2024 Arts Preview: The Year Ahead in Classical Music

As smaller events and ensembles struggle, larger ones need to step up, writes David Kettle

It’s the season of goodwill, of warmth and cosiness, so it’s tempting here to simply give a pat on the back to Scotland’s classical music scene, and pick out a few choice highlights. There are plenty to choose from – Scottish Opera’s UK premiere of Jonathan Dove’s Marx in London! in February, for example, or the Dunedin Consort teaming up with ace Edinburgh-born guitarist Sean Shibe for a new concerto from Cassandra Miller in April.

But there’s something not quite so positive going on, too. Perhaps we’re still feeling the fallout of the pandemic, or perhaps it’s the cost of living squeeze (probably both, and many other factors besides). But there’s a definite sense of smaller things struggling, or being forced to quit, while activity is concentrated into larger-scale, better-funded organisations.

Pioneering community orchestra the Nevis Ensemble went to the wall in 2023 “following severe funding challenges”, it said, while there appear to be questions, too, about whether the St Andrews Voices festival is still functioning (no responses to queries about its future). Most shockingly, however, the long-term future of East Lothian’s Lammermuir Festival is in doubt after the withdrawal of Creative Scotland funding. Alternative support sources are being explored for 2024, with a festival currently being planned for September, but to lose one of the country’s most vibrant events would send a deeply worrying message about not getting too successful lest you’re expected to survive unsupported.

Pekka Kuusisto PIC: Felix Broede

Over at the Edinburgh International Festival, meanwhile, we’re promised events reflecting “rituals that unite us” for 2024, and already announced is a Carmen from Paris’s Opéra-Comique and director Andreas Homoki, one of three staged operas this coming year. It comes after what felt like a new inwardness in 2023, however, in a festival that seemed to spend a year trying out ideas and contemplating what it was for – a valuable opportunity that other organisations would no doubt relish, given the chance. Scottish Opera follows up Marx in London! in February with a revival of Sir David McVicar’s La traviata in May and June, but they’re two of just three main-stage, full-scale productions this season (for comparison, Welsh National Opera offers five, while Opera North has six in its autumn/winter season alone). If smaller organisations are struggling or facing oblivion, it’s hard not to feel we should expect more from the ones that are still securely supported.

But it’s far from all doom and gloom. There are plenty of reasons for celebration: not least Fife’s East Neuk Festival reaching the age of 20 in June, and Aberdeen’s sound festival of new music and Sir James MacMillan’s Cumnock Tryst both turning ten in October. The St Magnus Festival in Orkney, scheduled for midsummer, includes a new Orcadian song cycle for children.

The Royal Scottish National Orchestra, too, is going from strength to strength, with online broadcasts, pioneering partnerships, a European tour in January, and of course a wealth of music for Scottish audiences: Catriona Morison singing Chausson’s Poème de la mer et de l’amour in March and the season-ending Berlioz Grande messe des morts look like two sure highlights.

The BBC SSO continues a strong programme under Chief Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth: a Verdi Requiem (March) and Bruckner Seventh (May) will no doubt bristle with energy and insight. Part-way through its 50th anniversary season, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra is on exceptional form, seldom sounding stronger than under its effervescent Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, and with some revelatory partnerships: Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto returns for a trio of concerts in February and March (don’t miss his typically idiosyncratic Four Seasons), and Associate Composer Jay Capperauld introduces us to The Great Grumpy Gaboon in February – a brand new theatrical show for kids, with (we’re promised) some unexpected turns from SCO musicians.

More causes for celebration are entrepreneurial Glasgow composer Matthew Whiteside’s The Night With… concert series, which continues from strength to strength (it’s just held its first festival, with more concerts planned for 2024), and an unexpected addition to Scottish musical life from Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket: 2023’s four-evening Deep Time festival was a bit of a revelation, and there’s a similar Cage-themed event in the works for November 2024. And it looks like a landmark year for Edinburgh’s new Dunard Centre: construction work on the St Andrew Square concert hall is due to begin mid-year.

So it’s a mixed picture. And though new projects emerge to fill the gaps left by some cherished organisations, if the balance is shifting in favour of bigger, more established things, that can only raise questions about the richness and diversity of what we all experience in classical music.