by Paul Matheson

The Lammermuir Festival: ‘Path of Miracles’ performed by the Tenebrae choir, conductor Nigel Short (Signum Classics SIGCD471 - www.signumrecords.com)

The headline performance at this year’s Lammermuir Festival was the return of Joby Talbot’s much-loved choral composition that celebrates the great Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Northern Spain. I booked my tickets after receiving the Festival’s jubilant announcement:

‘At the heart of the programme this year is Joby Talbot’s Path of Miracles performed in the Concorde Hangar at the National Museum of Flight. Sung by one of the finest choral groups in the world, Tenebrae, for which it was written, the work which is both ravishingly beautiful and hugely dramatic has been performed once before at Lammermuir to a sold-out audience who stood cheering when it finished. This is an unmissable masterpiece and centrepiece of the festival.’

The concert was indeed hugely affective. Members of the audience were weeping with emotion at the end. I was one of them.

The core idea of the Lammermuir Festival is that the performance space showcases the majesty of the music, and vice versa. The choice of the National Museum of Flight as the concert venue was inspired. The performance started at 10 pm, so concert-goers had to travel like pilgrims through the pitch-black September darkness of East Lothian to reach the vast Basilica-like hangar in which the huge Concorde aeroplane sits brooding like the Eagle of Saint John the Evangelist. It was a promenade concert, with no rows of seats or pews, and thus the audience were scattered around the hangar in small groups, like visitors to a medieval cathedral.

Sublime 

The choir used the vast space brilliantly. When performing plainchant-inspired sections of the piece and musical extracts from the 12th-century Liber Sancti Jacobi (the ’Book of St James’), the choir divided its vocal forces to move around the hangar singing processionally, like monks and nuns singing the Liturgy of the Hours. The acoustics were cathedral-like, and sublime sounds came from every direction. At one point the singing came from above, when the stairway up to Concorde was used by choristers like the balcony of a church.

Paul Matheson is a diversity officer with the police.