments where the piano is encased within a toy box world of ethereal celeste and fluttering woodwind exquisitely enhanced by the spacious acoustics. The preternatural world of Tippett’s opera The Midsummer Marriage, written around the same time, is never far away.

Neither, though, is the inspiration the composer himself declared came from Beethoven. It was there, without doubt, in the tumultuous surges that inhabit and shape the outer movements, but also in the intertwining lyrical threads – every one of them surreally definable as Tippett – that inform the structural flow, especially in the central slow movement. 

SSO principal conductor Ryan Wigglesworth supported Osborne’s mindset well, eliciting lustrous empathy from his players. If the slow movement fell short in achieving a genuine tranquillo – Wiggleworth’s direction favoured a more restive lamentation – the rest was a triumph of transcendent rapture.

The concert ended with Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, and a performance that didn’t hang about, giving it the necessary vigour and clarity to succeed in such a diffusive environment. There were superlative moments from the orchestra – the brooding basses in the Funeral March, the sky-bound horns in the Scherzo, golden woodwind solos, and the strings meaty and resplendent throughout. 

As a whole, Wigglesworth engineered a purposeful and ultimately exhilarating reading. Not every tempo felt rigidly stable – he has a tendency to add spasmodic flicks to his beat that audibly impact on rhythmic discipline – but it was a version of a visionary, revolutionary symphony that celebrated its most profound and affirmative qualities. And, needless to say, Lammermuir’s.

Ken Walton

Dunedin Consort / Maxwell Quartet

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Crichton Collegiate Church, by Pathhead/Dirleton Kirk

The multifaceted 2023 edition of the Lammermuir Festival – very possibly the most artistically successful in its history, making Creative Scotland’s absence as a supporter all the more absurd – revealed yet another face on its final Sunday. In two of its most architecturally beautiful and acoustically admired venues we heard very different sung music, composed centuries apart, that fitted their original purpose as places of worship.

Roddy Willliams closed his short but highly effective recital at Dirleton Kirk in the afternoon with the Five Mystical Songs of Ralph Vaughan Williams, setting lyrics by metaphysical poet George Herbert, in the composer’s own arrangement for piano (Christopher Glynn) and single strings (the Maxwell Quartet).

Herbert’s guidance to living the Christian life is still part of the liturgy of the church, and the unmistakable voice of the popular baritone sounded wonderful in the closing Antiphon: Let all the world in every corner sing, My God and King!

Less familiar were the settings of English Folk Songs by Vaughan Williams in the singer’s own arrangements for string quartet, which were as crisp as his own immaculate diction. Originally a lockdown project with soprano Mary Bevan and tenor Nicky Spence, Williams took on all the characters in these tales himself with changes of tone and timbre. In a varied selection from the composer’s vast archaeological project, Captain Grant was a geographically appropriate tale of an Edinburgh jail-break, while others dealt with lovers bereft, spurned and slightly soiled.

Preceding the songs and hymns, in the first half the Maxwells and Glynn combined forces for Elgar’s Piano Quintet, perhaps not obvious territory for this quartet but to which they brought their own folk-tinged style, to the music’s great profit. The work is full of changes of mood and tone, the haunted opening giving way to a dance tune that sounds almost Mediterranean, and a spooky carnival ride alternating with a stride across the South Downs in the finale. With a blended sound in the strings that only long acquaintance can bring, and assertive contributions from the pianist, this performance told its tale in what seemed a very swift 40 minutes.

Earlier in the day, at the well-off-the-beaten-track Crichton Collegiate Church (actually in Midlothian), the sequence of secular and sacred was reversed in soprano Nardus Williams’s recital with a Dunedin Consort quintet, led by John Butt from chamber organ and harpsichord.

Following on neatly from the Dunedin’s Out of Her Mouth production in June, featuring three of French composer Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre’s Biblical cantatas, this programme included her instrumental music alongside songs and solo cantatas by her female contemporaries and predecessors in Italy.

The convent composers featured in the first half may have had the Saviour and religious life as their subject, but they were clearly not cloistered from worldly desires and Williams brought real passion to her delivery, whether seated or standing. Singing from memory, she brought an expressiveness to these appeals for the bliss of Heaven or an encounter with the Christ-child that contrasted with the wry, more cynical tone of Barbara Strozzi in La vendetta, the song that gave the recital its title.

The lesson-telling of that and Costuma de grandi, the brilliant word-setting of Havete torto and the 12 minute mono-drama Hor che Apollo made the sequence after the interval a superb introduction to Strozzi, but the genius of the programme was the way it presented her work in context, with the Dunedin instrumentalists on top form.

The soprano – now happily a Dunedin stalwart – was the star however, in what was a beautifully nuanced, delightfully ornamented and utterly compelling performance.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Nardus Williams by Bertie Watson

Lammermuir: Royal Northern Sinfonia / Sousa

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St Mary’s Parish Church, Haddington

It is possibly a little gauche to mention it, but one person who has emerged well from the grim tale of the fall of Sir John Eliot Gardiner is the Principal Conductor of the Royal Northern Sinfonia, Dinis Sousa.

As Gardiner’s Associate Conductor of the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestras, he stepped up to the podium for the concert performances of Les Troyens after the rehearsal incident and the final show of the project’s European tour, at the Royal Albert Hall in the Proms season, was universally acclaimed. The RNS made an astute appointment of the Portuguese conductor two years ago and he is now a highly appreciated asset.

So too is the orchestra’s leader, Maria Wloszczowska, who partnered pianist Jeremy Denk in a Charles Ives sonata at Lammermuir two years ago and went on to play Bach with him in New York. She was the soloist in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto here before taking her place in the orchestra for Schumann’s last symphony.

There is a glorious fluidity to her playing and although she had the music in front of her, she rarely consulted it. In terms of performance, soloist and conductor were very much on the same page from the opening bars, which can sometimes seem purposely tentative but here took a hint from the timpanist’s march rhythm. Come the first movement’s closing cadenza, the timpani were crucial again, Wloszczowska and Sousa using the dialogue in the composer’s later piano version of the score.

While this was not always pacey Beethoven, it was neither leisurely nor sedate, and there was a compelling deliberateness about the slow movement, particularly in the relationship between soloist and orchestra, underlined in the way the music skipped into the finale. Sousa and Wlosczcowska were in lock-step in dynamics as well as tempo throughout.

The conductor’s account of Schumann’s Symphony No 3, the “Rhenish”, was very much as a showcase for his orchestra, the horns resonating in the fine acoustic of St Mary’s in the first movement, a beautiful clarity of sound in the wind soloists in the third, and the trombones at the back leading the chorale in the fourth.

There was an architectural grandeur here that is not always present in chamber orchestra accounts of the work, and the waltzing Scherzo sounded almost Viennese. Given the ultimately fatal fall-out of the composer’s recent Dusseldorf appointment, where the work premiered, this holiday jaunt down the Rhine with Clara has rarely sounded as sunny as it did here.

Keith Bruce

Lammermuir: Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective

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North Esk Church, Musselburgh/Dirleton Kirk

The rich and varied menu of 2023’s Lammermuir Festival had an especially tasty ingredient in the East Lothian residency of ten musicians of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective. It does not appear especially inspired at first, but rarely has a group been so well-named – for its range, its speciality, and its ethos – in those three words.

Although the other demands of their individual careers must limit the rehearsal time together, the communication between these players when they assemble on the platform – in combinations from a trio to a nonet that never repeated itself once over three programmes and eleven fascinating works (excluding encores) – was a constant delight to watch as well as hear.

That repertoire ran from Mozart and Stamitz to a world premiere in Nicola LeFanu’s After Ferrera, which was written for horn player Ben Goldscheider, but often as much of a showcase for cellist Laura van der Heijden. Her role throughout was as key to the success of these performances as those of violinist Elena Urioste and pianist Tom Poster, who co-ordinate the group.

But everyone involved stepped up at some point. Savitri Grier completed the trio for the LeFanu in Dirleton, and was first violin for Schubert’s wonderful Octet in Musselburgh, a beautifully structured account of one the most substantial masterpieces of chamber music. Clarinettist Matthew Hunt was the lead voice in much of that piece, and also key to Dohnanyi’s Sextet in the ensemble’s opening programme, which culminated in the Nonet by Samuel Coleridge- Taylor that Kaleidoscope has played a huge part in popularising.

The Dohnanyi – which literally sent the audience singing into the afternoon sun at the interval – was the first example of a significant strand in the repertoire played. Alongside Britten’s oboe-led Phantasy Quartet No 2, Reynaldo Hahn’s wonderfully elegant Piano Quintet, Poulenc’s Trio for oboe, bassoon and piano, and Korngold’s magnificent 1930 Suite, commissioned by one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein, it dated from the years between the wars of the last century.

Much of this music was as new to the ears of the audience as LeFanu’s piece, but the pioneering Lammermuir ticket-buyers were rewarded with sensational playing of lost gems, and a genuine sense of a shared adventure with an engaging collection of talent. The string section was completed by bassist Ruohua Li and Rosalind Ventris – another core player – on viola, and the double reeds were oboist Armand Djikoloum and bassoonist Amy Harman. Her beautifully rounded tone from that opening Iain Farrington arrangement of Mozart’s Bassoon Quartet onwards made a very eloquent case for her instrument’s voice in chamber music.

The bassoonist was also part of an unlikely “brass section”, with oboe and French horn, that distinguished the last music we heard from Kaleidoscope at Lammermuir this year. It was a Poster arrangement of Mancini’s Moon River for the Dirleton septet, which followed Gershwin encores he had made for the different combinations of players at the Musselburgh recitals.

The versatile pianist had just completed a stunning performance of the left-hand-only part Korngold wrote for Wittgenstein, surely as eloquent a work for the World War 1-injured pianist as Ravel’s famous concerto. Those nods to the Great American Songbook were not simply crowd-pleasers, but matched the period of some of the important scores Kaleidoscope have unearthed, and perhaps suggested a reason they were buried in the first place. 

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Amy Harman by Kaupo Kikkas

Don’t Kill Tradition, Build On It

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Harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani, currently in residence at the threatened Lammermuir Festival, tells KEN WALTON why tradition is as much about looking forward as looking back

Earlier this week, a shocked Lammermuir Festival revealed that Creative Scotland, after two invited re-submissions, had turned down its funding application for the 2023 programme, currently in mid-flow, leaving the future of the East Lothian festival in doubt. The news has shocked its organisers, supporters, and not least the performers who rank among the world’s topmost stars.

One of these is Iranian-American harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani, whose week-long presence as resident artist in this year’s Festival has given him an extended insight not only into what the event means in servicing Scotland’s and East Lothian’s cultural thirst, but the crucial role it plays in promoting new musical talent within a high stakes environment.

He had this to say in response to Creative Scotland’s latest act of evisceration: “At a place like Lammermuir, we are really talking about more than a series of concerts. We’re sharing as wide a range of music as can be imagined with different communities in a large region of Scotland that shows remarkable enthusiasm for it and which moreover trusts the performers. 

“And we see tribute paid to established artists alongside the crucial work that needs to be done in giving opportunities and a platform to tomorrow’s stars. In this sense, Lammermuir Festival is the very model of a modern festival.”

Esfahani, himself, is the very model of a modern pioneer. More than most, he has taken an instrument more often associated with museum status – the early music movement’s predilection for archeological scrutiny of ancient repertoire, which is fundamentally valid in itself – and thrown open the doors to the harpsichord’s relevance in a modern world. 

As such he has challenged the historical connoisseurs and is as equally comfortable performing Byrd, Scarlatti or Bach (he opened this week’s Lammermuir residency with an exhaustive performance of the Well Tempered Clavier Book II, and teams up on Sunday with the SCO in Bach’s concertos) as introducing curious audiences to contemporary harpsichord music by the likes of Andriessen, Takemitsu, Jockel and Ferrari involving electronics. 

One critic described Esfahani deservedly as “a superstar whose musicianship, imagination, virtuosity, cultural breadth and charisma far transcend the ivory tower in which the harpsichord has traditionally been placed.”

He views that “ivory tower” with some scepticism, but dismisses the notion that just because he seeks new modes of expression for the instrument he is some kind of crazy maverick. “”From the time of the harpsichord’s revival at the beginning of the 20th century, contemporary music is nothing new, so I merely see myself as continuing the tradition of that instrument. 

“Every instrument should concern itself with new music, otherwise its tradition dies. I say pointedly that what called itself the Early Music Movement actually interrupted those traditions. It’s a post-modern movement that has nothing to do with tradition.” 

The bottom line for Esfahani is simply the quality of the music. “I look for a composer who demands everything from me as a performer,” he explains. “There is harpsichord music, equally from the 17th/18th centuries, which I find takes the easy way out expressively. That’s to say it doesn’t extend one’s demands of the capabilities of the instrument. Bach or Byrd, these are composers who ask you to imagine possibilities beyond the ordinary. 

A year ago, Esfahani gave the UK premiere in Edinburgh and Glasgow of Poul Ruders’ Concerto for Harpsichord, a work exploding with inventive hues and textures, ethereally enhanced by electronic amplification. “I wanted a piece that was virtuosic, that sang, that understands that the harpsichord has an infinite range of colours,” he recalls. He got what he wanted.

His contemporary programme in St Mary’s Church Haddington earlier this week involved interaction with electronics, but what of the instrument itself? If tradition demands that the music itself must challenge the status quo, is it okay to meddle with the sacred design of the actual harpsichord?

“You just have to look at the Russell and Rodger Mirrey Collection of old instruments in Edinburgh to realise how knowledgable the older builders were about acoustics, about sound,” Esfahani argues. “Yes, it’s important we take signals from them today, but at the same time these builders were practical. Take the example of the Ruders concerto, where I used a very large, very loud instrument of mine, and you said today to, say, Ruckers or one of the great 18th century instrument makers, ‘we have this thing called the Usher Hall and have to fill the sound in there – what do we do?’

“He’d say, ‘okay we could do this or that. We have this thing called plastic, this thing called carbon fibre, let’s work with that.’ We have screws, they didn’t. Do you think they’d have objected to using screws? Often times these arguments are used in a very truant way. People say, there’s the piano; Bach would have preferred it, but we don’t know that. It’s very possible he would have, but he would have written differently for it. 

“At the end of day we can engineer, though we have to be careful. We don’t want to engineer the harpsichord out of existence.”

As for his Lammermuir residency, which continues on Friday with a recital of Bach’s English Suites before Sunday’s concerto programme as soloist/director with the SCO, it’s an experience Esfahani has found immersive and satisfying.  

“Of course I love it, in a way I assume that when I play the next concert the listeners will have heard the previous one. They get to know what I’m on about, and that conversation with them changes. During Bach’s 48 last Friday, I sensed after an hour that they were in the zone, that I could manipulate them a little bit. You have to always communicate. What’s the point if you don’t?

“Last night I though at times I can push the envelope a little bit – let’s see what we can discover together in this piece. Otherwise it just becomes an exercise in virtue. In which case, why not just stay at home and look at the score?” 

That’s something Creative Scotland might well mull over as it puts the stranglehold on yet another priceless cultural gem. 

Mahan Esfahani’s Lammermuir Festival residency continues with a Coffee Concert of Bach’s English Suites on Fri 15 Sep at Holy Trinity Church in Haddington; and ends with the SCO in Bach’s Harpsichord Concertos, Sun 17 Sep at Dunbar Parish Church, Full Festival details at www.lammermuirfestival.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.”

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