United Kingdom Lammermuir Festival 2026 [2] – Tenebrae: Nigel Short (director). St Mary’s Church, Haddington, 15.9.2026. (SRT)
Back in 2015, my very first visit to the Lammermuir Festival (click here) included a concert from Tenebrae. They have been regular visitors to the festival in the years since, and this year their programme focused on music of rest and acceptance, as well as the ultimate fulfilment of both of those things: death.
Deep questions require deep music, and I cannot imagine a choir better suited to guide an audience through the spiritual depths of considering the ultimate reality. The most striking thing about Nigel Short’s choir is the sheer purity of its sound, as though it is emanating directly from the beyond rather than using mere fallible human beings, so clean, clear and unpolluted it is. His team of 19 singers produced an uncanny combination of clarity and haze, sometimes homing in on every syllable, as in a grippingly dramatic performance of Vaughan Williams’s Valiant for Truth, and sometimes creating a bewitching halo of sound where words didn’t matter as much as the intoxicating aura of the music. The opening numbers by Holst and McDowell were like that, and I doubt that death can ever have sounded as alluring as it did in their take on Pearsall’s Lay a garland. In this they were helped by the glowing acoustic of the medieval Haddington church, which seemed to capture the sound and levitate it before the audience’s ears before letting it fade away with unusual crispness.
The two approaches could snap together transfixingly in other numbers, though, such as Tavener’s Song for Athene, which had the bass drone placed under the crossing of the church while the ladies sang at the back, the two gradually coming together as the ladies came forwards. The step-by-step perfection of and the swallow and the luminous sopranos in Harris’s Bring us, O Lord God both had the immediacy of a storyteller’s narrative, and Francis Pott’s The Souls of the Righteous moved from its chorale-like opening to a gorgeous web of melismas whose beauty intensified along with their complexity.
Joel Thompson’s setting of Psalm 13 mirrored the Psalm’s move from anger, frustration and rage through defiance of God to the quiet beauty of its resolution, with delicate sprinkles of not-entirely-convincing joy. That emotional ambiguity also shone through in Howells’s Requiem, whose stiff upper lip and emotional restraint allowed the ardent emotions below the surface to well up from beneath.
Short conducted the whole thing with unobtrusive directness, and the several solo parts were all taken by beauty, clarity and perfect precision. Taken as a whole, this musical journey to the edge of the hereafter was little short of heavenly.
Simon Thompson
The Lammermuir Festival runs until 20 September, for more information click here.
Programme:
Holst – The Evening Watch
McDowell – Standing as I do before God
Pott – The Souls of the Righteous
Shaw – and the swallow
Bennett – A Good-Night
Vaughan Williams – Rest; Valiant for Truth
Thompson – A Prayer for Deliverance
Tavener – Song for Athene
Pearsall – Lay a Garland
Sullivan – The Long Day Closes
Howells – Requiem
Harris – Bring Us, O Lord God