Over the last 15 years the Lammermuir Festival has become one of the highlights of Scotland’s classical music calendar, and the 2025 edition is about to take place in venues all around East Lothian. Back in September 2010, however, it was still just an idea. Scotsman classical music critic Ken Walton spoke to co-artistic directors James Waters and Hugh Macdonald about their plans for the inaugural event

There’s something very familiar about the blueprint for the Lammermuir Festival – Scotland’s newest addition to the map of prestigious music festivals that are now thriving in some of the country’s unexpected locations.

It’s not a carbon copy of the East Neuk Festival, which has been an extraordinary perennial success for Fife each July. But East Neuk’s simple philosophy – that the modest out-of-the-way attractions of a small geographical area can be successfully married to top-class musical activity that is scaled to suit – cannot have escaped the notice of Lammermuir’s co-artistic directors, James Waters and Hugh Macdonald, who this week unleash their own festival vision for East Lothian.

The ten-day programme starts this Friday, with a concert by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in Haddington’s idyllic St Mary's Parish Church, and ends a week on Sunday with the Dunedin Ensemble performing Bach’s magnificent Mass in B Minor under its director, the eminent Bach scholar John Butt, in the same venue.

In between, a daily diet of chamber music will feature in venues as varied as the parish churches of Dunbar, Stenton, Garvald and Yester, to historic buildings in Lennoxlove and Haddington. Then there’s the most unusual venue of all – the Concorde Hangar at the National Museum of Flight in East Fortune, for which a new work by Edinburgh University music professor Peter Nelson has been commissioned.

For Macdonald and Waters, dreaming up such an initiative is no arbitrary whim. Both have strong connections with Haddington – Macdonald, former director of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, having been born there; and Waters, former assistant director of the Edinburgh International Festival, now having lived there for over 20 years.

“We encountered each other a lot when I was at the Edinburgh Festival, and it was in conversations then that the idea of a festival in the foothills of the Lammermuirs took root,” says Waters.

With Macdonald now retired from his full-time position at the BBC and Waters engaged in major freelance projects, the pair have now found time to make it happen.

Their extensive experience no doubt helped convince East Lothian Council that this was a project worth backing, which it has done as a major funder of the Festival. “It all seemed to fit with certain priorities the council had, such as their tourism objectives and their wish to develop initiatives that would impact on young people,” says Waters.

Appearances by the National Youth Choir of Scotland (a concert of Fauré, Duruflé and MacMillan in Dunbar) and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama Brass Ensemble in East Fortune and Haddington are part of a deliberate attempt by the festival “to inform young people about classical music”.

That in no way diminishes ambitious programming, which accommodates the broad parameters of large-scale choral and orchestral concerts and smaller-scale chamber activity, both of which embrace this inaugural Lammermuir Festival’s subtly interwoven Bach theme.

It’s by no means an exclusive theme, as the BBC SSO’s programme next Wednesday in St Mary’s of Wagner, Mendelssohn and Schumann, demonstrates. But it is there in the SCO’s opening concert of Mendelssohn (a great Bach reviver), JS Bach and his son CPE Bach. And even more unmistakably in a series of recitals that see cellist Philip Higham perform the entire solo cello suites at Lennoxlove House and Yester Parish Church, and Iranian harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani tackle Bach's epic Goldberg Variations at Haddington Town House.

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Like East Neuk, Lammermuir has built in an element of musical sightseeing, such as this Sunday’s opportunity to take a Mozart Musical Journey with the young Navarra String Quartet. Over the course of the afternoon and evening, they will perform in Garvald Parish Church (2pm), Stenton Parish Church (4:30pm) and finally in East Linton and Prestonkirk Parish Church (7:30pm), each of the programmes featuring a Mozart quartet.

Then there’s Concorde, and the hangar at East Fortune whose sonic boom acoustics will accommodate the RSAMD Brass Ensemble and electric guitarist Chris Day in music as diverse as 16th-century Gabrieli and Steve Reich’s multi-channel guitar piece Electric Counterpoint.

And how’s this for a star attraction – a chance to go inside Concorde and experience a new electro-acoustic work by Peter Nelson, specially commissioned by the Festival? “The idea came from the Festival's head of IT, who got married on Concorde, and had all the bridesmaids dressed as air hostesses,” Macdonald explains.

The big test for the first Lammermuir Festival will be to see if it can draw audience interest in the wake of the Edinburgh Festival. It’s a slot in Scotland’s music calendar that has potential to be filled, and in a part of the country that has its own charm and personality.

“Our view was, ‘Let's have a go,’” says Macdonald.

On that note alone, this latest rural initiative deserves to succeed.

This is an edited version of a story that ran in The Scotsman on 8 September 2010. The 2025 Lammermuir Festival runs until 15 September, see www.lammermuirfestival.co.uk