Ten concerts in seven different East Lothian churches, starting with a winter journey and ending in tears from Dowland: these would be riches enough for any top festival. But this was only the last four days of a nearly two-week programme. Simon Thompson has already covered now-regular visitor Jeremy Denk in Mozart piano concertos and vivacious Concerto Copenhagen in Haydn symphonies. I had the delight of more Denk, both as soloist and song partner, as well as great artists I've never seen live before, including soprano Christina Gansch, luthenist-plus Thomas Dunford and three string quartets (the Fibonaccis, Consones and Maxwells). Plus one of the great outdoor happenings, with tubas and friends in a magical walled garden tackling an American behemoth from the 1970s
A rain shower had us hurrying in to early 17th century, pink sandstone Dirleton Church (pictured below later; JC), just off the second of two very English-feeling village greens, for Schubert's Winterreise. You can tell a lot, about the piano part at least, from the very first bars before the soloist enters in "Gute Nacht"; Jeremy Denk's singular inflection passed the test of the best. Nicholas Mulroy matched him in extreme sensitivity, even if his tenor no longer has the lustre it once possessed, and the short range could do with a stronger lower register. But the narrative partnership was the thing, and startling details came so thick and fast that halfway through I got out my programme and actually started making the shortest notes (something I usually avoid during a performance).
Those felicities are too many to ennumerate here, but the vividness of contrasting dynamics conjured poignant contrasts between present misery and past happiness in "Der Lindenbaum" ("The Linden Tree") and "Fruhlingstraum" ("Dream of Spring"), while Denk's singular array of ghost voices and macabre pizzicati intensified the later stages of the journey, with Mulroy heroic in "Die Nebensonnen", and as original an approach to the famously desolate simplicity of the final dialogue with the strange old hurdy-gurdy man.
"Un tal baccano in chiesa" ("such an uproar in church"), thunders Scarpia to rollicking choristers in Puccini's Tosca. He would definitely disapprove, like Beethoven, of the supposed frivolity in Mozart's Così fan tutte taking place in what is one of Scotland's great medieval ecclesiastical buildings, St Mary's Kirk, Haddington, centre of operations for the Lammermuir Festival. Left half-ruined after Henry VIII's "rough wooing" of Scotland and the Reformation, its roofless choir was restored in the 1970s and it turns out to be the ideal acoustic for everything in it - even opera (Strauss's Daphne was performed here several years back).
Dinis Sousa, who animated the English National Opera revival earlier this year, conveyed his vivacious love of a masterpiece to the Royal Northern Sinfonia, of which he is Music Director. Even though they had a place behind the raised platform on which the action took place, few details were missed, and Sousa's collaboration with the singers, turning to them from time to time, was lovely to watch.
The cast was world-class without exception. The advertised Alexandra Oomens was replaced by Angela Brower, well versed in all Dorabella's tricks and manners, a mezzo I've long wanted to see in the UK (she's a Met regular and an acclaimed Octavian worldwide). She ran the vocal gamut, from perfect blending in ensembles to the fullest of tones; "Smanie implacabili" was more impressive than I've ever heard it, the first show-stopper.
Her experience clearly helped Christina Gansch, even if they didn't seem likely sisters: it helped with the drama that sparkly Dorabella seems like the most ferocious one, but when this Fiordiligi came into her own, "Come scoglio" ("Like a rock") took us by surprise. Gansch even pulled an extra dramatic stop out at the end of the opera's deepest number, "Per pieta", in Act 2, when fun and games have turned to desperate turmoil. A truly wonderful soprano.
If Jonas Hacker's excellently characterised Ferrando lacked a bit of the soft sweetness you want from the ideal tenor in the role, he went along with Cody Quattlebaum's more bullish Guglielmo, whose pride comes before a serious fall. The baritone's unleashed hair served as disguise for the pretend suit; this Ferrando had to make us believe in his Albanian with the mere addition of a moustache and the coloured shirt.
Neal Davies had the most impressive gestural intensity of them all as the manipulator Don Alfonso, and Rebecca Evans is still in astonishing bright soprano form as an older, if not ultimately wiser, Despina: the disguises as mesmeric doctor (pictured above in the Act 1 finale) and gabbling notary were actually funny. Longer time with a director on an actual production might yield more, or possibly less (Lucy Cullingford, movement director, was uncredited here but not for the ensuing Newcastle performance): the familiar lines gave us the opera's shift from broad comedy to pathos and confusion as intended, and Sousa's pacing, as at ENO, was simply perfect after a worryingly slow opening to the overture. He'll surely be music director of a major opera company in time.
18th century wit in the hands of the finest musicians continued the following morning as the Fibonacci Quartet soared and dazzled in Haddington's clearly well-attended Holy Trinity Episcopal Church - just a stone's throw from the river Tyne (St Mary's pictured above from the old bridge above, DN) the next morning with Haydn's "Lark" Quartet (the D major, Op. 64 No. 5). We've lost what was our best young quartet, the Castalians, when they disbanded; that this is a new equal was evident from Luna de Mol's first ecstatic soaring, bringing memories of first revelations from the Castalians' Sini Simonen.
The players are bold enough to elaborate recaps or play with a phrase on its return, even two notes (viola player Elliot Kempton's two notes in the Menuetto), and the pace of the famous vivace finale - the first quartet music I ever heard, on one side of a 78 - defied belief in its joy and precision. The Fibonacci's shadings made something very beautiful of a friend's quartet arrangement of Florence Price's now-ubiquitous Adoration. As for the Debussy Quartet, with Kryštof Kohout swapping places as first violin, I wasn't sure I quite believed cellist Findlay Spence in his sincere praise for Debussy's as the most special of slow movements until I heard the mesmerising interpretation. What a work of incredible unity this is, no mere starter work; here, we hung on every phrase. (Kohout, de Mol. Kempton and Spence pictured below; DN).
Would that I'd been there for the Fibonacci's concert the previous day, where they got the audience to join in Moravian folk songs. This encore was pure delight, anyway - a very ingenious combination of Gershwin songs to make what they called "I got fascinating rhythm'.
I'd go anywhere to hear these players now. But it says so much for the Consone Quartet, first period-instrument group on the BBC New Generation Artists programme, that their first programme also took us into other worlds with perfect focus. Aberlady Parish Church (pictured below; DN) was their venue, its 15th century tower close to the bay where curlews call and pink-footed geese overwinter. The melancholy grey of a chilly afternoon coincided well with the miraculous bittersweet quality of Schubert's A minor Quartet, where the "Rosamunde" theme is the only unsullied serenity in the piece. The Consones handled the most ambiguous of so-called Menuettos beautifully, and lightened the mood for the parts of the finale which merited it.
They, too, adapted a work for violin and piano, Clara Schumann's Three Romances, a magical opener; and it's only because of the Fibonacci's 18th century choice, the Haydn "Lark", that I've taken away less from Mozart's "Hunt" Quartet. Second violinist Magdalena Loth-Hill is a splendid verbal communicator, informing the audience about the gut strings and lighter bows the Consones use, and talking to her the next morning, I caught something of her wonderment that not only was the church packed, but with an intensely concentrating audience.
After the emotional challenges of the Schubert, Mozart and Debussy performances, Saturday evening's concert back at St Mary's was a welcome divertissement in Concerto Copenhagen's last appearance at the festival, a cleverly planned programme of serenades and the like threaded with Mozart's Eine klene Nachtmusik. Only his Ganz kleine Nachtmusik, discovered in 2024, seemed too naive for its duration, though careful dynamics made all the difference.
The necessary Till Eulenspiegel for the occasion was first oboist Antoine Toruncyk (pictured above right with fellow oboist Lars Henriksson and horn players Daniele Blzonella and Ricardo Rodriguez; DN), taking obvious delight in his colleagues' work when he wasn't playing, and producing some farmyard noises to enliven the summery journey. There were interesting quirks in Druschetzky's Quintetto, and in the unusual combination of instruments used by Michael Haydn in his Divertimento MH 518, but the famous brother outstripped him in the sudden surprise of two violins duetting at the end of each section in the Haydn outstripped his talented brother Michael in his longer and otherwise conventional Divertimento Hob:II/20.
For the Consones' second concert, this time of string sextets with the addition of second viola Francesca Gilbert and second cello Alexander Rolton, we set out in gale-force winds to the 19th century church of Gladsmuir, on a main road but with a wonderful churchyard overlooking the Firth of Forth and a picturesque ruin of the original church (pictured below, Agata Daraškaitė, Gilbert, Loth-Hill, Elitsa Bogdanova, George Ross and Rolton; DN). They reversed the original order, because they thought they might be dead after Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht. So we started with the matutinal freshness of Brahms's First, B flat major String Sextet. Its serenity is offset by searching developments and a slow movement where the gut strings brought the theme for the Andante ma moderato's variations remarkably close to folksong. How marvellously democratic Brahms is in this work - the second viola leads the lower three instruments at the start of the finale - and how graciously, playfully even, he ends the outer movements.
Schoenberg's programmatic following of a Richard Dehmel poem about a woman who on a forest walk tells her lover she's bearing another man's child moves from angst to a radiance very different from Brahms's. Here was another supremely intense and fully realised inner world, with engagement from and between players at every point, and inevitably a starlit conclusion moving to tears.
We needed at least something of a musical break before the next searing, and it was thoughtful of Jeremy Denk, back at Dirleton Church, to exchange Bach's Prelude and Fugue in B minor for the A minor Partita before late Beethoven and Janáček. The clarity was dazzling, as expected, the Corrente going at an incredible lick and the final counterpoint suitably meaningful as well as dancelike. Beethoven's A flat major Piano Sonata didn't work quite so well in the venue: the middle movement had titanic charm, but there were sections of the third which felt like hectoring. That's Beethoven for you, but personally I prefer a pianist who keeps a bit more of a distance, like Elisabeth Leonskaja (who's back to playing Schubert tonight at the Wigmore Hall, as I finish this).
I'm sure tenor Joshua Ellicott would have made a fine drama out of Janáček's The Diary of One who Disappeared, but there was a buzz when we found out his replacement was Nicky Spence, whose interpretation of the song cycle seems to have been the highlight of those I spoke to who attended one of the recent Janáček festivals in Brno (Spence will be back to sing in Šárka, The Excursions of Mr Brouček and Jenůfa later this year). Denk, whose role as pianist was mostly more support for a gripping, word-musical delivery of the text than it had been in Schubert's perfect equilibrium, matched the intensity, and did not fail the emotional charge of the piano-only "Intermezzo erotico".
Yet it was Spence's instant ability to deliver the essence of a country boy's obsession with a Romani woman which seized us from his first lines. The mystery, ambivalence even, of Zefka's attraction was equally well outlined in briefer contributions from Victoria Simmonds, and three female voices from the Robin Chapel Choir heightened the weirdness, singing from the back of the church.
As encore, we had the jolly release of a Moravian wedding song (Simmonds, Denk and Spence pictured above; DN). Then Spence was back to his home in Paisley, and yesterday he was in the town's West Primary School, celebrating the launch of a new singing resource for every such school in Scotland, under the aegis of the National Youth Choir of Scotland. Simmonds and Spence after the concert (pictured below; DN).
Musical community projects are alive and well north of the border, and none more ambitious than the early evening happening in Amisfield Walled Garden not far from Haddington. The eight-acre garden itself is a triumph of locals coming together, the largest volunteer-led display of its kind in the UK.
Even more organisation was required for the one-off hour we spent there. Red Note Ensemble, Scotland's leading contemporary music group, had somehow managed to get together enough players of the tuba family to give the UK premiere of Anthony Braxton's Composition No. 19 (For 100 Tubas), composed in the 1970s and given its first performance in New York in 2006.
No, there weren't 100 tubas - more like 70 or so - but as instructed, they were in four groups (one pictured above; JC) with four conductors (Ammal Bhatia, Lucy Callen, Daniel Riley and Claudia Jablonski, whom I'd met in July participating in the conducting course at the Pärnu Music Festival, and being steered in a dual-control way at one of the sessions by the legendary Neeme Järvi)
Braxton's music is no oom-pah affair but a rather funereal and haunting dirge full of tritones, requiring sustained notes from the tubas before they all go off at a squealing tangent towards the end. What made it all work was Red Note's brilliant idea of having a trumpet ensemble in the central circle, welcoming us in and breaking up the potential monotony with mobile fanfares by Britten and Scottish composer Lewis Murphy, among others.
I worried for the players' fingers; it got very cold indeed, though the rain which had fallen earlier held off; the skies shifted from grey to blue and pink. But they, and the doughty spectators, seemed to weather it all. The final ritual was everyone processing to the centre, close to one hour after the start. Some folk were heading back for the English Concert in St Mary's Kirk that evening, but I had a meal at the excellent Mazzoli's - no plug, just genuine thanks for the best Italian food - with which to repay our hosts of the third and fourth nights.
The winds had dropped and the sun shone on Sunday morning, when the deconsecrated Crighton Collegiate Church (pictured below; JC) could be commandeered for the Maxwell Quartet and clarinettist Maximiliano Martin. It's the most beautifully situated of all the venues, built in the mid-15th century for Lord Crichton along with the castle beyond (where I remember a spontaneous but perfectly respectable party being held during my first year at Edinburgh University). After the Restoration, only the chancel was left with its roof, but the rest has been splendidly restored, with an impressive corbel table on the north side.
The Maxwells kicked off with a gutsy (and gutty) performance of Prokofiev's Second String Quartet, based on Kabardian folk melodies heard during his stay in the region following evacuation from Moscow in the Second World War. There's plenty of sorrow and anger between the lines, though, and the players let none of it pass unnoticed - a reminder that Stalin displaced and destroyed so many ethnic groups in the Soviet Union.
Uncompromising grief and/or terror are in every bar of James MacMillan's Tuireadh (the Gaelic for lament). As a quintet for clarinet and strings, it's been a difficult work to programme since its origins as a companion piece to a sculpture by Sue Jane Taylor commemorating the 167 deaths from a fire onboard the Piper Alpha offshore oil and gas platform on 6 July 1988. MacMillan is uncompromising in the range of sounds he demands from the five players, the clarinet emerging imperceptibly at first from silence - as in Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time - to rise to lacerating wails and agonised turns.
The traditionally-informed laments offer little consolation, and when the clarinet returns to its starting point we seem to have come full circle. Although it goes on to articulate fresh anguish in the lower register, the work could have stopped there; the problem is that it's a third too long. All credit, though, to the stamina of Maximiliano Martín, long-term principal clarinet of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (pictured above, centre, with Max Baillie, George Smith, Elliot Perks and Duncan Strachan; DN).
In the balm of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet after the interval, he worked with the church's beautiful acoustic to touch ecstasy in the higher lines, movingly complemented by first violinist Baillie in the perfect meditation of the Larghetto and allowing himself a few discreet elaborations in the Menuetto. The Maxwells had promised us their usual selection of Scottish folk music, but it was already a long programme, and the Irish equivalent as encore, enigmatically refined, was just as welcome.
What Martín achieved in his surroundings was profoundly echoed by - I'll say it again without embarrassment - the most extraordinary young countertenor of our time, Hugh Cutting in Dowland's masterpiece "In darkness let me dwell" (Cutting pictured above second from left with soprano Mélissa Petit, tenor Thomas Hobbs, bass-baritone Florian Störtz and lutenist Thomas Dunford; JC). With Dunford's matching subtlety doubling the power of the spell, it concluded the first half of a remarkable programme back in St Mary's Kirk marking the 400th anniversary of Dowland's death, and as Dunford later remarked, the intense silence of the attentive audience worked with it to create a sense of time suspended.
Dunford as impresario had threaded the perfect sequences for the ultimate homage, calling upon the versatility of his four singers and the five viola da gambas of his Ensemble Jupiter. This was the first stop of a tour that would take them to Paris, Vienna and London, and the many demands of a kind of semi-staging had not yet been perfected, though that never affected the rainbow range of performances.
While the instrumental ensemble (pictured above, Étienne Floutier, Clémence Schitz, Mathilde Vialle, Myriam Rignol and Nick Milne with Dunford; JC) had mostly lively dances from the Lachrimae sequence, the vocalists had to run an even wider gamut, from perfectly balanced harmonies to at least a couple of solos for each. Petit, like Cutting, trusted the acoustics to fade to near-silence, while "Come, heavy sleep" and "I saw my lady weep" put Hobbs's clarion tenor in the spotlight - especially effective in the lovely simplicity of the second - before Störtz joined him. Unlike the winter journey which had begun my own odyssey through the last four days in and around Haddington, this adventure did not end tearfully but with variegated joy and another communal singalong which has clearly been a feature of this marvellous festival.
