Lammermuir Festival this year features Haddington composer Raymond Dodd’s music in this year’s festival in a concert at Winton House, Pencaitland in East Lothian on Monday 15 September at 7.30pm.
Winton House is an exclusive use hospitality venue for bespoke events; complementary wine and North Berwick gin are being served during the interval.
You can see details of the concert on Lammermuir Festival blog.
Raymond Dodd’s musical education began as a young child with piano lessons, and his first attempt at composition was a setting of a Robert Louis Stevenson poem when he was around 6 years old. He then took up the cello and was to become a superb cellist, later playing professionally as a soloist and as a chamber musician, including concerts all over the country with his trio.
Performing was just one part of his career, and he is well-known as a composer, having written a great number of works including orchestral, chamber and vocal music. He studied composition at The Royal Academy of Music in London, then at Oxford University, and was successively lecturer, senior lecturer then Head of the Department of Music at the University of Aberdeen, over a period of some 35 years before moving to East Lothian.
He has written a new version of his expressive and melodic Fantasty String Quartet which he first wrote in 1987. The new arrangement will receive its premier performance at Winton House as part of Lammermuir Festival on Monday 15 September when it will be performed by the Maxwell String Quartet.
Here is a podcast of an interview with Raymond Dodd:
The composer commented on how pleased he is to be hearing it in Winton House’s beautiful surroundings. He said, “I’m optomistic that it will sound very good, clear, but I hope the sonorities will be rich enough as well, and I think they will be. I’m very much looking forward to hearing it, I have to say.”
As well as being featured in this year’s festival as a composer, Raymond Dodd has been going to the Lammermuir Festival concerts since they began in 2010. When we asked him if he thought this was a good thing for the region he said, “Lammermuir Festival has been wonderfully successful and I think that almost speaks for itself. I personally was very much involved in the organisation of the concerts given by The Lamp of Lothian organised before the Festival started. The idea of changing over from individual concerts scattered throughout the summer to a festival which was a feast of music seems to have worked so well, and I’m absolutely delighted. The longer it goes on the better.”
For more details on how to get tickets for the Winton House concert or for other concerts at Lammermuir Festival, please visit their website or call 0131 473 2000