Music

One Fine Day

St Margaret's, Braemar

Keith Bruce

five stars

THERE are parallels with James MacMillan's composer-led, community-embracing yet immaculately high quality Cumnock Tryst, and with the chamber music concerts in the long-term restoration project that is Glasgow's Cottier, but the mini-festival that composer Graham Fitkin and his partner, harpist Ruth Wall, curated at Braemar's new arts venue was a singular occasion, albeit one that intended as a pilot for a longer event in the years to come.

The parade of virtuosi Fitkin introduced certainly showed off the possibilities of the redundant church. Not only did saxophonist Simon Haram premier a new Fitkin composition, entitled Braemar, inside the building, he also called the audience to the building by performing it and a selection of other solo pieces from on top of the tower. On the road from there to a closing recital of (mostly) unaccompanied early music by vocal quintet The Marian Consort, Fitkin also supplied a duo for Haram and Wall, Spill, and two unlisted additions to the programme – a clapping piece by himself and Wall, Soft Wac, and a world premiere for the Braemar Choir, Cum Tandem. It emerged after an instrumental introduction by violinist Ruth Palmer, whose account of Bach's Partita No.3 and Sonata No.3 were as full-blooded as you are ever likely to hear with the following Sonata from Belgium's Eugene Ysaye an ideally passionate-sounding partner.

Counter-tenor Rory McCleary's group wove James MacMillan and Thomas Tallis into a programme built around the music of Portugal's Estevao Lopes Morago, but there was one more Graham Fitkin gem to come there too, when Wall, who had joined the singers for MacMillan's Os Mutorum, made her last appearance of the evening on the composer's Lost, a song of breath-taking loveliness that had seemingly found its ideal environment.