Jeremy Denk & Maria Wloszczowska, Dunbar review: 'passionate and deeply moving'

It was precisely the kind of concert that other musical organisations would run a mile from, terrified of alienating their delicate listeners with ‘difficult’ music (or simply worried about low ticket sales). Gain the trust of a devoted audience, however – as East Lothian’s Lammermuir Festival has done over the past 15 years of pioneering, deeply imaginative programming – and you’ll pack out Dunbar Parish Church with a concert devoted to Charles Ives’s four violin sonatas.

Yes, the pieces are hardly easy listening: they’re idiosyncratic, often very dissonant, unpredictable, sometimes cussedly contrary. But in the hands of US pianist and passionate Ives devotee Jeremy Denk and Polish violinist Maria Wloszczowska, they were passionate, rhapsodic, sometimes joyfully clangorous, and often deeply movingin their blurry watercolour hymn-tune evocations. Denk and Wloszczowska had local choir the Garleton Singers on hand, too, to sing some of the hymns that had inspired Ives in their original forms, before leading us through Ives’s larger-than-life transmogrifications. Hearing both together was revelatory, and brought whole new layers to an appreciation of this music.

Sitting behind the audience, too, were the young players of the East Lothian Secondary Schools Wind Band, contributing jaunty all-American marching tunes, the other vital ingredient that Ives drew on deeply. The overall results felt occasionally a bit like a music lesson, though Denk’s off-the-cuff, heartfelt introductions kept things warm and personal. The Dunbar audience lapped it up – and Denk and Wloszczowska offered them brilliantly incisive accounts.

Rather than a music lesson, their recital was maybe more about meetings, collaborations and discoveries, as well as an object lesson in bringing international performers, local amateurs and a keen audience together to immerse themselves in music. Denk quipped that he never imagined he’d be celebrating Ives’s 150th birthday in Scotland – after the Lammermuir Festival’s exceptional tribute, it’s hard to imagine a better location.