Lammermuir Festival

Dunedin Consort, His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts

St Mary’s Church, Haddington

Five stars

By Rowena Smith

In the seven years since it was founded, the Lammermuir Festival has established itself as a serious presence in the Scottish music calendar. As it has expanded the venues it encompasses have become ever more varied and adventurous (this year’s programme features a performance in the Concorde Hangar at the National Museum of Flight). However, the cornerstone of the festival surely remains the superb acoustic of St Mary’s Church in Haddington. Only fitting that this year’s opening concert showcase the venue in all its glory with a performance of one of the great masterpieces of early seventeenth-century choral music.

Monterverdi’s Vespers is a work on the threshold, at once both the culmination of the late Renaissance and a trailblazer for the emerging Baroque style. It is a choral work where every singer is a soloist and where the instrumentalists are as much voices as the choir. Its movements encompass declamatory psalm settings for choir and brass and lyrical motets for solo voice. Theatrical effects such as the ghostly off-stage echo are a reminder of Monteverdi’s role in the birth of opera.

This richness and variety shone through in this superbly stylish and joyful performance from Dunedin Consort and His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts directed from the organ by John Butt. The Vespers is a lengthy work, but here delivered with the Consort’s trademark energy, the momentum was never allowed to falter. There was plenty of space too in the lyrical movements, most memorably a tenor duet underpinned by Elizabeth Kenny’s richly resonant theorbo accompaniment, which was performed in the gallery of the church behind the audience to make full use of the acoustic. All told this was an exhilarating performance and it was rapturously received by the capacity audience in St Mary’s.