Pursuit of the beautiful

Wednesday 12 September 2012

Tantallon Castle, stronghold of the Douglas earls of Angus for some 300 years, sits like a jaggedy molar atop its cliff edge, now in ruins but still a fearsome silhouette against the Bass Rock.

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Kate Molleson looks at the joys that lie in store at East Lothian’s unique classical festival

The sky here is open wide and the sea birds plunge screeching into the waves – for gentile East Lothian it's a very raw kind of beauty spot, and presumably a nightmare in terms of audience health-and-safety. "True, not exactly a straightforward venue," says Lammermuir Festival co-director James Water as we roam about the castle grounds. "But then festivals have to have a bit of madness about them, don't they? Otherwise what's the point?" He pledges then and there to programme "at least one seriously quirky event each year".

It was only really a matter of time before Lammermuir turned to East Lothian's most foreboding landmark as a venue. The three-year-old festival operates under a tagline of "beautiful music in beautiful places" and has already made itself comfortable in the county's stately homes and churches. But each programme has had that wild card, too. Last year it was Philip Glass's 1000 Airplanes on the Roof performed under the body of a Concorde at the National Museum of Flight. This year it's These Lands, This Wall – a co-commission between Lammermuir and Red Note Ensemble that fuses music, poetry and high-tech light trickery on the façade of Tantallon.T=he idea of commissioning a site-specific work for the castle came to Waters's co-director Hugh Macdonald while driving home from last year's festival. To incubate a new work of this scale within 12 months is a brave undertaking, but poet Aonghas MacNeacail and composer William Sweeney have worked together long enough to manage it. They first collaborated 25 years ago on a Gaelic choral work called an Fhearainn (Psalm of the Land), and have since worked on song cycles, film and opera. Sitting together on a brilliant, blustery morning looking out to sea from what was once Tantallon's kitchen, they explain something of their collaborative process. "The starting point is an instinctive mutual trust," says MacNeacail. "We're happy to bounce ideas off each other, and we don't expect to get things right first time. That is important. When I give advice to kids I tell them two things: make a mess, and embarrass yourselves! You've got to be prepared to do that in the creative process." "At the moment we're sitting within the castle walls." He gestures beyond the ruined rubble at the cliff edge, out towards the Bass Rock and the Isle of May. "There once would have been a whole wee village buzzing around in here. The place still has its own music that changes from day to day. The sea comes in and you can't avoid hearing it as well as looking at it. So I suppose that has made its way into my words. But I didn't start with any predetermined plan. I write in order to find out what I have to say." "That's it," says Sweeney. "You write in order to find out what it was that was bothering you. And that's where the poet in Aonghas really comes through. There are still lines in this piece, and in others that we've written together, that I don't really understand. But somehow they're pregnant." For Sweeney, MacNeacail's poetic economy of means leaves him enough room to compose around the text. "When we came to work on the opera [An Turus in 1997] I realised that librettists should really be poets," he says. "Novelists often stretch out their descriptions too much. Aonghas is expert at tacking down an image in very few words." The result is anything but a straight retelling of Tantallon's turbulent history. MacNaecail has made the castle itself into the work's main protagonist: I, Tantallon, his story begins, want to know if you are friend, if you are foe. The verses unfurl in English, Scots, Gaelic, Latin and even Welsh – all languages once spoke by the castle's centuries of occupants – and are delivered with vivid diction by Crawford Logan. Sweeney's 45-minute score centres around a trio of clarinets, a pair of cellos and three female voices, with underlying pace driven by propulsive percussion. The combination is at times mellow, at times eerie, at times shrieking and militaristic. Ghostly voices drift over gutteral bass clarinet drones; there's a beautifully spare Scots lament, crazed battle cries, wonky hornpipes and cackling nursery rhymes. In a particularly beautiful interlude the cellos intertwine at the top of their range around a Gaelic song of farewell. "It's a no-brainer when writing for Red Note," says Sweeney, "to give Robert Irvine [Red Note founder and cellist] something decent to play. So of course I've written a cello tear-jerker." The music and text won't be played live on the night; that, says Waters, would have been one logistical headache too far. Instead Red Note and Logan have made a recording that will be diffused through surround-sound speakers around the castle. The "live" aspect will be the light show, courtesy of Northumberland-based Culture Creative, whose director Zoë Bottrell describes her contribution as a "visual response" to the score. "Using lights and digital projections we create a series of images to bring the castle to life," she says. "We don't want to create a slideshow; that's what guidebooks are for. Instead we're providing a new layer of interpretation -- trying to get the audience to think about what the building means and has meant over the centuries."These Lands, This Wall is at Tantallon Castle on Monday. Tickets must be booked in advance (by phone at 0131 473 2000 or online at www.hubtickets.co.uk). Car parking at the site is limited but special buses are running from Edinburgh, Musselburgh, North Berwick, Haddington and Dunbar. For information see www.lammermuirfestival.co.uk.

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Pursuit of the beautiful

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