THREE packed weeks of Edinburgh Festival and Fringe may stretch before us, but in other locales, the compact event seems to be having its day, possibly for obvious economic reasons. Glasgow Jazz Festival had a very successful year at the box office, spreading its wares across the city, but working within a five day Wednesday to Sunday format where once, in days of yore, it spanned two weekends. The chamber-music-and -beyond programme of the East Neuk Festival on the other side of the country filled a very similar time span just a week later. Pop music's attention span is usually, perhaps predictably, even shorter, with a long weekend, whether at Glastonbury or Glasgow's new TRNSMT event seen as as much as the market can stand.

Can a festival happen in a single day though? In Braemar they are attempting to prove exactly that this coming week. On Thursday, the One Fine Day music festival will be curated by Fitkinwall, the portmanteau identity of Cornish composer Graham Fitkin and Scottish harpist Ruth Wall. The music programme features performers of the top rank and the venue is not only the attraction, but the reason behind it. One Fine Day is the latest in a continuing series of events in St Margaret's Church in Braemar, which is an architectural gem that is thankfully the centre of a community campaign to preserve it as a new arts and performance venue on Royal Deeside. (If they haven't already had a chap at the door downstream at Balmoral requesting support, it is very possibly on the agenda.)

St Margaret's has already had £80,000 of preservation work through the good offices of the precisely-named Scottish Redundant Churches Trust. The former Scottish Episcopal Church was built in the Victorian heyday of the Cairngorms and is one of the major buildings designed by Sir John Ninian Comper, whose other work includes St Margaret's Convent Chapel in Aberdeen, where he was born, and St Mary's, Kirriemuir, where his father had been Rector. His work, both as an architect and designer of altars and stained glass is also to be found all over England from Huddersfield to Malvern, and his ashes are interred beneath the windows he designed in Westminster Abbey. (They must surely know of him at the Palace.)

The St Margaret's Trust has already shown the adaptability of Ninian Comper's venue for all kinds of music, with concerts by Beth Nielsen Chapman and Mary Gauthier, traditional singer Fiona Kennedy and fiddler Paul Anderson, Sicilian guitar and violin duo, Ten Strings, and Paul Mealor and a choir from Aberdeen University. The last two on that list are booked for return visits in August and September.

Even next to that varied list, however, it does look as if Thursday's event will be special indeed. Fitkin, whose work has been commissioned by a long list of major orchestras (including the RSNO) and contemporary chamber groups, and who has a particular association with dance, has composed a new work for the occasion, which will be his own response to the landscape and history of the area. Virtuoso saxophonist Simon Haram, a member of the Graham Fitkin Band and renowned teacher of the instrument at conservatoires from London to Glasgow, will open proceedings. Acclaimed young violinist Ruth Palmer will then add her solo voice with a Bach Partita and Sonata and a Sonata by Belgian composer Eugene Ysaye. Haram is also a member of Will Gregory Moog Ensemble and the Goldfrapp connection continues in harpist Ruth Wall, whose work with that ensemble sits alongside performances with Kathryn Tickell and the BBC Concert Orchestra. On this occasion she will be joining acclaimed early music vocal sextet and Delphian label recording artists The Marian Consort.

With all the proceeds from the event being donated to the ongoing development work at St Margaret's, it looks like a statement of intent that the programme promises to range "from Renaissance Portugal, through Tallis and Bach, to present day Scotland." One Fine Day for sure, and deserving of the label "festival", however bijou.