Photographs from the Bach St John Passion concert held on 30th March are now available on our website on the Photos page

We have received a letter and certificate from Marie Curie to thank the orchestra and our supporters for the fantastic donation of £1024.46. Thank you to our musicians and audience members for raising this magnificent sum. 

The Borders Chamber Orchestra will next be performing at the Preview Concert for the Melrose Music Festival. The concert is on Saturday 11th May at 6:30pm in Melrose Parish Church.

The Festival, at its new dates of Saturday 7th - Sunday 15th September, will feature choral, orchestral and jazz evenings in its programme. Come and discover who will be performing at the 2024 Melrose Music Festival in September, where a world-class line-up of artists will be delivering a diverse range of music. All will be revealed at the Festival Preview on Saturday 11th May, at 6.30pm, in Melrose Parish Church.

Special guest at the Festival Preview will be Sir James MacMillan, who is one of today’s most successful composers and performs internationally as a conductor.

The event will be introduced by Robert Marshall, Melrose Music Festival Artistic Director, and artists performing at the Preview will include:

• Borders Chamber Orchestra conducted by Derrick Morgan, Assistant Conductor of the RSNO and featuring professional orchestral harpist Ellie Hetherington
  • Ralph Vaughan Williams - Serenade to Music in conjunction with Borders Chamber Choir
  • Constant Lambert - Aubade heroique 
  • Sergei Rachmaninoff - Intermezzo from his opera Aleko
• Borders Chamber Choir
• Melrose Vocal Ensemble

Click here to get tickets
Adults: £15
Concessions (students and unwaged): £10
Under 18s: free

Derrick Morgan, Assistant Conductor of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, will be conducting us at our Melrose Music Festival Concert on Saturday 14th September. Derrick, who was born in the Scottish Borders and is now based in Glasgow, is already known to some of our orchestral musicians having conducted us at the MMF Preview Concert in May. He studied Musicology at the University of Edinburgh and conducting at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where he received prizes for his achievements in conducting. Derrick is a musician who strives actively to engage with the community, collaborating with ensembles and communities across Scotland and we are excited to be working with him. Further information can be found on his website

Eleanor Hetherington, who now lives in the Scottish Borders, will be our guest Harpist at the Melrose Music Festival Preview Concert on 11th May. She is a classically trained harpist with a deep-rooted background in Gaelic traditional music.  

Eleanor completed her schooling at St. Mary's Music School in Edinburgh before reading Music at the University of Leeds where she gained a First-Class Honours Degree.  Eleanor then moved to Germany to study harp performance at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Weimar.  

Since graduating in 2008, Eleanor has performed extensively as an orchestral harpist with many prestigious orchestras, including, the Gewandhaus Orchestra Leipzig, WDR Radio Orchestra Cologne, Staatskapelle Weimar and Beethoven Orchestra Bonn.

Eleanor is now enjoying a diverse career as a performer and teacher in Scotland, working regularly with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and other leading UK orchestras, as well as guest performances in Norway and teaching at festivals such as the Edinburgh International Harp Festival.

Further information can be found on her website

Sir James MacMillan will be the guest speaker at the Melrose Music Festival Preview Concert on 11th May. He is the pre-eminent Scottish composer of his generation and performs internationally as a conductor. 

He studied composition at the University of Edinburgh with Rita McAllister and Kenneth Leighton, and at Durham University with John Casken, where he gained an undergraduate degree and then a PhD degree in 1987. After his studies, MacMillan returned to Scotland, composing prolifically, and becoming Associate Composer with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, often working on education projects.

He came to the attention of the classical establishment with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra's premiere of The Confession of Isobel Gowdie at the BBC Proms in 1990. Isobel Gowdie was one of many women executed for witchcraft in 17th-century Scotland. Sir James founded the Cumnock Tryst festival in Scotland in 2014 and was awarded a Knighthood in the 2015 Queen's Birthday honours. Further biographical information can be found here