Dunedin Consort
John Butt, Director
Johann Sebastian BACH (1685-1750): St John Passion, BWV 245
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Dunedin Consort is one of the world's leading Baroque ensembles, recognised for its vivid and insightful performances and recordings. Formed in 1995 and named after Din Eidyn, the ancient Celtic name for Edinburgh Castle, Dunedin Consort’s ambition is to allow listeners to hear early music afresh, and to couple an inquisitive approach to historical performance with a commitment to commissioning and performing new music. Under the direction of John Butt, the ensemble has earned two coveted Gramophone Awards – for the 2007 recording of Handel’s Messiah and the 2014 recording of Mozart’s Requiem – and a Grammy nomination.
Dunedin Consort performs regularly at major festivals and venues across the UK, including the BBC Proms, Edinburgh International Festival and Lammermuir Festival, with whom it enjoys close associations. In 2017, Dunedin Consort announced its first residency at London’s Wigmore Hall, which continues to this day and complements its regular series of events at home in Scotland, as well as throughout Europe and beyond. The group’s growing discography on Linn Records includes Handel’s Acis and Galatea and Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, both nominated for Gramophone Awards. Other Bach recordings include Mass in B Minor, Violin Concertos, Magnificat, Christmas Oratorio, Matthew Passion and John Passion, which was nominated for a Recording of the Year award in both Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine. A recording of Handel’s Samson, in its first version of 1743, was released in October 2019, receiving Editor’s Choice accolades across the board.
Alongside its performance and recording work, Dunedin Consort is committed to a wide-ranging education programme both in schools and in the wider community. In inspiring and encouraging musical participation, developing vocal skills and fostering a love of classical music, historical performance and new music, Dunedin Consort aims to develop and nurture its potential audience and to encourage the performers of the future.
While Dunedin Consort is committed to performing repertoire from the baroque and early classical periods, and to researching specific historical performance projects, it remains an enthusiastic champion of contemporary music. In recent years the ensemble has commissioned and premiered new music by composers including Stuart Macrae, Ailie Robertson, Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade, William Sweeney, Nico Muhly, Peter Nelson, Stevie Wishart and Sally Beamish. In 2019 it premiered four new co-commissions with the BBC Proms, and in 2021 premiered Dido’s Ghost, a new opera by Errollyn Wallen, co-commissioned with the Barbican Centre, Edinburgh International Festival, Buxton International Festival, Mahogany Opera and Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale.
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John Butt is Gardiner Professor of Music at the University of Glasgow and director of Edinburgh's Dunedin Consort. He has recently also been appointed as a Principal Artist with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. As an undergraduate at Cambridge University, he was organ scholar at King's College; he completed his PhD in 1987. Following posts at the University of Aberdeen and Magdalene College Cambridge, he joined the faculty at UC Berkeley in 1989 as University Organist and Professor of Music. In 1997 he returned to Cambridge as a University Lecturer and Fellow of King's College, and in 2001 he took up his current post at Glasgow.
His books include Bach Interpretation (1990), the handbook Bach’s Mass in B Minor (1991), and Music Education and the Art of Performance in the German Baroque (1994). Playing with History (2002) marked a new tack, examining the culture of historically informed performance as a contemporary phenomenon. He is also editor or joint editor of both the Cambridge and Oxford Companions to Bach and of the Cambridge History of Seventeenth Century Music (2005). His book on Bach’s Passions, Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity (2010) explores the ways in which Bach's settings relate to broader concepts of modernity, such as subjectivity and time consciousness.
John Butt’s conducting engagements with the Dunedin Consort (2003-) have included major Baroque repertory and several commissions. He has made twelve recordings of the group for Linn Records. His recording of the first version of Messiah (Dublin, 1742) received the ClassicFM/Gramophone award in the Baroque Vocal category in 2007; then, in 2014, his reconstruction of the first performance of Mozart’s Requiem earned a second Gramophone award (Choral category) and a Grammy Nomination. Four further recordings have been nominated for a Gramophone award, Handel’s Acis and Galatea, Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, John Passion and Magnificat (both the latter performed within their original Vesper liturgy); the recordings of the large-scale Bach choral works were completed with the Christmas Oratorio in 2016. Dunedin’s recording of Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers will be released in Autumn 2017, to celebrate Monteverdi’s anniversary year. He has been (or is soon to be) guest conductor with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Hallé Orchestra, Portland Baroque Orchestra, English Concert, Stavanger Symphony Orchestra and the Irish Baroque Orchestra, among others. He is also active as a solo organist and harpsichordist, with eleven recordings on organ, harpsichord and clavichord released by Harmonia Mundi and three more on Linn (including Bach’s complete, Well-Tempered Clavier).
In 2003 John Butt was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and received the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association; he was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2006. In 2013 he was awarded the medal of the Royal College of Organists and the OBE in the UK New Year’s Honours list.