THANK YOU FOR THE MUSIC
breadth of the land. From Kirkwall to Mull, and the East Neuk to the Borders, Scotland will once again stake its claim to be one of the world’s top venues for great events on a modest scale. Indeed, its six summer festivals – St Magnus, East Neuk, Mendelssohn on Mull, Paxton House, Edinburgh International and Lammer- muir – are now so well established that many of the world’s top performers come back year after year. It’s also one of the few occasions in the musical calendar where audience and artists intermingle freely, in one big rolling party. Now in its fourth summer, the Lammermuir
is the newest of the six. The festival has been an amazing success story and it now spans a full ten days of music making, readings and other activities that fill the churches of Hadding- ton, Inveresk and Dunbar. ‘It is a marriage of location and event,’ says James Waters who, along with former Scottish Symphony Orches- tra director, Hugh Macdonald, founded the Lammermuir.
‘Our surroundings influence
hugely our choice of programme.’ And this was certainly the case with last
K
irkwall’s squat, pebble-dashed Auction Mart
is more used to the strains and Massey Fergusons
odour of livestock and the thrum of than Bizet’s Carmen, but
on a cool, sunny day last June a baton rose to herald the start of yet another summer of clas- sical music in Scotland. The St Magnus Festival marks the start of
three months’ music making in churches, barns, stately homes and distilleries the length and
Above: Levon Chilingirian, the man behind Mull’s ‘M on M’ festival. Top right: The Raeburn Quartet at last year’s Lammermuir Festival.
year’s festival highlight; an ambitious produc- tion on the spectacular cliff-top setting of Tantallon Castle. Over 2,000 people watched this grand-scale sound and light extravaganza, featuring specially commissioned music from the Scottish composer, William Sweeney, that interwove the castle’s ancient and bloody story with that of Scotland to the words of the Scot- tish poet, Aonghas MacNeacail. The story of the nation’s musical flower-
ing really begins in 1947, in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the Edinburgh
WWW.SCOTTISHFIELD.CO.UK 59
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