East Neuk Festival

De Profundis

The Bowhouse, St Monans

Keith Bruce

four stars

WITH its origins in the Latin Psaltery, the title of composer John Wallace's brass performance piece that was Saturday's big "event" production of this year's East Neuk programme, has been used by many writers since, perhaps most famously Oscar Wilde in a letter from Reading Gaol. Many of the event's erudite audience would know this, and their classical education would also give them the simpler translation "from the depths" and the intention to evoke the experience of Fife's miners, whose lungs blew trumpets and horns when they were not inhaling the sometimes toxic atmosphere of their workplace.

Devised by Wallace with fellow member of his Wallace Collection ensemble Tony George and East Neuk director Svend McEwan-Brown, the work saw professional musicians attached to five groups of players from the Tullis Russell Mills band, with two percussionists joining conductor George on a raised platform from where actor Maureen Beattie delivered selected texts (including work by local playwright Joe Corrie, and Edinburgh poet David Purdie) that reflected the reality of the mining experience. The work was delivered in haze-filled near-darkness for a promenading audience in a repurposed argicultural shed supplied by local landowner and festival supporter Toby Anstruther, in what was an attempt to evoke the reality of life below ground, that – arguably crucially – could clearly never replicate the claustrophobia.

For both the participants and the audience, however, it was the sonic experience that was key, and it was multifaceted indeed, morphing through episodes that incorporated recorded birdsong as well as a superb evocation of Gaelic psalm-singing with George – on tuba – as Presenter, and the 60-strong brass "congregation" responding. In the end it was the almost tangible focus of all the performers involved that made the elements gel into a real festival event.