Lammermuir Festival: 'Quite a big beastie'

The one thing you will not find at the Lammermuir Festival this September (8 - 19) is a concert in a town called Lammermuir. Instead, head for Haddington, Musselburgh and Dunbar, along with a selection of villages, ruins and even a closed monastic order. Lammermuir, for those outside East Lothian, is the range of hills that creates a barrier to the southern borders. The festival takes places in their shadow and along the coast as it turns from the North Sea into the Southern shore of the Firth of Forth.

Like so many good ideas, the notion of a festival beneath the hills came to joint artistic directors Hugh Macdonald and James Waters over a pint. They looked out of the pub window, saw the hills and thought of all the great buildings in East Lothian that had a fascinating heritage and could hold a concert audience. 'East Lothian has a huge number of heritage buildings and we do a venue crawl and try to add three new ones each year. We started with 13 concerts in 2010 and this year we have 35'. Macdonald was born in Haddington and became head of music for BBC Scotland and director of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra for many years, while Waters has been with Bath Festival, associate director of the Edinburgh International Festival and now programmes Perth Concert Hall, among others. The timing of the Lammermuir is important too. 'We didn't want to clash with anyone, there's Perth and St. Magnus in the Spring, East Neuk and Edinburgh in the summer, so we chose the end of the Scottish festival season.'

These days the Lammermuir 'is quite a big beastie, from solo recitals up to full symphony orchestra', Waters says. This year the most unusual place will be the secluded Nunraw Abbey, founded by Trappist Cistercian monks in 1949, which will open up for the music of William Byrd, sung by the choir Sansara. They will also be performing a couple of days earlier in Musselburgh's Catholic Church in an event which includes Jonathan Harvey's Stabat Mater from the 1970s, with its electronic manipulations remastered and performed live. Concerts like those, 'mean that we are getting real audiences for serious choral music'.

Out in the countryside, though much older than the monastery, is the fifteenth century Crichton Collegiate Church, which will host the second of Quatuor Mosäiques' concerts and Quatuor Agate. Another collegiate establishment (i.e. a Scottish church built solely for the memory of its aristocratic benefactors) is Dunglass Church, where the Orlando Consort perform music from the 15th century, when it was built. The music has fared better than the building, which ended up as a barn in the 1700s and now has a roof but no doors or windows. 'The music sounds fine, but the place is draughty,' admits Waters. Blankets may be in order.

'Haddington is the festival core, though,' he says, especially its huge parish church, ransacked in the endless battles of siege and counter-siege from 1547-49 between the Duke of Hamilton, for Scotland supported by France, and English troops led by the Earl of Shrewsbury. It was only restored in the 1970s after a campaign led by the then Duchess of Hamilton and Yehudi Menuhin. That is the venue for the largest concerts by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO).

While most of the events happen in the area's many churches, 'we do also try to find places that aren't.' This year's find is The Big Shed, a puppetry workshop and arts venue built in the grounds of Drummohr House, close to Musselburgh golf course. The concert there is of Gavin Bryars' work based on a homeless man singing, Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me. In a very different vein at Musselburgh's Brunton Theatre, Iain Burnside accompanies a quartet of singers including Sophie Daneman in songs by composers who fled the Nazis to Hollywood in the 1930s, presented by film music expert Neil Brand; 'classical art song but with fizz round the side,' as Waters describes it.

A feature of Lammermuir is the series of coffee concerts (cake at 11am in time for music at 11.30am). 'We're lucky enough to have a master baker from Leipzig, Falko Burkert, living in Haddington who produces a different cake appropriate to each concert, which gives them a bit of extra flavour'. Four out of eight of the programmes this year have been devised by Waters and his friend from schooldays, the accompanist Malcolm Martineau, around the 16 surviving songs of Duparc. 'The joy is you can build programmes around four at a time', each day with a different singer and voice (in order: mezzo Jennifer Johnston, baritone James Newby, tenor Joshua Ellicott and soprano Sarah Fox).

Waters likes long term relationships with musicians, 'incrementally developing their profile in Scotland', as he is doing with the Quatuor Mosäiques - 'the best of their kind and still with the original members' -, the Berlin based violinist Viviane Hagner and pianist Jeremy Denk. He has a residency in Dunbar in this year's festival: a solo recital, Brahms' 2nd Piano Concerto with the RSNO and Beethoven's 4th with the Royal Northern Sinfonia in the closing concert.

Lammermuir festival runs across 12 days from 8 to 19 September. You can find out more about the festival and buy tickets at the Lammermuir Festival website.