IN SENIORITY, the 15th East Neuk Festival, which opens on Wednesday June 26, sits between longer established events like Orkney’s St Magnus Festival and Music at Paxton in Berwickshire and newer initiatives like the Lammermuir Festival in East Lothian and Sir James MacMillan’s Cumnock Tryst as part of Scotland’s varied and geographically spread diet of festivals of smaller classical musical festivals.

Its programme of chamber music, experimental commissions, associated visual art and literary events, and a concluding concert by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, has been shaped and directed by Svend McEwan-Brown since its inception. What began as a road trip for audiences between the pretty churches of the fishing villages of North-East Fife for recitals of well-known repertoire, has grown to also embrace projects that involve the local community and opportunities for young musicians to experiment with new ideas and collaborate in new groups.

One of the most successful examples of these has been guitarist Sean Shibe’s softLOUD project, originally heard in Anstruther’s Dreel Hall before being showcased at the Edinburgh Fringe and recorded by the Delphian label, and now in the running for the Scottish Album of the Year.

McEwan-Brown, who now lives in St Boswells in the Borders with his husband, Roy, former chief executive of the SCO, has also programmed music at Perth Concert Hall and was director of Glasgow’s UNESCO City of Music and behind seasons of work under the Minimal banner that brought composer Steve Reich and the Kronos Quartet to the city. The end of that job coincided with the his partner’s retirement and not long after their relocation from Edinburgh, McEwan-Brown suffered a stroke, but continued to work on the festival from his hospital bed.

Now appreciating the therapeutic value of gardening as his recovery continues (“there’s work to do all the time but a lack of stress, and it is both incredibly rewarding and very forgiving when you mess it up,” he says), he recognises he was very fortunate in the way his illness unfolded.

“I was lucky in having a mini-stroke first, so that when the stroke itself happened I was already in hospital and there was a doctor in the room.”

This year’s East Neuk programme features a whole slew of new initiatives, with its newest venue, The Bowhouse near St Monans, hosting seven concerts, Kellie Castle gardens the venue for a music and art installation project inspired by the drying greens of the Fife coastal villages, percussionist Colin Currie bringing his new quartet and former SCO players Peter Whelan, Alexander Janiczek and Alec Frank-Gemmill all involved.

“Tapping into local interest is important,” says McEwan-Brown, “as we have done with the brass band piece two years ago, which drew 300 people for a piece that no-one had heard before.

"The biggest project this year is the Drying Green project, rooted in an idea that came out of the community, about the drying greens that are dotted around the villages of the East Neuk, which were places of work but also where you would talk to people and hear the news. So we have made that into a bigger thing at Kellie Castle, with music amongst it.

These sort of projects are events which McEwan-Brown sees working in the East Neuk Festival in a way that the location makes possible.

“If you are trying to put on a world premiere by someone you think is amazing but is virtually unknown in this country, like John Luther Adams, you have to be imaginative about staging and engagement. If you put 40 percussionists into Cambo Gardens, you can get 400 people to that. If you put 40 percussionists into the Old Fruitmarket in Glasgow, which I also did, you’d be lucky to get 150. People don’t have the same reaction to the idea: that it is going to be fun and different and exciting, and not in any way cliquey and exclusive. You have to take away the boundaries that are off-putting.”

Those sort of events now sit side-by-side with the music of Mozart, Haydn, Mendelssohn and Beethoven played by some of the finest chamber musicians in the world, often working together for the first time.

“The thrilling thing for me is getting the Belcea Quartet and the Pavel Haas Quartet playing the Mendelssohn Octet together and the combination of those two is the essence of the festival. People who embark on a career in chamber music are basically making a bed of pain for themselves for many years. Audiences are mostly obsessed with big orchestral stuff, although music clubs are doing a terrific job for much smaller numbers, and can only pay small fees. At the same time the volume of work to prepare a piece, when compared to an orchestral musician, is enormous.

“With all of that in mind, we set out to see if we could have an “ensemble of the year”, so that is what Camerata Janiczek is [featuring former SCO leader Alexander Janeczek and more recent first horn Alec Frank-Gemmill]. They have never performed before, and it was a wish of theirs to work together using period instruments. There is a quiet excitement about it: it will be unique and thrilling and you won't have heard it before.

“Our Retreat brings brilliant young performers to the East Neuk, so that we can hear young musicians close up, and build long-term relationships. This year we are showcasing two returnees, which was the sort of thing I really aspired to be able to do in Glasgow, but there wasn’t the will. So this is quite a special year at East Neuk.”

There is a sense of unfinished business about McEwan-Brown’s time in Glasgow, particularly with regard to the Minimal series of concerts, which attracted a large audience.

“I would like to be able to do Minimal somewhere again, but that is always going to be an urban event. The obvious place to do it is Glasgow because Glasgow has the venues, but Glasgow doesn’t seem to have the spirit.

“The difference between Glasgow and East Neuk is that there you could create critical momentum going from space to space in the concert hall, while in East Neuk there is an eight-mile drive between venues, and that it one of our challenges. But on the other hand, what you get is a great landscape and great fish and chips!”

“I’ve really happy memories of my work in Glasgow, but I don’t miss it and what I regret is that because of the way Glasgow Life changed the funding, there is almost no legacy from it. It is a bit like 1990 [European City of Culture] all over again. They didn’t really get what I was trying to build up. Agents and artists still contact me about dates in Glasgow and I don’t know who to point them to. Glasgow Royal Concert Hall seems like such a missed opportunity because the spaces are good. There are three great halls and a studio in a city large enough to support the kind of programming that kind of place could do, and there doesn’t seem to be a sense of what the artistic adventure could be at all.

“Maybe there just isn’t the money. In the end it always comes back to funding and, perhaps, I should watch what I say but I think it is true that Glasgow is less known for its artistic philanthropy than the east of the country. At East Neuk, the biggest single source of income is private donations at about 40%, with box office 20%, public funding 20% and 20% from various other sources. We have more patrons than last year, and more people have upped their donations.

"Arts events and organisations were once founded on subscription and the idea of people buying upfront was exactly the same as crowd-funding. Culturally, getting a big lump of money from a public source is really recent, and also urban. A rural organisation has much less chance of getting support that way and that makes the challenge for a producer to maintain momentum in a rural location all the greater.”

East Neuk Festival runs from Wednesday June 26 to Sunday June 30; eastneukfestival.com