Lammermuir Festival 2025 review - music with soul from the heart of East Lothian

One piece that you’re unlikely to hear at the Lammermuir Festival is Lucia di Lammermoor. As co-director James Waters explained during a drive to the absurdly picturesque church and castle at Crichton (fit setting for a Netflix epic, let alone a blood-soaked bel canto opera), venues and resources do set some limits to works that can be presented to the standards he demands.

But not many: this year the festival hosted a double-bill of one-acters from Scottish Opera; it will welcome both the Philharmonia Orchestra at full strength, and Reinaldo Alessandrini’s legendary Concerto Italiano ensemble, later this week. My visit encompassed not only chamber concerts and recitals but I Fagiolini’s far-from-minimal stagings of both Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610. 

Those events filled (in every sense) the biggest venue among the dozen that Lammermuir uses, spread around the towns and coast of East Lothian. The Lammermuir hills themselves, site of Walter Scott’s and Donizetti’s dramas of marriage, mayhem and madness, rise just to the south. Some 20 miles east of Edinburgh, St Mary’s in Haddington officially ranks as a parish church but resembles, and feels like, like a cathedral. A medieval Franciscan foundation, the 200-foot-long church was wrecked by English armies during Henry VIII’s “rough wooing” of Scotland in the 1540s and only fully restored (and re-roofed) in the 1970s. Compact in forces, mighty in impact, the singers of I Fagiolini (and, in the Monteverdi, the suitably scary-looking Renaissance instruments of the English Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble, pictured below by Sally Anderson) made its renovated rafters ring and shake. Launched in 2010, Lammermuir has grown from a dozen events to 42 under the directorial duo of Hugh Macdonald and James Waters (for many years Brian McMaster’s associate director at the Edinburgh International Festival). It has some lovely locations to enhance but I never felt (as one sometimes can) that I was attending a pleasantly so-so concert easily outshone by its scenic or architectural backdrop. 

On the contrary: the chamber-music strand – provided by the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective and the Van Baerle Trio of Amsterdam – proved consistently robust, passionate and powerful. We endured none of the fatal gentility that can make a festival afternoon subside into a polite snoozefest. 

As for the performer we visited the fortress-like 15th-century church at Crichton (just over the border in Midlothian) to hear, Timothy Ridout takes the solo viola recital to a level of technical virtuosity and expressive versatility that makes the shape-shifting in-between instrument a star across the spectrum. In this landscape marked by a gory history of territorial raids, he grabbed some prime musical properties for himself: Bach’s G minor sonata from the violin, and G major suite from the cello, repertoire. Telemann’s ingenious and inventive Fantasias for solo violin also fell to his ambitions, but it was the iconic pair of Bach pieces that truly tested his expansionary aims. 

To my ears, the sonata never sounded too heavy, nor the suite too light. Ridout (pictured below by Kaupo Kikkas) combines a fabulous richness of tone with a range of voices that made, for instance, the fugue of the violin sonata sound like a one-person string orchestra, or the central dances of the cello suite a lordly, and lavish, feast of contrasting rhythms, flavours and textures. And Britten’s rare Elegy – which has a weight and gravity far beyond the years of its teenage composer – showed that Ridout can even master viola pieces too.Two concerts from the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective revealed all the command of mutating tone and pattern proclaimed by their name. Here, the ever-resourceful couple of pianist Tom Poster and violinist Elena Urioste were joined by flautist Adam Walker, violist Vicki Powell and the festival’s artist-in-residence, cellist Laura van der Heijden. At Dirleton Kirk, for their first gig, Walker managed a nerveless quick-change act from the salon refinement of Mozart’s flute quartet in D to the savoury vernacular idioms, and uncanny pastoral harmonies, of Barton’s Suite Paysanne Hongroise in Paul Arma’s flute-and-piano arrangement. Gritty rusticity also breaks in on sophisticated give-and-take in the Croatian composer Dora Pejačević’s bold piano quartet – for which the Kaleidoscopes stake a compelling claim – and, above all, in the whirling, driving gypsy rondo that closes Brahms’s first piano quartet.

Big-boned, open-shouldered, the ensemble’s Brahms typified an outfit happy – and able – to balance collective cohesion in their playing with individual flair. In their second Dirleton concert, much (though by no means all) of that flair came from Walker’s flute. The Three Aquarelles for flute, cello and piano by Philippe Gaubert belie their slightly wispy title with a vivid tonal palette (often more oil than watercolour) that gives body and feeling to the flows and eddies of what Poster described as “mellifluous, fluid, water-infused music”. 

Passages of ecstatic lyricism looked forward to the afternoon’s climax: Fauré’s first piano quartet, distinguished – in an outstanding ensemble performance – by the perfect weight and song-full, soulful nobility of van der Heijden’s cello. Before that, however, Walker pranced and bounced through Poulenc’s flute sonata, as enjoyable in moments of spirited breathiness as in his flights of silvery grace.

Last year, at the Ryedale Festival in Yorkshire, I heard the Van Baerles and was reminded by their sumptuous cohesiveness of the (almost) incomparable Beaux Arts Trio: they acknowledge the Beaux Arts’ peerless pianist Menahem Pressler, who died aged 99 in 2023, as an inspiration. At Dunbar parish church, a fiercely red sandstone ship gazing out over the North Sea, they spanned many moods and faces of the piano trio’s repertoire, from Haydn’s inexhaustible wit, sweetness and cunning (No. 30 in E flat) via Brahms and Lili Boulanger to the Ravel trio: a work almost symphonic in its shape and scope, and itself a signature piece for the Beaux Arts. Securely, but not staidly, anchored by pianist Hannes Minaar, violinist Maria Milstein and cellist Gideon den Herder (pictured below) brought a luxurious basket of mixed feelings – melancholy gaiety, veiled ardour – to Brahms’s trio no. 3. With Minaar’s elegant powerhouse to back them up, Milstein and den Herder set out on their captivating solo journeys. Along with strong instrumental accents and seamless togetherness went a keen alertness to the minute rhythmic shifts that always keep Brahmsian beauty from edging into blandness. As for Ravel, he just didn’t do bland. The Van Baerle’s ensured that the trio’s endlessly refreshed palette of colour and rhythm bent and thrilled the ear at every turn, from the wistful Basque-influenced string themes of the opening to the skittish leaps and lurches of the “pantoum”, the dense, dark and brooding passacaglia, and a majestic high-impact finale that signs off – in this work from the ominous days of 1914 – with a blaze of (ironic?) glory. Three players, but an almost orchestral range and depth: the special magic of a world-class trio.

With Dido and Aeneas, and then the Monteverdi Vespers, Robert Hollingworth and I Fagiolini brought old favourites onto new ground. Always engaging as MC, presenter and even stand-up comedian, Hollingworth can be a spiky defender of his own performance choices with these much-reinterpreted masterworks. St Mary’s in Haddington supplied a grand but not overwhelming frame for Baroque music-making that blended vocal and instrumental panache with communicative power. Hollingworth has plenty of good, strong ideas about “historically informed” performance – when it helps, and when it wrecks, a piece – but the unbridled emotional force of both the Purcell and Monteverdi trumped any scholarly wrangles. Their Dido did give us a few masks and props – for me, the sailors edged a bit too far into Gilbert and Sullivan territory, and the witches into Halloween school capers (pictured above by Sally Anderson). For the most part, however, capable, committed singers – and period instrumentalists – alone brought the tragedy achingly alive. The part bulked out by a well-judged insertion of another Purcell aria (from the Yorkshire Feast), Frederick Long made a charismatic Aeneas, agile and authoritative both in voice and (striding down the aisle) movement.Julia Doyle’s Dido (pictured above by Sally Anderson) had more grandeur than pathos, forceful even in abject abandonment until, at the close of a defiantly beautiful “When I am laid in earth”, she slumped. All the principals cut impressively through the big ecclesiastical spaces, with the diction of Rowan Pierce’s Belinda especially crystalline. Martha McLorinan’s Sorceress, and her spooky sisterhood, pulled off their creepy-comic turn with zest while the small band (just seven, including Hollingworth’s chamber organ) never lacked for pulse, colour or momentum. 

The question of momentum mattered in his Vespers. Hollingworth dislikes super-fast Monteverdi and, from his reading of the manuscripts, finds tempi that achieve presence and power rather than excitement for its own sake. As an interpreter he has other distinctive choices: a high pitch for the instruments, for instance (with the organ at A493), and – less contentiously – the small-group, one-to-a-part approach that avoids any massed-choir overkill. 

Not that this Vespers lacked visceral punch and bite, even in this cavernous barn. No more than ten (in psalm settings such as the Nisi Dominus), the I Fagiolini singers absolutely owned every corner of St Mary’s with a punchy precision whose impact surpassed more ragged choirs of thrice their size. 

Star quality blazed through many of the solo, duet or trio numbers from Monteverdi’s supreme scrapbook of polyphonic treats. If the glorious Nigra Sum from tenor Nicholas Mulroy (pictured below, centre, by Sally Anderson) proved that respect for historical context need not rule out sheer operatic bravura, the soprano duo of Julia Doyle and Ciara Hendrick (in Pulchra Es) had a sensuous sheen and ravishing languor. Sometimes it felt as if Hollingworth aimed to lower the musical temperature – I’ve certainly heard more frenzy, vim and dash at some points in the Vespers – in order to push up the reading on the emotional glass. If so, it worked. There was time to appreciate the ecstatic ornamentation of Greg Skidmore in the Audi Coelum, or relish the unfolding of one spectacular musical statement after another in the closing Magnificat – with the angelic feasting of the Esurientes (Doyle, Hendrick, McLorinan) especially fine. The instruments sounded splendid, from the pair of chitarrones that laid down a rock-solid rhythm section (Eligio Quinteiro, Lynda Sayce) and Aileen Henry's unerringly sensitive harp (pictured below) to those occasionally raucous yet somehow courtly sackbuts. Sometimes I felt that Hollingworth might have made even stronger use of the church architecture, and that singers and played sounded too closely bunched, and so from time to time got in one another's way. It takes a lot of vocal firepower for a small group of singers to outgun the semi-feral prehistoric trombones of the sackbut trio, but once or twice it happened. Still, he did manage the echo effects uncannily well, and one verse of the Marian hymn Ave Maris Stella emerged eerily from an aisle. In hands as firm as these, this space lends itself eagerly to musical drama and splendour with few limits. Maybe Lammermuir shouldn’t give up on the idea of Lucia di Lammermoor quite yet.

• The Lammermuir Festival continues until 15 September
• More Classical music reviews on theartsdesk