An innovative festival of chamber music
10 – 16 May 2008

Are you looking for inspiration?
You’ll find it in abundance on the shores of Loch Shiel in the second week of May, when leading artists from all over Scotland and beyond will team up to perform classical music befitting the scenic splendour of the West Highlands.

 

Albeit short of lavish concert halls, the villages round Loch Shiel offer a series of imaginative chamber music venues ranging from the awe-inspiring to the picturesque, and festival programmes are devised to match. In 2006 we staged a concert at Glenfinnan railway station, featuring music by Steve Reich. In 2007 we celebrated the Highland Year of Culture by commissioning a collaborative work based on local themes and song traditions.

 

This 2008 festival will be about many things - spirituality, journeys, foreign-ness - and, as always, about managing somehow to do extraordinary things, about necessity being the mother not only of invention but of inspiration.

 

The Wednesday concert will feature the very wonderful accordionist Karin Kuestner playing her own arrangement of a Cesar Frank piece which was itself a reworking for organ of what was originally a duet for piano and harmonium. The Saturday and Sunday concerts will feature the vocal duo Red Byrd, who have been breaking new ground and tearing down barriers for nearly 20 years now. Their "recusant's" version of a William Byrd mass will surely illuminate corners of the work which better-nourished interpretations miss out on. Likewise our Bruckner 7, which we can promise will sound anything but pint-sized. When we first heard a recording of this chamber arrangement for 9 players, we were struck by how little of the majesty of the original was lost, and how much the gains of limpidity outweighed that very small loss. 

 

Of course, this isn't just the Loch Shiel Festival of Clever-clogs Arrangements. We have glorious originals, too - the great Schubert song-cycles, a Bach cello suite, string quartets, sonatas - but we are confident that these too will gain from being placed next to works which are nominally larger in scale and which wouldn't normally be heard in the same type of venues.

The Festival’s Artistic Director is London-based violinist Charles Mutter, Assistant Leader of the BBC Concert Orchestra.

 

 

Click here for details
on how to get to Loch Shiel.