Getting the hangar of it

Last year, in the direct wake of the Edinburgh Festival, two wise old owls of the Scottish arts scene – Hugh Macdonald and James Waters – took a chance with a brand new festival just south of the city in East Lothian. “I imagine there was a bit of scepticism along the lines of ‘do we need yet another Scottish music festival’ and it being so close geographically to the big one,” admits co-director Macdonald.

But in the event, the first Lammermuir Festival was a resounding success, attracting 80 per cent audiences and an ongoing commitment to fund the event by a highly pleased East Lothian Council, alongside Creative Scotland and Event Scotland.

Twelve months on, and the second Lammermuir Festival is not only bigger and further flung, in terms of accessing more hidden gems among the area’s characterful venues, but it has sensibly delayed the start point by a week, just to let us all recover from the cultural gluttony of Edinburgh.

It runs from Friday until 25 September, featuring 17 world-class events in a spread of locations as varied as St Mary’s Church and Poldrate Granary in Haddington, various village churches from Dirleton to Stenton, elegant stately homes and even an aircraft hangar. “I feel more comfortable that we have that extra week after Edinburgh,” says Macdonald.

So far as content is concerned, there should be no worries about a lack of pulling power. Among a line-up that extends from trumpeter Alison Balsom, violinist Jennifer Koh and upcoming clarsach player Emily Hoile, to the full might of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Scottish Chamber Orchestra, is a range of programming encompassing chamber, orchestral and choral music, with a bold and ambitious music theatre project thrown in for good measure.

That last event is a rare staged performance of Philip Glass’s 1000 Airplanes on the Roof, a collaboration between the Festival, John Harris’ highly creative Red Note Ensemble and the National Theatre of Scotland, which takes place this Sunday evening in the Concorde Hangar at the National Museum of Flight in East Fortune.

The production itself will move on to Aberdeenshire’s Sound Festival and Glasgow Royal Concert Hall in October, but the Lammermuir performance will be the only opportunity to see Glass’s extra-terrestrial music drama in exactly the type of unconventional venue it was written for.

“After commissioning an electronic work last year to be performed inside Concorde, we had worried about using the hangar again this year, unless we could find a project that had relevance there,” Macdonald explains. “It was then that John Harris reminded us that 1000 Airplanes was actually premiered in 1988 in a hangar at Vienna Airport. It seemed a no brainer. The original production was brought to Glasgow’s Mayfest in 1989, with a revival by the Paragon Ensemble in the city’s Tron Theatre in 2003, but Macdonald believes this could be the first time since the premiere that it has been performed in its intended setting. “The National Theatre of Scotland’s willingness to direct and co-fund the project really made it possible,” he says. Scots actor David McKay will play the mysterious figure “M” who recounts messages he claims to have received from extra-terrestrial life-forms. Glass’s music, through his trademark minimalism, casts a hypnotic halo around this strange character.

Elsewhere in the Festival programme, local strengths and connections inform the content and context. So far as musical connections go, none is quite so prestigious as the area’s link with Gian Carlo Menotti, the eccentric composer of Amahl and the Night Visitors and one-time partner of American composer Samuel Barber, who, up to his death in 2007, lived somewhat reclusively in Yester House, his glorious mansion in the village of Gifford where the locals referred to their strange laird as Mr McNotti.

“We’re only now beginning to realise how much of an international figure Menotti really was,” Macdonald maintains. “Part of the problem was that his music is essentially conservative; he wasn’t a modernist.” This, the centenary year of his birth, provides an ideal opportunity to test the theory, so scattered throughout the programme are examples of Menotti’s music that we may not have come across.

Jennifer Koh performs the tuneful Violin Concerto – a work she studied with the composer and recorded – in a concert with the BBC SSO, preceded by a talk on the composer by local writer and lecturer Derek Watson; the Navarra String Quartet (back after their success last year) are joined by Harpist Emilie Hoile and soprano Louise Alder in St Andrew Blackadder Church, North Berwick for a rare performance of the Nocturne for soprano, harp and string quartet; and Alder includes the Canti della Lontananza – written originally for Elisabeth Schwarzkopf – in a song recital with pianist Sam Hutchings at Winton House, Pencaitland.

The Samuel Barber connection is hinted at in the opening orchestral concert this Friday by the SCO, when Pablo Gonzales conducts the American composer’s Canzonetta for oboe and strings, with SCO principal Robin Williams as soloist. But the Menotti theme is neither overbearing nor overdone. Faure, Poulenc and Tavener are featured in this Sunday’s afternoon concert at St Michael’s Kirk, Inveresk by Christopher Bell’s splendid NYCoS National Girls Choir. The Hebrides Ensemble combines the spiky modernism of Kurtag with Mozart and Schubert in Stenton Parish Church. Vocal group Stile Antico make a welcome return in music of the Spanish Renaissance. And the Bach theme – prevalent last year – continues with Koh’s unaccompanied violin recital in Lennoxlove House, and in a closing concert in St Mary’s Haddington by the Dunedin Consort, under its director and Bach expert, John Butt.

The final Saturday of the Festival – 24 September – sees a repetition of last year’s Musical Journey by the Navarra Quartet – three recitals at different parts of the day in different churches. Each has a work by Beethoven and Britten. On the previous day, Alison Balsom’s appearance with the Scottish Ensemble includes Seraph, a work written specially for them by James MacMillan.

All in all, there’s nothing to suggest that Lammermuir lurks under anyone’s shadow. It has a magnetism all of its own.

l Lammermuir Festival, 16 to 25 September in various venues throughout East Lothian, www.lammermuirfestival.co.uk.