East Lothian’s Lammermuir festival is not all string quartets in pretty rural churches – although those are still available. On Tuesday afternoon, festival artist-in-residence and harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani brought a programme of 20th- and 21st-century music to the magnificent acoustic of the festival’s main venue in Haddington with works by Louis Andriessen, Oscar Jockel, Toru Takemitsu and Luc Ferrari.
The French musique concrète pioneer Ferrari’s Programme Commun combines tone-generator drone and throb with fast-fingered, miked-up improvisatory keyboard playing on an instrument that is just 30 years old – rather than 300 – and so able to sustain a forearm smash.
Esfahani’s clever encore was Ligeti’s Continuum, which was composed four years earlier, in 1968, and was the Hungarian composer’s attempt to produce sustain on the harpsichord without electronic assistance. Regrettably, we were denied the opportunity to hear a more recent contribution to that debate when a technical failure afflicted Jockel’s honig.meer.licht (honey.sea.light) and the composer’s “installation of organised sound” became a briefer work of cascades of notes followed by a slower, meditative passage in the natural reverberation of St Mary’s, before the complete absence of the tape element led to its early curtailment.
The other two works on the programme both dated from 1982. Andriessen’s Overture to Orpheus is all spare notes and rippling arpeggios, giving way to a motoric pulse, and Takemitsu’s Rain Dreaming is a typically varied and lovely impressionistic evocation of water. Their shared meditative quality suited the acoustic, as well as – as promised – taking player and audience into unfamiliar terrain for the instrument.
With its substantial stage space, Dunbar parish church has become another prime Lammermuir location. On Monday evening it hosted a rare opportunity to hear the compelling partnership of violinist Alina Ibragimova and pianist Steven Osborne.
Their recital was primarily of Prokofiev: the two violin sonatas and an encore of the first of the earlier Five Melodies – which is all music on the pair’s acclaimed Hyperion disc dedicated to the composer’s oeuvre. The Sonata No 2 in D was beautifully shaped and ferocious in parts, but it was the rarely heard Sonata No 1 (completed two years later) that was awesome in its intensity. Both players brought their power game, with huge left-hand chords from Osborne, but that was balanced with the violinist’s lightning-speed sotto-voce runs, both bowed and pizzicato, and the querulous concluding bars to what is a deeply ambiguous work.
It was preceded by Debussy’s late Violin Sonata, and Prokofiev’s second by Arvo Pärt’s Fratres – both gentler, perhaps, but given revealing muscularity in these performances.
In April, the Dunbar stage was packed with community performers for Lliam Paterson’s opera Catriona and the Dragon, a Lammermuir project pursued through the pandemic, further illustrating the diversity of the festival’s work. Yet Creative Scotland, Scotland’s arms-length funding body, has just rejected this year’s application for support after encouraging the organisation through a triple-hoop process. That threat to the survival of an event that ticks so many of the required boxes, and is achieving 80% box office, is quite inexplicable.
