Lammermuir Festival: Red Note Ensemble's Sounding Brass

Scottish Mezzo Karen Cargill and the Red Note Ensemble perform Watching Over You,  Composer Rory Boyle's new setting of Dilys Rose's poems depicting the journey of early motherhood.

Many composers would be delighted to be sharing the bill with Pergolesi, particularly if the ratio of programmed pieces were 2:1 in their favour. Judith Bingham combined composing and singing careers for many years, but she now concentrates solely on composing. However, she does – as she confessed in a YouTube interview – compose unconsciously in “breath lengths”.

It was the hottest ticket in town. An limited audience of 100 convened for The End of the World (for one night only). The venue which I had mistakenly perceived as a single building turned out to be more of a small village. Summerhall was, from 1916 to 2011, the home of the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, known to locals as the Dick Vet.

St Giles’ Cathedral, at the top of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, boasts a wonderful acoustic. From the chancel of this magnificent building a string quartet, drawn from the Red Note Ensemble’s flexible and varied forces, presented a late-evening, candlelit programme of meditative music entitled, Hymn of Thanks (Transcendence).

In her short introductory remarks at the evening’s outset, Sally Beamish referenced Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose, wherein in the redness of a rose is secured by a nightingale’s pierced heart.