The Lammermuir Festival returns for 13 days of intimate and ambitious music-making in East Lothian from 8 to 20 September. It continues to be a festival shaped by place and by long-standing relationships, and builds its reputation through thoughtful programming, deep artistic relationships and a setting in which music feels inseparable from place.
Royal Northern Sinfonia return to the festival, providing a significant thread. Dinis Sousa and the Royal Northern Sinfonia are bringing their first concert performance of a Mozart opera, Così fan tutte to Lammermuir with soloists Christina Gansch, Alexandra Oomens, Jonas Hacker and Cody Quattlebaum as the lovers, plus Rebecca Evans and Neal Davies. Pianist Jeremy Denk also joins Royal Northern Sinfonia, directed by Maria
Włoszczowska for a three concert series of Mozart piano concertos
exploring the full range of the composer’s output with concertos nos. 9,
14, 17, 20, 24, and 25 alongside music by Janacek, Stravinsky and
Britten. The concert series also highlights Denk’s strong relationship with the festival.
Scottish Opera also have an ongoing relationship with the festival and this year, Douglas Boyd and the Orchestra of Scottish Opera are joined by sopranos Charlotte Kennedy and Charlotte Clapperton, and mezzo-soprano Avery Lafrentz for three of Britten’s works for solo voice, Les Illuminations, Our Hunting Fathers and Phaedra.
On a smaller scale but no less dramatic, tenor Nicky Spence and mezzo-soprano Victoria Simmonds are joined by Jeremy Denk for Janacek’s Diary of One who Disappeared. Denk also joins forces with tenor Nicholas Mulroy for Schubert’s Winterreise.
Another exciting thread in the festival is the residency from Concerto Copenhagen with sequence of programmes exploring Haydn’s symphonic world, including the vivid triptych of the ‘Morning, Noon and Night’ symphonies.
Pianist Javier Perianes makes his festival debut with a Chopin recital and then directs the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in Ravel, Haydn and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3. Violist Timothy Ridout makes a welcome return to the festival for a programme centred on Brahms’s Viola Sonata No. 2 and Bloch’s Suite for Viola. Other visitors include Scottish-Indian guitarist Samrat Majumder and the Fibonacci Quartet.
Lucy Crowe sings Strauss’s Four Last Songs, soprano Ailish Tynan joins the Hebrides Ensemble for music by Judith Weir, Thea Musgrave, Helen Grime, and Stuart MacRae, soprano Claire Booth and violinist Tamsin Waley-Cohen perform Kurtág’s intense Kafka Fragments, Matthew Brook joins Dunedin Consort for solo cantatas by Buxtehude and Bach.
Choral contributions include Tenebrae, The Marian Consort, and The Binchois Consort, whilst the female voices of National Youth Choir of Scotland’s Chamber Choir join Scottish Ensemble in a programme which includes David Fennessy’s Blood, based on a vocal melody by Hildegard of Bingen.
Full details from the Lammermuir Festival website.
