Glasgow Barons Early Music Festival 2026
Glasgow Barons Early Music Festival 2026, Govan Old Church
Since 2017 the awe-inspiring Glasgow Barons project, set up by the imaginative conductor and local resident, Paul MacAlinden, has been dedicated to helping everyone enjoy making and listening to live music in Govan. One of the many strands of their outreach is an annual Early Music Festival, which I first attended last year. This year’s third festival runs from Friday 24th to Sunday 26th July, with six concerts over three days. It is a sparkling gem of a festival, centred on the atmospheric Govan Old Church with its evocative display of the millennia-old Govan Stones. Tickets are extremely affordable (the lunchtime concerts are free) and the festival welcomes donations to help the project with its fantastic work. Performers are a judicious mix of well-known figures from the early music scene and up and coming young musicians just starting their professional journeys.
Concerts on Friday 24th are the newly formed Curious Collection introducing the recently discovered music of Scots organist and violinist Charles Macklean, who played in the Dublin premiere of Handel’s Messiah. This is followed by the Glasgow based vocal quartet Iuchair singing anonymous 12th century devotional music from Santiago de Compostela.
On Saturday lunchtime Pei-Jee Ng, principal cellist of the RSNO, plays Bach cello suites 1-3. In the evening Royal Conservatoire of Scotland singers perform virtuoso baroque arias with fellow students on period instruments in ‘The Baroque Virtuosi’, followed by Héloïse Bernard and friends performing the music of John Dowland in ‘Cupid and Death’. On Sunday lunchtime the final concert sees the Royal Sackbut Collective performing medieval to baroque music for this precursor of the trombone in ‘The Path of the Soul’. It promises to be a great weekend of music-making. I strongly urge you to make tracks for Govan Old Church, listen to some fabulous music, and support this outstanding project!
Information and tickets from: https://www.glasgowbarons.com
Image credit: Royal Sackbut Collective
