CUMNOCK, Scotland — Cumnock is, as someone told me last weekend, the kind of place where music festivals do not happen. Buried in the damp and drizzle of the Scottish lowlands south of Glasgow, it was once a mining town. But then the pits closed and decline set in. The streets are empty, shops are boarded up. It feels forlorn and broken. Anything but festive.
For that very reason, though, it needed something to lift local spirits. And last week it acquired the Cumnock Tryst: a music festival that for the strangeness of its name alone drew interest beyond the Scottish borders.
“Tryst” sounds like an amorous encounter but is actually a Gaelic word for “gathering together.” And this gathering was the creation of the celebrated Scottish composer James MacMillan, who is also Cumnock’s most illustrious living son. Known internationally for vivid, ear-catching orchestral scores, operas, and choral music — much of it religious (he’s devoutly and conspicuously Catholic) — Mr. MacMillan has never forgotten his roots in this mining community. And the Tryst is an attempt to reconnect with them in the classic manner of the bright child from humble origins who goes out into the world, makes good, then wants to bring the goodness home.
What he specifically brought home to Cumnock last weekend were some of the top-rank musicians he’s associated with professionally. Artists like the supercharged, elite professional choir The Sixteen (household names in Britain thanks to several TV series) and the glamorous but credible violinist Nicola Benedetti (so famous these days that a British music magazine recently carried 14 photos of her in the same issue: an achievement that drew letters wryly asking if the editor couldn’t have found room for more).
These artists all gave pristine, largely sold-out concerts which, in the case of The Sixteen, included new settings of the Catholic Stabat Mater text commissioned from three rising composers — Alissa Firsova, Tonu Korvits, Matthew Martin — as part of a project supervised by Mr. MacMillan and soon to be released on compact disc. But just as important, the visiting artists were there not just to do their own thing but to engage with amateur performers from the Cumnock area: the “gathering” of the title.
The Sixteen stayed around to sing alongside local voices at a Sunday morning Mass in Cumnock’s Catholic church. One of their basses, Eamonn Dougan, ran a Singing Day that with improbable effectiveness for six hours’ work drilled Cumnock amateurs into the basis for a chorus that will hopefully become a fixture.
And there was an extreme example of inclusive programming when Mr. MacMillan brought together the accomplished National Youth Brass Band of Scotland, a star tuba-player from Sweden (there are such things), a clarinetist from the virtuosic London Sinfonietta, and some children from a local school — performing side by side in pieces that included a MacMillan premiere. The work, an evocation of the Cumnock skyline, miraculously drew these very mixed abilities into a brief but meaningful coherence.
Projects like this call for sensitivity. The risk is they’ll be misinterpreted as patronizing. But from what I saw, the folk of Cumnock welcomed everything on offer in the Tryst with open arms, only too pleased to have these starry visitors among them, and keen for the experiences that wouldn’t otherwise have come their way. What’s more, Mr. MacMillan doesn’t play the great man: just a conscientious one who saw that Cumnock needed help and wondered what, as a musician, he could do.
In the most down-to-earth of ways this was a family affair. His wife did the administration work. His son did front-of-house. Assorted in-laws manned the car parks. There were probably MacMillans washing up backstage.
But that said, there was one moment of grandeur in the weekend. Cumnock may be run-down, but the nearby countryside has an impressive mansion, Dumfries House, that was about to be stripped bare and sold off when Prince Charles stepped in to save it, turning the estate into a project for regeneration of the area.
The house is now restored, magnificently. And the prince gave his permission for a Sunday concert, scattered across different spaces with the audience promenading between rooms — carefully supervised to mind the Meissen and the Chippendale.
A grand finale to the Tryst, its highlight was (inevitably) a MacMillan first performance. And once more it was a gathering, this time between The Sixteen and Ms. Benedetti for a piece that set a snatch of text Mr. MacMillan had discovered in the plasterwork of one of Dumfries House’s ceilings.
Soft, serene, appropriately enigmatic, Domus Infelix Est (An Unhappy House), as it was called, won’t be an easy piece to fit in future concert programs: solo violin and voices are an awkward combination. But for these specific circumstances it was perfect. Tailor-made to celebrate the place from which it came. And unequivocally a tryst.