Lammermuir Festival
Dunedin Consort with Alexander Chance/Joshua Ellicott with Anna Tilbrook
Crichton Collegiate Church/Holy Trinity Church, Haddington
Keith Bruce
five stars
A VISIT to the perfect acoustic of Crichton Collegiate Church near Pathhead is off the beaten track even on the Lammermuir Festival’s own terms, and feels a little like a pilgrimage. That was appropriate for the Dunedin Consort’s contribution to this year’s festival with its liturgical music for Holy Week.
It culminated in Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater of 1712, and one of the finest settings of the word “Amen”, a fast and furious fugue articulated perfectly by counter-tenor Alexander Chance. Other sections of the work had set his remarkable voice, always pitch perfect and musically superbly articulate with diction to match, to a mix of continuo and ensemble or against spare upper strings, reminiscent of the Four Seasons.
Chance’s other contributions to the programme were more esoteric: a slightly lascivious Marian aria by Frantisek Ignac Antonin Tuma that framed his voice between the violin of Matthew Truscott and John Crockatt’s viola, and Zelenka’s setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, the musical representation of an illuminated manuscript with bassoon and oboe joining a string trio.
The wind players, Alexandra Bellamy and Inga Maria Klauke, were to the fore in the instrumental part of the programme, and especially in the Vivaldi bassoon concerto that opened it, where Klauke’s brilliant technique on the slow movement made the most of the mellow tone of an early instrument that looked as lovely as it sounded.
There was also a devotional tone to the very different concert Joshua Ellicott presented in Holy Trinity Church, Haddington with pianist Anna Tilbrook. Entitled From Your Ever-Loving Son Jack, it interweaved letters home from the Western Front written by the tenor’s great-uncle, Rifleman Jack Ellicott, with an inspired selection of music.
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Only one tune, Haydn Wood’s Roses of Picardy, was a familiar World War One “hit”, and the recital climaxed in James MacMillan’s The Children, setting the words of William Soutar occasioned by the later horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Both of these were highlights, the former a melodic gem, and the MacMillan a brilliant exercise in working with very few notes to create something almost unbearably haunting.
Young Jack died in France in August 1916 but his great-nephew found plenty of humour in the letters he sent, not least in allusions to female rivals for his affection back in Lancashire. The music of Frank Bridge, John Ireland, and Gerard Finzi and Frenchmen Francis Poulenc, Claude Debussy and Reynaldo Hahn, not only suited but in many cases also shared the benefits of this act of remembrance.
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