United Kingdom Lammermuir Festival 2025: (SRT)
Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective: Dirleton Kirk, 6.9.2025.
Mel Bonis – Suite en trio, Op.58
Philippe Gaubert – Trois aquarelles
Duruflé – Prélude, Récitatif et variations
Poulenc – Sonata for flute and piano
Fauré – Piano Quartet No.1
Purcell, Dido and Aeneas: Soloists and Orchestra of I Fagiolini / Robert Hollingworth (director). St Mary’s Parish Church, Haddington, 6.9.2025.
Cast:
Dido – Julia Doyle
Aeneas – Frederick Long
Belinda – Rowan Pierce
Sorceress – Martha McLorinan
Sailor – Rory Carver
Van Bearle Trio: Dunbar Parish Church, 7.9.2025.
Haydn – Piano Trio No.30
Brahms – Piano Trio No.3
L. Boulanger – D’un soir triste et d’un matin printemps
Ravel – Piano Trio
One of the Lammermuir Festival’s major methods of working is to build partnerships, inviting back artists year after year to embed themselves in the festival for a few days and, more importantly, to foster a relationship with audiences. Both the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective and the Van Bearle Trio are returning visitors to the festival, and there is a sense that the trust-building is working. How else could you explain Kaleidoscope’s ability to fill a seventeenth-century church on a Saturday afternoon for a concert of French chamber music that included several composers that rarely feature on a British concert hall programme?
They are evangelists for this repertoire, and they bring to it both curiosity and an empathy for the style. Their method of working suits it very well, too. Kaleidoscope are a collective of soloists but, for most of this concert, flautist Adam Walker felt very much like first among equals. His sensuous flute line was the most striking thing about Mel Bonis’s Suite, soaring confidently over Tom Poster on piano and Elena Urioste’s violin, but floating gently across the limpid theme of the beautiful slow movement. Philippe Gaubert’s Trois aquarelles, in contrast, contained the same sort of evocative lines but brought out with much more strength and forthrightness, before a final movement that was like a rustic folk song.
Walker’s flute balanced the piano and Vicki Powell’s viola much more equally in Duruflé’s Prélude, Récitatif et variations, which grew organically out of a shadowy opening before some urgent, quasi-operatic drama introduced the main variations. The flute then took centre stage for Poulenc’s sonata where the star moment was the long-breathed slow movement with its endlessly beautiful line of melody that was then blown away like a puff of smoke in the light-hearted finale. Similarly, Fauré’s Piano Quartet matched drama with gorgeous, soft playing, balanced all the time by Fauré’s gift for beautiful melancholia and emotional restraint. The finale, for example, had a touch of the tarantella to it, but it was always an extremely elegant, Gallic one.
The Van Bearle Trio made their Lammermuir Festival debut last year, playing all of Beethoven’s piano trios over five concerts. This year they returned with the smaller (but still substantial) menu of all three of Brahms’s piano trios over three concerts. The concert I saw featured a strident, dramatic performance of No.3, whose outer movements were dramatic and forward-thrusting, tempered by gorgeous, mahogany depths in the string playing for the second themes. Haydn’s Trio No.30 made for a much lighter contrast, but still one with humour and wit; music that seemed to ask a lot of questions and then answer them with its own conversational delicacy.
The slightly echoey acoustic of Dunbar Parish Church suits a piano trio, even if it somewhat flatters the higher registers, emphasising the twinkle of the violin and piano slightly at the expense of the cello. It worked very well for Ravel’s Piano Trio with its combination of gorgeously sweet writing and intensely dramatic outbursts. The explosions of the outer movements were terrifically exciting, surrounding a heel-kicking Pantoum and a doom-laden Passacaglia. The cello that sounded so underpowered elsewhere, however, got its moment in the spotlight in the dark, urgent song-without-words that launched Lili Boulanger’s D’un soir triste, underpinning the violin in the rest of the piece as though it was keeping guard over it, the piano all the while intoning ominously behind them both. This, like much of their concert, was a turbulent cauldron of emotions expressed with a framework of supreme restraint.
Alongside returners like Kaleidoscope and the Van Bearle Trio, however, came a debut: I Fagiolini’s first visit to the Lammermuir Festival. Their programme of Purcell centred on a semi-staged performance of Dido and Aeneas but was preceded by a collection of songs and instrumental music that the ensemble’s director, Robert Hollingworth, had mined from a trawl through Purcell’s music in 2019-20. This, he told us, was the first time they had done it as a medley in concert, and it worked very well, partly because of the choice of repertoire but mostly because it was so beautifully played, the silky period strings seeming to caress every phrase, while the singers brought vigour and meticulous enunciation to every aria they got to sing.
Dido was definitely the main event, and done in a simple semi-staging in the crossing of St Mary’s Church, it didn’t lack for any ounce of drama. All the acting was done in the voices and the gestures so that sets and costumes seemed unnecessary, though the uproariously camp group of witches was very fun.
The two main sopranos were well contrasted. Rowan Pierce brought twinkling purity to Belinda, while Julia Doyle’s voice was richer and more emotionally complex as Dido, even if she was somewhat statuesque in her stage presence. Frederick Long sang Aeneas with a macho strength that the hero seldom gets: an extra aria, taken from one of Purcell’s Welcome Odes, was interpolated for him, and it felt like a bonus to spend more time with the voice. Martha McLorinan’s imperious Sorceress and Rory Carver’s energetic Sailor were great bonuses, and the small chorus – often of no more than four singers – added poignancy through the fragile delicacy of their contributions. Hollingworth directed unobtrusively from the organ console and managed to be a dab hand with the thunder sheet at the same time.
Simon Thompson
The 2025 Lammermuir Festival runs until Monday 15 September, click here.