The Lammermuir Festival returns this September with a rich and ambitious programme of beautiful music in beautiful places. The festival runs from the 8 – 19 September, featuring 35 live performances at 16 venues across East Lothian, allowing audiences to truly explore and appreciate the beauty of Scotland’s ‘sunshine coast’.
Starting mornings in style, this year’s festival features the return of the Coffee Concerts at Holy Trinity Church in Haddington. Split into two sections, the first will feature internationally acclaimed Scottish accompanist Malcolm Martineau who has devised four programmes in partnership with BBC Radio 3. Over the course of four concerts, Martineau performs all 16 of Henri Duparc’s gorgeously romantic songs accompanied by major singers Jennifer Johnston, Joshua Ellicott, Sarah Fox and James Newby. The second half of the concert series features festival debuts for pianist Till Fellner, performing Beethoven and Schubert, violinist Viviane Hagner playing Bach, and French oboist Armand Djikoloum playing Tchaikovsky, Britten and Poulenc, in addition to returning Lammermuir Festival favourite, Danny Driver.
In Scottish Opera’s 60th anniversary season, it will perform a semi-staged performance of operatic rarity, Massenet’s Thérèse (1907), in what is likely its Scottish premiere on Thursday 8 September at St. Mary’s Parish Church. Conducted by Anu Tali, this passionate two-act opera set during the French Revolution is a must-see for opera lovers and stars one of today’s most exciting singers, soprano Justina Gringytė.
Festival artist in residence 2021, American pianist Jeremy Denk returns for five performances, beginning with a characteristically eclectic programme featuring Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit and Missy Mazzoli’s Heartbreaker at Dunbar Parish Church on Thursday 8 September. In a friendship born at the 2021 Festival he is reunited with violinist Maria Włoszczowska on Tuesday 13 September to perform all six of Bach’s gloriously imaginative Duo Sonatas.
The Royal Scottish National Orchestra makes its festival debut on September 10th conducted by Rory Macdonald in Sibelius’s 4th symphony and Brahms’s second piano concerto with Jeremy Denk as soloist.
On 10th September ‘The Lure of Hollywood’ features Marta Fontanals-Simmons, Sophie Daneman, William Dazeley, Neil Brand and Iain Burnside in a concert of film and song around composers who left Germany for Hollywood in the 1930s.
Conducted by Christopher Bell, the newly formed National Youth Choir of Scotland Chamber Choir makes its debut live performance on Sunday 11 September. The choir delivers a diverse programme featuring James MacMillan’s haunting a cappella Culham Motets, Caroline Shaw’s And the Swallow and Britten’s Hymn to St Cecilia.
The Dunedin Consort returns for its 13th consecutive year at Lammermuir on Sunday 18 September. John Butt will lead the Consort through Mozart’s unfinished ‘Great’ Mass in C minor K427: the cast includes stellar sopranos Lucy Crowe and Anna Dennis.
This year’s line-up brings an exciting number of new artists to the Lammermuir Festival including Baroque ensemble, Spiritato, which will make its Festival debut on Tuesday 13 September, performing alongside The Marian Consort for a thrilling performance of uplifting choral music from the very soul of the 17th and 18th Centuries.
French ensemble, The Quatuor Agate makes its Scottish debut on Saturday 17 September, at Gladsmuir Church in first of its two appearances at the festival, centered around Brahms’s String Quartets.
Lammermuir Festival favourites, Quatuor Mosaïques return for three sensational concerts of the last three quartets of Haydn and Schubert. On Sunday 11 September, they will return to Crichton Collegiate Church, where they last performed in 2019, for a thrilling performance in this mediaeval church hidden in a secluded valley.
Nestled in the Lammermuir hills at Nunraw, the Cistercian monastery of Sancta Maria Abbey is a festival venue for the first time, hosting the award-winning vocal collective, Sansara, for a concert celebrating the wonderful music of William Byrd on Friday 16 September.
Among the atmospheric partial ruins of another new venue, Dunglass Collegiate Church on Sunday 18 September, The Orlando Consort, renowned for its Renaissance and Medieval vocal performances, sings a beautiful and intimate programme of works, including those by Gilles Binchois and Guilluame Dufay known to be popular with Scottish Kings in the 15th Century.
Closing the Festival on Monday 19 September, Jeremy Denk, performs Beethoven’s 4th piano concerto alongside the Royal Northern Sinfonia, conducted by Dinis Sousa, in a celebratory concert opening with the enigma of Ives’s Unanswered Question and ending with Mendelssohn in breezy Mediterranean mood.
Hugh Macdonald & James Waters, Artistic Directors of Lammermuir Festival said: This year’s festival is our most ambitious to date and we couldn’t be more excited to share our plans. The wonderful American pianist Jeremy Denk returns with another astonishing collection of performances. Our friends Quatuor Mosaïques bring their incomparable Viennese insight to the music of Schubert and Haydn. Scottish Opera performs a late masterpiece by Massenet, and the exquisite French songs of Henri Duparc form the backbone of our coffee concerts.