A CLASSICAL music festival is overcoming the odds to ensure the show goes on.

Festivals the length and breadth of the country have fallen by the wayside this year due to the coronavirus pandemic.

However, the organisers of the Lammermuir Festival are counting down to the curtain going up on this year’s festival on Tuesday.

James Waters, festival director, said it would have been easier to simply cancel the event but the organisers wanted it to go ahead in some form.

He said: “I am hugely looking forward to it but not in the way we would usually look forward to it!

“We don’t have an audience but we do have an online audience and it is selling pleasingly.”

The 62-year-old said organisers had held off as long as possible in the hope of holding the traditional festival, which usually attracts people from throughout Scotland and beyond.

He added: “All rules went out of the window.

“We were just determined to try to do something.”

A dozen concerts will take place between Tuesday and September 19, with all bar one taking place in East Lothian.

Haddington’s Holy Trinity Church will act as the venue for those local concerts, which will be performed behind closed doors.

The performances will be screened live or streamed as live online to those who have bought tickets.

Opening the festival are Chloe Hanslip (violin) and Danny Driver (piano), who have won plaudits for their recordings of Beethoven’s sonatas.

Their performance is broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 with a tribute to Beethoven, in the year which marks 250 years since his birth.

The following day, Joshua Ellicott (tenor) and Anna Tilbrook (piano) perform at the Haddington church, with Navarra String Quartet and Philip Higham (cello) playing next Thursday (September 10).

Roman Rabinovich (piano) performs next Friday (September 11), with Sean Shibe (guitars) the following day and the Navarra Quartet with Tom Poster (piano) next Sunday (September 13).

Bach Viola Da Gamba Sonatas, with Jonathan Manson (viola da gamba) and Steven Devine (harpsichord) takes place next Monday (September 14), with Coco Tomita (violin) and Kan Tomita (piano) performing the following day, and Matilda Lloyd (trumpet) and Martin Cousin (piano) on September 16.

The Dunedin Consort take centre stage in the church on September 17, with Roman Rabinovich (piano) and members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra playing on September 19.

The only concert from outside East Lothian will come from Scottish Opera, live from Glasgow, on September 18.

Mr Waters acknowledged that it would have been “very easy” to cancel the festival and focus firmly on 2021.

He said: “We are an arts organisation and our responsibility is to make art.

“Purely from a strategic point of view, we really did not want to drop out of sight for two years.

“We have done very well since we started in 2010 and it has been a fairly consistent line of getting slightly bigger each year.

“If we did not do anything then the likelihood is we would have lost some ground.”

The festival has proven a great success over the decade since it was formed.

Dozens of musicians have been attracted to East Lothian, which Mr Waters said was “the perfect place for the festival”.

He said: “It has got to be a place you want to go to, even if there is not a festival there.

“It has got to be [somewhere people can] get about easily and you can create unique combinations between the performer and the venue.”

Tickets for the concerts are £5, with a pass to each of the 11 Haddington concerts costing £33.

For more information, go to lammermuirfestival.co.uk