Tag Archives: Lammermuir Festival

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.”

Lammermuir: Opening Concerts

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St Mary’s Church, Haddington / Gladsmuir Parish Church

The opening weekend of this year’s Lammermuir Festival toyed with history. We had a Richard Strauss opera, written in 1938 but rarely seen on the world’s stages, that was now breathing Scottish air for the very first time. Scottish Opera delivered that opportunity in a powerfully revealing concert staging. Why has it become a museum piece?

And while Mozart’s string quintets are performed often enough on modern instruments to modern ears, hearing them on period instruments, with all the fragile idiosyncrasies that entails, was a time-travelling ear-opening courtesy of the uniquely talented string ensemble, Spunicunifait. 

As for the Marian Consort, one of many excellent UK a cappella vocal ensembles focussed on fine-tuning our understanding of early sacred music, they were instrumental, so to speak, in articulating the paradoxical highs and lows of the fortunes besetting Haddington’s medieval St Mary’s Church during the early half of the 16th century.

Strauss’ Daphne, the Festival’s opening evening spectacular in St Mary’s, was a revelation. It has its weaknesses, not least a rather tepid storyline by librettist Joseph Gregor – drawn loosely from Ovid’s Metamorphosis and Euripides’ The Bacchae – that somehow passed muster with the composer. 

In this concert staging, director Emma Jenkins aimed to give it new life, thoughtfully transferring the original “bucolic tragedy” concept to a shadowy 1930s Weimar nightclub and the clandestine activities of the anti-Nazi White Rose movement. It was challenging, if strangely inoffensive, neither stealing the show nor threatening Strauss’ red hot score. 

The focus was firmly on the latter, sung by a cast that knew its worth and driven to the most thrilling Straussian heights by a turbo-charged Scottish Opera Orchestra, its uninterrupted musical narrative the very nerve centre of the piece. Placed behind the singers, superbly nurtured by conductor Stuart Stratford within the expansive church acoustics, the impact was all-embracing, from the sweet-scented pastoralism of the opening to the surreal string effects that etherealise the closing transformation music.

Soprano Hye-Youn Lee stole the vocal show as Daphne, a performance as steely and rapturous as it was affectionate and vulnerable. Australian tenor Brad Cooper addressed the role of Apollo as a pugnacious SS official, his manic animation sharpening the contrast with fellow tenor Shengzhi Ren’s penetratingly naive Leukippos. Recast as nightclub owners, Daphne’s father and mother – Dingle Yandell and Claire Barnett-Jones respectively – appeared like Cabaret side-show equivalents of Le Mis’s Thénardiers. 

Every performance, including a snappy supporting cast, served the performance well, and its worthy ambition to prove what an inspired piece of music this forgotten opera actually is.

The genius of Mozart’s six string quintets has never been in doubt, the consequence of the extra viola – which the composer himself would have played – opening up vistas for harmonic density, contrapuntal complexity and expanded musical conversation. 

In the second of their programmes exploring all six, Spunicunifait’s exclusive interest – they formed purely to celebrate these quintets – was borne out in performances that not only crackled with instinctive interaction, but treated us to the more visceral sound world Mozart’s audiences would have experienced.

That had its issues. Gut strings hate the heat, and Saturday in Gladsmuir Church was exceedingly hot and humid. Tuning between movements extended the concert – recorded for BBC Radio 3 – by a good 20 minutes, not to mention a mid-performance string break that required a quick change by one violist and an impromptu lecture on the perils of period instrument performance by the other (the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s’s new principal viola, Max Mandel).

In many ways the vulnerability of these instruments, and the level of player concentration required to make them speak truly and expressively, added immeasurably to the excitement of the event. A whispered fragility cast an air of suspense around the opening bars of the Quintet No 2 (Mozart’s arrangement of his own C minor Wind Serenade), a performance further enriched by its raw dynamism. The other works were originals: the late String Quintet No 6 in E flat, full of harmonic surprises, boisterous interplay and a golden Andante; the earlier No 3 in C unmistakably operatic through the playful jostling of its instrumentally-conceived dramatis personae. A playing style that took time to acclimatise to was always a joy to ingest, something of a challenge for 20th century ears, but always invigorating.

As for the ensemble’s curious name, Spunicunifait is a made-up word, a conflation of a nonsense phrase penned by Mozart in one of his often racy letters to his cousin “Basle”. 

Nothing was made up in the Marian Consort’s two Saturday events back in St Mary’s. These were based on facts surrounding a stormy few decades in which the Haddington church witnessed the burgeoning of musical excellence – it had its own song school – and the physically devastating impact of invading forces and the Reformation. 

The first Marian appearance was effectively a supporting role, providing music that gave context to a lecture-tour of the church – A Glory of the Middle Ages – by Edinburgh University’s Dr Lizzie Swarbrick, a foremost authority on medieval art and architecture. While much of what she told us about the likely richness of fabric, decoration and spiritual icons existing then within St Mary’s had to be imagined, the music examples by Rory McCleery’s first-rate ensemble was an immediate and exhilarating presence. Motets by Christopher Tye and Adrian Willaert combined with ritualistic chants, performed in a progression of strategic positions within the building. 

It also acted as an intoxicating taster to the more formal concert that evening, a sequence of 15th century music sourced from the Dunkeld part books housed in Edinburgh University, some of it anonymous, some of penned by key continental figures, reflective of 16th century Scotland’s independent openness to the sophisticated fashions of mainland Europe, something the SNP would no doubt approve of. 

The anonymous Missa Felix namque echoed such inspirational circumspection, acting as the programme’s spinal cord and exemplified in a performance that sourced spiritual depth from its outward naivety. That said, the high points were undoubtedly the surrounding set pieces: a melancholic Pater Noster by Pierre Certon, the florid intensity of Josquin’s Benedicta es caelorum Regina, and the gloriously rich harmonies of an anonymous O Maria stans sub cruce.

The supreme purity of the singing, its immediate contextual relevance, and periodic commentary from Swarbrick, struck a resounding consonance against a historically dissonant background.

Ken Walton

Chamber music’s full spectrum

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The pianist at the heart of Lammermuir-resident ensemble, Kaleidoscope, tells KEITH BRUCE about the music festival audiences can look forward to

Tom Poster sounded remarkably relaxed when we spoke less than a fortnight ahead of the Lammermuir residency of Kaleidoscope, the chamber collective he leads with his violinist wife Elena Urioste. The couple’s summer schedule, I suggest, does look to have been non-stop.

“That’s true,” the pianist concedes. “Elena and I just got back from a month in the States. We were in Santa Barbara and Seattle, and then in Maryland where Elena has a small festival. Then we made our Proms debut with Kaleidoscope in Truro, and now we are about to go off to France for a week with the Elias String Quartet before preparing for Lammermuir.”

A glance at his website confirms the suspicion that playing chamber music with a constantly-evolving list of different ensembles and collaborative partners means learning a huge amount of different music. Poster says that, in fact, he has eased up a bit.

“One of the changes I’ve made since becoming a parent two years ago is that I am slightly more thoughtful about not overloading myself with repertoire. There’s so much music I love that I used to try to say ‘yes’ to as much as I could, but with a two-year-old it is hard to learn quite as many notes.

“But Festivals, for pianists especially, do tend to involve a large number of notes!”

Besides playing, of course, there is also the business of keeping Kaleidoscope on the road, with 10 players making up the team staying in East Lothian.

“We have a lovely administrator who works with us on a freelance basis, otherwise I think I’d go completely mad,” says Poster, “but Elena and I do end up doing an enormous amount ourselves, partly because the repertoire and the musicians involved are so intertwined.

“We have a flexible line-up, with a slightly different group of musicians for each concert, depending on repertoire or who is around and available. We are both very passionate about the art of programming, as well as the selfish pleasure of gathering together some of our favourite musicians to play in new and different combinations.

“The Lammermuir group has a lot of our regular players: Elena and myself, Rosie Ventris (viola), Laura van der Heijden (cello), Savitri Grier (violin) – all the string team for Lammermuir are very much core players. But every one we’re bringing is an integral part of the team.”

Lammermuir audiences can also look forward to core Kaleidoscope in the music that team is playing.

“We are very lucky that James Waters and Hugh Macdonald are such wonderful and generous festival directors. They gave us free rein and that enabled us to put together what I think is a trademark Kaleidoscope programme.

“There are some justly celebrated works, like the Schubert Octet, alongside a number of pieces that we really just feel deserve to be heard far more and which we are really confident that audiences will love when they hear them, even if they haven’t heard them before.”

Monday’s opening recital includes a work that Kaleidoscope can take credit for helping down that road to familiarity.

“The Coleridge-Taylor nonet is a student piece that he wrote when he was 18 at the Royal College of Music. I came across it because we are always looking for pieces that involve as many of us as possible.

“After the pandemic, when concert halls were just beginning to re-open, John Gilhooley asked us to programme a concert at Wigmore Hall. There’s not all that much for strings, winds and piano – and selfishly I wanted to be part of the recital.

“We all fell in love with it, and recorded it for Chandos on a whole Coleridge-Taylor disc last year. It has become a real signature piece. It is such an inventive work, where he is flexing his musical muscles. It has a young man’s exuberance, trying to find as many combinations of the nine instruments as possible. It has immediate appeal and always seems to go down well with audiences.”

Other works that Kaleidoscope are bringing to East Lothian are being championed by Poster’s group in the same way.

“I can’t understand why the Reynaldo Hahn Piano Quintet is a piece that is not played all over the place. Anyone who loves the chamber music of Faure will adore it – it is one of the most sumptuous pieces of chamber music I know. Singers know his songs, but his chamber music is just as wonderful.

“And the Korngold Suite is a piece that does get played occasionally but the unusual combination of instruments means it doesn’t get heard enough. It’s a piano quartet with two violins and cello, but the pianist is only using left hand because it was written for Paul Wittgenstein.

“Elena has loved the piece for years and persuaded me to practise my left hand skills! It has so many influences, from Bach to Viennese waltz, with this sort of golden shimmer. There’s this amazing slow movement that is just so touching.

“Another thing we are really excited about is the world premiere of Nicola LeFanu’s new piece which Ben Goldscheider has commissioned – a trio for horn, violin and cello. I haven’t heard that yet so I can’t talk in detail about the music, but it’s always a special thing to be bringing new music. I have seen a bit of the score and it looks immediately appealing with wonderful textures from the three instruments.”

New music is something that Poster sees as integral to the development of Kaleidoscope in the future.

“I do a lot of arranging for the group, which is a side passion of mine. Clarinettist Mark Simpson regularly plays with us and is also a wonderful composer. He is going to write something for us and we have various other plans in the pipeline.”

The group’s fourth disc for Chandos is coming out this month. Entitled Transfigured, it has Schoenberg as its centrepiece alongside three other works from the Viennese early 20th century period, that Poster says deserve to be heard far more: Zemlinsky for soprano and string sextet, Alma Mahler songs which he has arranged for soprano and string sextet, and a Webern Piano Quintet, an early Romantic work by the composer.

Another side of Urioste and Poster’s musical life will also have an outing as a Coffee Concert on Wednesday morning in Haddington. The couple’s Juke Box videos-from-home, with Poster’s duo arrangements of light classical, pop and rock tunes became a phenomenon during the Covid pandemic.

“The success of the lockdown Juke Box project has been the biggest surprise of our musical lives so far,” says Poster. “When we originally dreamed it up it was just to keep ourselves amused, and we thought maybe our mums might watch it. But it happened to fill a need for what people were looking for at the time. Obviously we didn’t expect lockdown to go on so long, but then it has had an afterlife as a recording that has won awards, and as a live programme it is a lot of fun.

“We try to incorporate the element of public choice that was the original impetus behind it, by giving the audience a chance to vote for what they want to hear.”

It is another facet of this pianist’s enormous range of activity, often, but not always, in partnership with Urioste.

“I do still play concertos – I’m at the Royal Albert Hall for Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with the Philharmonia at the end of the month, and I’ve Grieg and Rachmaninov coming up later in the season. But concertos are really just large-scale chamber music. The collaborative aspect of music-making is where I find most joy and fulfilment. I still play some solo recitals – a few each season – but chamber music is the thing I’ve found keeps me inspired with its musical companionship bringing people together.”

Kaleidoscope plays the Lammermuir Festival on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. Elena Urioste and Tom Poster programme their Juke Box on Wednesday.

Lammermuir 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scottish Opera’s new season

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pictured: Jonathan Dove

Lammermuir: Catriona and the Dragon

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Dunbar Parish Church

The fact that Lammermuir Festival kept faith with its latest community opera project for four years, through all the prohibitions of the pandemic, makes celebrating it something that overrides any conflict of interest I may have in doing that for VoxCarnyx.

My son, baritone Arthur Bruce, was one of three professional singers involved, alongside mezzo Andrea Baker and – in a demanding multiplicity of roles – soprano Catriona Hewitson. They would concede that the show was not about them, however, as they voiced the story-telling alongside a huge cast of local people, from adults to young primary schoolchildren, singing, acting and playing most of the orchestral instruments.

Conducted by Sian Edwards, who marshalled their varying skill-levels with impressive aplomb, the orchestra was led by Katie Hull. It was in itself a fascinating development of the McOpera ensemble established by Scottish Opera players when their staff contracts became part-time, with musicians from the SCO, Maxwell Quartet, National Youth Orchestra of Scotland and elsewhere as principals.

Composer Lliam Paterson and librettist Laura Attridge had risen to the challenge of giving everyone in this diverse company an important part to play in a narrative that used local folklore and had a lucid, and unpatronising environmental message. Not only were all the young participants on board for the anthemic chorus at the end, but a child of no more than one in front of me was engrossed by it all.

Leading the community cast in the role of Queen Catriona, Nora Trew-Rae not only revealed a fine voice as the show evolved, but also put in a good number of laps of the auditorium in an energetic performance. That physicality ran through the project and the directors – Attridge, Moira Morrison (Chorus Director), and Ian West (Movement) – achieved wonders of co-ordination. It was Hewitson who often provided the icing on the cake, especially in her soaring singing of the Dragon, but also with some startlingly fast changes of costume.

The climactic confrontation between the Queen and the beast happens off-stage, reported and enacted by her courtiers, Carruthers and Colquhoun (Baker and Bruce). That is a device that can be traced back to ancient tales like Beowulf, but it perhaps lacked a little dramaturgical – rather than performative – style to be a complete success here, solely because it was the only time there were so few people onstage.

It hardly mattered, though, as the chorus quickly returned for that moving Anthem for East Lothian. The county, and Lammermuir Festival, can be justly proud of its talented people, making such a vibrant show in this terrific wee venue.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Catriona Hewitson in rehearsal with the cast by Rob McDougall

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