Lammermuir Festival reviews: Van Baerle Trio | Lotte Betts-Dean | Scottish Opera

The Amsterdam-based Trio made quite an impression last year, and brought enormous charm and focus to Schumann’s Six Canonic Studies, while immersing themselves fully in the expansive emotions of Brahms’s First Piano Trio, in its original, longer version. While they might not have made a watertight case for the piece’s somewhat unwieldy sprawl, there was no mistaking their close identification with the music and their evident passion in playing that was often luxuriant and expansive, yet never less than focused – even if Hannes Minnaar’s piano occasionally dominated his colleagues in the church’s generous acoustic.

READ MORE: From the Archives: Ken Walton on the first ever Lammermuir Festival

It was in the far more austere yet no less resonant space of St Mary’s Church, Whitekirk, that the afternoon’s concert devoted entirely to the music of Edinburgh-based composer Stuart MacRae unfolded, with mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean at its heart (★★★★★). The building’s bare stone walls served as an appropriate setting for MacRae’s sometimes raw, almost ritualistic pieces that drew on Scottish folk tunes and ancient modes in a deeply compelling, almost fearsomely intense concert.

Betts-Dean is clearly a muse to MacRae, with her rich, honeyed voice and uncanny abilities in characterisation and vocal flexibility. She declaimed imperiously in the opening Christina Rosetti setting Earth, thy cold is keen, to iridescent harmonies from MacRae at his grandmother’s age-old harmonium, transported in specially for the occasion. And she rather magically conjured a gamut of entirely contrasting vocal characters for MacRae’s Earth ever green the ways, swelling to fill the church with her radiant voice, or half-swallowing sounds in muted, veiled singing.

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The string duo Sequoia gave thrilling contributions, too, on their own in MacRae’s barbed sea portrait the ebb, or in the glistening but fleeting sun-clipped harmonies of Shetland-inspired Haroldswick, and offering strong but supple support in the more ambitious Emily Brontë setting The Captive. It was an intense, demanding hour-and-a-bit of music, but a concert whose strange, arcane sounds lingered in the memory long after Betts-Dean’s hushed final incantations.

From piano trios to ritualistic invocations to – well, opera. In this case, it was not one, but two one-act comic operas on marital infidelity as part of the now well-established partnership between the festival and Scottish Opera (★★★★).

Ravel’s farcical L’heure espagnole glittered with fluorescent colours and primary-hued neon in Kenneth MacLeod’s larger-than-life designs, and director Jacopo Spirei ensured equally flamboyant performances from his five-strong cast. Luvo Maranti and Edward Jowle both hammed it up magnificently as secretive suitors to clockmaker’s wife Concepción, a deliciously frustrated Lea Shaw who matched sublime vocal agility and richness with a scene-stealing line in withering, eye-rolling glances. Daniel Barrett, too, was nimble but robust as the humble muleteer she eventually falls for.

Barrett returned in more swaggering form as Smirnov in Walton’s The Bear, demanding debt repayments from widowed Yelena – a simmering Chloe Harris – before falling for her considerable charms. Comedy was in shorter supply in this second work, despite Jowle’s enjoyable buffoonery as butler Luka, but thematically the two pieces bounced off each other to stimulating effect. Scottish Opera’s orchestra, too, was rich and brightly coloured, arrayed in a seemingly endless rows behind the stage in St Mary’s Church, Haddington: some of Ravel’s intricate orchestral detail got a bit swamped in the rich, resonant acoustic, but energetic conductor Alexandra Cravero conjured brisk, crisp playing nonetheless.

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