Lammermuir Festival 2026 - a Look Back
Lammermuir Festival 2026 - a Look Back, by Brian Bannatyne- Scott
The first thing to say about this year’s Lammermuir Festival is that it was a triumph. I covered 14 performances and nothing was less than excellent. It followed the usual format of top class music in interesting and varied venues, with St Mary’s Kirk, Haddington being the home base, as it were, and the supporters turned out in their droves. East Lothian has a very educated and prosperous population, and it is gratifying how the Festival has tapped into that demographic, and I reckon the majority of the audiences are from the county. It helps being only a few miles from Edinburgh, and many in the audiences, like me, are from the capital, but it has a distinct rural feel and that makes it quite unusual among festivals anywhere.
The prices are very reasonable, rarely straying over £40, and when you compare with the Edinburgh Festival, with its ‘dynamic pricing’, it’s great value. The quality of performances is never less than superb, and I must commend the artistic directors, James Waters and Hugh Macdonald, not only for finding top class musicians, but for coming up with programmes which are innovative and interesting. With very few exceptions, they have also matched performances to venues, choosing the right places to hear the right people. It is genuinely delightful to find some of the more obscure venues around the county, and to discover unexpected jewels in unusual places, often with particularly good acoustics. Somewhere ideal for Renaissance polyphony is less well suited for a solo voice and piano or a string quartet. My favourite surprise venue this year was St Baldred’s Church in North Berwick, where Tenebrae sang 16th Century English polyphony in an acoustic which was well-nigh perfect.
The EMR covered a large number of concerts this year, my 14 well matched by Donal Hurley’s selection, and I hope we provided a decent mixture of reviews. As a singer myself, I tended to favour the vocal side, while Donal was more eclectic, but I trust that our contributions added to peoples’ enjoyment of the festival.
In a fortnight of excellence, I don’t want to single out many concerts, but I must commend Tenebrae for their two perfect choral performances, Roderick Williams and Christopher Glynn for their fascinating ‘English Winterreise’ and the Lodestar Trio for their absolutely fabulous Folk Odyssey. I heard two world class voices for the first time live, Nicky Spence (tenor) and Hugh Cutting (countertenor), and who will ever forget the tubas at Amisfield Walled Garden?
The whole enterprise would not be nearly so successful without the scores of dedicated ushers and car park attendants, volunteers all, who make every venue run smoothly and get people in and out with a minimum of fuss and a lot of goodwill.
Like all such endeavours, Lammermuir relies on its audience and donors to top up the money from the Government, which as we know can be fickle. If you can, please consider becoming a friend of the festival. I have no connection with it myself, but I see the hard work that goes into producing such a top class festival every year, and I want to see it continue and thrive.
www.lammermuirfestival.co.uk/friends will take you to the site you need.
All that remains for me is to say well done, and see you next year!
