Festival thanks

There is little doubt that the 2015 Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival has been the biggest and brightest to date.

Our plans to broaden the scope of the festival to a wider audience with a diverse and innovative programme and to get young people more involved both behind the scenes and on the stages paid off as the number of sell-out shows, ticket sales and increased audience numbers have shown.

Of course, the festival would not have reached such a prominent position in the region’s entertainment calendar without the help and support of the people and organisations that have got behind us over the past 36 years.

And so, we would like once again to thank you all.

Thanks to our funders, our supporters, the venues, the acts and, of course, members of our rich and diverse communities who attended performances from the grand to the tiny and remote stages across the region.

The year on year success and growth of Scotland’s largest rural performing arts festival can be solely attributed to the high level of support from all of you.

It has been an amazing, positive and exciting 36-year journey and we’re back next year from 20 to 29 May for another year of bringing world-class performing arts to the region.

Thanks again. See you in 2016.

The Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival Team

 

Scottish Ensemble’s From Russia With Love: A quick guide to the concert…

TOMORROW night, at the Easterbrook Hall, Dumfries, the sensational Scottish Ensemble will open the 36th Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival with a rousing, lively performance of From Russia with Love. This is a powerful showcase of two of the country’s master composers, Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich, and an absolute audience favourite. Expect an evening of extreme emotions expressed through music, from despair and devastating brutality to beauty and passion.

We asked the festival to give audiences a brief glimpse into the programme and a taste of what to expect.

Tchaikovsky – Andante Cantabile

Watch the video here.

The first piece we’ll be playing is so powerful that it made Leo Tolstoy cry (a fact which programme-note-writers have been delightedly using ever since). This may be because it really captures an element of the melody that is difficult to describe other than ‘really, really beautiful’. Played by solo cello it’s haunting, luscious and evocative – but you can listen for yourself.

As Tolstoy was known as not being a fan of classical music, preferring folk tunes, it was perhaps the recognition of the main melody performed on this beautiful instrument and bolstered with the sweet sound of the orchestra – it’s actually a tune Tchaikovsky heard being whistled by a carpenter working on his sister’s house in the Ukraine.

Shostakovich – Chamber Symphony in C Minor

Watch the video here.

If you’re familiar with this piece, it may well be the original string quartet version, which has been used in films pretty much ever since people were first left speechless at its incredible extremes of feeling (as well as the technical capabilities needed to play it). At the height of the Cold War, Shostakovich had been forced to travel abroad as a Soviet ambassador as well as joining the despised Party, and was tormented by a deep depression. When he returned, he presented this as his suicide note.

The version you’ll hear Scottish Ensemble play is the arrangement his good friend, Rudolf Barshai, made of it for string orchestra. Whenever we play it you can feel an almost tangible cloud of emotion hanging over the audience, due to the desolate melody but also the display of physical intensity from the players. We’re actually surprised there haven’t been more severe shoulder and neck injuries!

Shostakovich – Two Pieces for String Octet

Listen:

Shostakovich: Prelude Adagio

Shostakovich: Allegro Molto

Shostakovich is probably one of the Marmite composers – you’ll either love or hate this stuff. But if you’re looking for characteristic Shostakovich, these two pieces tick many of the boxes. Started when he was a student, and finished years later, they’re full of the spiky jarring harmonies and driving rhythms which you hear in his later career. There are so many good moments – winding chromatic melodies from the cello, slithering muted triplets in the violins, a vigorously pounding cello accompaniment in the Scherzo.

Tchaikovsky – Serenade for Strings

Watch here.

This one by the Vivaldi Orchestra is a beautiful version of this big, sonorous, romantic piece by Tchaikovsky. It’s also really quite different to how you’ll hear us play it as a string orchestra – listen for yourself here.

Share your comments with the Scottish Ensemble at:

Twitter: @ScotEnsemble
Facebook: facebook.com/ScottishEnsemble

Scottish Ensemble play the opening night of the Dumfries & Galloway Arts Festival at the Easterbrook Hall, Dumfries, on Friday, 22 May at  8pm. Tickets from the Midsteeple Box Office, Dumfries, 01387 253383, or on the door on the night.

Sensational start to 36th festival

The 36th Dumfries & Galloway Arts Festival opens at the Easterbrook Hall, Dumfries, with one of its most rousing and passionate performances to date.

On Friday, May 22, the sensational Scottish Ensemble bring From Russia with Love: a programme of music by two musical giants – Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky.

Tchaikovsky’s dramatic themes, intense rhythms, and soaring, dancelike melodies make an immediate connection with audiences today, just as they did in the 19th century. His Andante Cantabile and the Serenade for Strings are powerful, moving works that come straight from the heart.

Written during a visit to war-torn Dresden, Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony is a gripping portrayal of the brutality of conflict. Its jagged, dynamic rhythms in the central sections are contrasted by plaintive outer movements that never fail to move the listener.

Photo by Peter Dibdin

The programme includes Tchaikovsky’s Andante Cantabile, Op. 11 and Serenade for Strings in C major, Op. 48; Shostakovich,Chamber Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 110a (arr. Barshai) and and Two Pieces, Op. 11.

The Scottish Ensemble is a dynamic group of 12 string soloists formed from some of the most highly respected classical musicians in Europe.

The group performs without a conductor, led from the violin by its artistic director Jonathan Morton. The Scottish Ensemble regularly commissions new work, plays rare and unusual pieces and brings characteristic style and sprit to more well-known music.

Look forward to an evening of passionate Russian soul.

The performance takes place at the Easterbrook Hall, Dumfries, at 8pm.

Tickets from the Midsteeple box office, Dumfries, tel: 01387 253383.

The Dumfries & Galloway Arts Festival runs from May 22 to 31. To find out what’s on in your area during the festival, visit www.dgartsfestival.org.uk

Fresh breath to forgotten songs

A multi-artist collaboration to recreate a performance from a volume of little-known and forgotten local songs is due to make its world premiere on a Stranraer stage in May.

Macmath: The Silent Page is a song project of major historical significance to Scotland’s musical heritage. It involves a team of seven of Dumfries and Galloway’s top traditional musicians – Emily Smith, Robyn Stapleton, Aaron Jones, Claire Mann, Wendy Stewart, Jamie McLennan and Ali Burns – who are all in the process of breathing new life into an old forgotten collection of local songs.

Macmath: The Silent Page began when award-winning Galloway songwriter Ali Burns visited Broughton House in Kirkcudbright and came across two old books of handwritten songs. The books had been made by William Macmath who began his working life as a clerk at Hewats Solicitors in Castle Douglas around 1860.

“What is most remarkable about the collection is just how local it is to Dumfries and Galloway,” said Ali. “Macmath’s Grandfather had bought Airds of Kells by Loch Ken in 1826 and the whole family spent much sociable time there together.”

Mary and Jean Webster – William’s Mother and Aunt – were renowned singers and the songs they sung were learned from local people – the woodsman, nursemaid, kitchen maid, a local fisherman. These songs were written down by Macmath along with notes of the names and sometimes small details about the singers.

Ali said: “I can’t stress how exciting it is to be singing these songs back to life and what a unique and precious piece of local heritage we’re working with. It’s the singer’s equivalent of finding a trove of buried treasure.

“The bigger picture of Macmath’s work was that he spent 30 years of his life researching and sending Scottish songs to Professor Francis Child at Harvard University for the publication: English and Scottish Popular Ballads 1882 – 1898. So, although we have a very local collection of songs we’re working on, it’s important to remember that William Macmath was Scotland’s leading song expert: a hugely knowledgeable, well-read man whose contribution to our musical heritage was unequalled.”

“When I found the books I immediately wanted to hear them sung again and set about imagining how they could be back brought back to life. Dumfries and Galloway has some outstanding traditional musicians living and working here so my first thought was to get hem involved as I knew it would be in safe hands. And so back in the Autumn last year we all met up for the first time and began looking at the songs in detail.”

The two volumes contained 56 songs or song fragments between them and, with the help of Scottish ballad experts Alison McMorland and Geordie McIntyre, the group have chosen the songs they thought were unusual, rare or unique to the collection and have set about creating arrangements that not only bring the songs back to life but also manage to give a glimpse of another time and another Galloway.

The project has been commissioned by the Dumfries & Galloway Arts Festival and the songs will be performed for the first time at the Ryan Centre, Stranraer, on Tuesday, 26 May before moving to the Buccleuch Centre, Langholm, on 27 May and joining a number of other performances at the Dumfries & Galloway Arts Festival’s grand finale at the Easterbrook Hall on Sunday, 31 May.

Chair of Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival board, Ken Gouge, said: “We are very excited about staging the world premiere of Macmath: The Silent Page.

“The arts festival has been working in partnership with the National Trust of Scotland and local award-winning song writer Alison Burns, who has researched the project for over two years and is directing the performances.”

“This is the first major commission undertaken by the arts festival and we wanted to undertake this project as it was a way of bringing these important works to life;  to share them with the community of Dumfries and Galloway as well as the rest of Scotland; and to showcase the world class traditional musicians we have in the region.”

To find out all about the project, visit www.macmathsilentpage.wordpress.com

The 36th Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival takes place between 22 and 31 May at stages across the region. Tickets from the Midsteeple Box Office, Dumfries: 01387 253383. For further information about the festival, visit their website at www.dgartsfestival.org.uk

All photos courtesy Kim Ayres

Poetry in motion

Acclaimed poet Katrina Porteous and virtuoso Northumbrian piper Chris Ormston take to the stage at Easterbrook Hall, Dumfries.

Scottish-born poet Katrina Porteous grew up in North East England and her poems are steeped in the stories, histories, wildlife and people of the borderlands.

Ranging from the Eildons and the River Tweed to Hadrian’s Wall and the Northumberland and Durham coast, her work is rooted in Border Ballad and Northumbrian story-telling and song and often draws directly on the dialect voices of living people – hill farmers, shepherds and fishermen – whose lives are intimately involved with land and sea.

“I write for people who perhaps might not normally read much contemporary poetry,” says Katrina. “The rhythms and sound patterns of my work are close to music, and are meant to be heard out loud.”

An acclaimed performer, well-known for her lively readings of her own work on BBC Radio, Katrina will present a selection from her new Bloodaxe book, Two Countries, a passionate interweaving of human life and joy in the natural world. The naturalist and Guardian Country Diarist Mark Cocker praises Two Countries as being ‘of universal significance, yet rooted in a lifelong commitment to local community and the Northumbrian landscape.’

“For me, poetry is a communal activity,” she explained. “My poems draw on the words and experiences of living communities and I want to share those words with them, as well as with a wider public. The traditional ways of life which I write about in Two Countries give people a sense of common purpose and values, which link them closely to place. Fishing and farming give people a strong sense of belonging in the natural world, and I think they have important things to say to a society increasingly estranged from nature.”

Photo by Harry Beamish

Katrina is joined on stage by virtuoso Northumbrian piper , an internationally-acclaimed player and composer of traditional music. Together they will present a lively and spell-binding hour of words and music which will make you see and hear the Northumbrian and Borders landscape with new eyes and ears.

“Katrina Porteous is one of our best poets and her big new book of poems Two Countries is surely one of the most distinctive and important collections of the year.” (Morning Star)

The event will take place on Sunday 31 May, 5.30pm

Tickets, £10, from the Midsteeple Box Office, Dumfries. 01387 253383.

www.dgartsfestival.org.uk

WARNING: Side-effects may include uncontrollable milking and painful running gags

The region’s festival audiences are set to be reduced to tears of laughter when the Reduced Shakespeare Company brings its highly-acclaimed Complete History of Comedy (abridged) to stages in Dumfries and Stranraer.

They’ve skewered history, the Bible and the world’s most celebrated playwright, now this much-sought-after three-man comic troupe tackles the subject it was born to reduce.

The Reduced Shakespeare Company is a three-man comedy troupe that takes long, serious subjects and reduces them to short, sharp comedies.

Since 1981, ‘The Bad Boys of Abridgement’ have created nine stage shows, two television specials, several failed TV pilots and numerous radio pieces – all of which have been performed, seen, heard and translated into Klingon the world over.

The company’s first three shows, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged), The Complete History of America (abridged) and The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged) enjoyed a nine-year run at the Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly Circus. Not only were they London’s longest-running comedies, but at one point the Reduced Shakespeare Company had more shows running in the West End than Andrew Lloyd Webber. Some of them were funnier too.

The company were last seen on a four month tour of the UK and Ireland with The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged) at the start of 2014. Before that a whirlwind eight month tour of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) played to packed houses throughout the UK and London’s West End throughout 2013. Prior to this the “other RSC” were wowing the UK with their highly successful Complete World of Sports (abridged), which toured the country before completing a season in London’s West End during the 2012 Olympics.

“THE REDUCED SHAKESPEARE COMPANY ARE BACK, DOING WHAT THEY DO BEST.”  What’s On Stage (2014)

“THE TRIO DELIVER 70 MINUTES FILLED WITH LAUGHTER TO A DELIGHTED AUDIENCE.” British Theatre Guide (2014)

If you’re up for a good laugh, don’t miss the shows:

SUNDAY, 31 MAY, 7.30pm. The Ryan Centre, Stranraer DG9 7AP

SATURDAY, 30 MAY, 7.30pm. Easterbrook Hall, The Crichton, Bankend Road, Dumfries, DG1 4TA

Tickets from the Midsteeple Box Office, Dumfries: 01387 253383

To find out more of what’s on during the festival, visit: www.dgartsfestival.org.uk

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

A GLORIOUS evening featuring one of the world’s best loved operas comes to Dumfries on May 16.

For the 35th Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival, Opera a la Carte will present Puccini’s heart-breaking masterpiece Madama Butterfly at the Easterbrook Hall, Dumfries, and this is a rare chance to experience a glittering night at the opera with all its colourful grandeur and magnificent splendour.

For those who have never been to an opera, Madama Butterfly is the perfect introduction to this beautiful performing artform.

And the under 25s have two good reasons to attend. First, the exciting chance to see a quality, real-life opera without having to travel to the city; and second, to take advantage of this year’s half price ticket concession.

Madama Butterfly is a heart-rending tale of passion, honour and the tragedy of love. Set in 1890 Japan, this is the story of a naive teenage geisha whose lover, an American naval lieutenant, marries her for convenience and then cruelly abandons her with tragic results.

Luxuriant and exotic, Giacomo Puccini’s glorious and majestic tour de force portrays sorrow and betrayal in a powerful musical score that has enthralled the world’s audiences for over a century.

Madama Butterfly was the inspiration for Miss Saigon and Memoirs of a Geisha. It is the seventh most performed opera in the world and its famous moving arias have been heard in venues across the continents since it was first performed at La Scala, Milan in 1904.

Opera a la Carte presents Madama Butterfly at the Easterbrook Hall at 8pm on Friday, 16 May, and heralds the start of this year’s exciting Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival programme. Tickets from the Midsteeple Box Office, Dumfries, tel: 01387 253383. Full colour festival brochures are available from www.dgartsfestival.org.uk or from outlets across the region.

For a chance to win a pair of tickets and a £50 voucher towards an Italian pre-theatre meal for two on the night, visit www.dgwgo.com and fill out the simple competition entry form.

 

VIVA ITALIA: WIN A NIGHT AT THE OPERA PLUS A MEAL FOR TWO

CLASSIC Italian is on the menu on the evening of Friday, 16 May, as Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival kicks off its 10-day celebrations with Opera a la Carte’s stunning performance of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in the grand setting of the Easterbrook Hall.

And the festival has teamed up with those wonderful people at Dumfries and Galloway What’s Going On and Little Italy Restaurant in Dumfries to offer a splendid night of Italian food and music, which includes a meal for two to the value of £50 and a pair of tickets to this timeless opera, to one lucky winner.

For a chance to win, simply visit http://www.dgwgo.com and fill out the entry form.

Hailed as one of the world’s best-loved operas, Madama Butterfly, is a heart-breaking tale of passion, honour and the tragedy of love. Set in 1890 Japan, this is the story of a naive teenage geisha whose lover, an American naval lieutenant, marries her for convenience and then cruelly abandons her. Luxuriant and exotic, Giacomo Puccini’s glorious and majestic masterpiece portrays sorrow and betrayal in a powerful musical score that has enthralled audiences across the world for over a century.

For diners who enjoy the whole experience of eating excellent Italian food in a relaxed and intimate setting with echoes of the Tuscan Hills, then Little Italy in Moffat Road, Dumfries, is the only place to be. One of Dumfries’ favourite eateries, the talented chefs of this popular restaurant produce the kind of food that leaves a lasting impression. The extensive lunch and dinner menus include pasta and pizza favourites as well as a mouth-watering variety of fish, chicken and meat dishes cooked in the traditional Italian way but made with some of the best local produce Dumfries and Galloway has to offer.

 

For further information on Little Italy, visit their website at http://www.littleitaly.co.uk

 

Opera a la Carte presents Madama Butterfly at the Easterbrook Hall at 8pm on Friday, 16 May. Tickets from the Midsteeple Box Office, Dumfries, tel: 01387 253383. Full colour festival brochures are available from http://www.dgartsfestival.org.uk or from outlets across the region.