What links Robert Burns, Joseph Haydn, the Scots Musical Museum and Forres!

It is well known that Beethoven made settings for Scottish traditional songs under commission from George Thomson, an Edinburgh publisher and folk-song collector.  What is less well known is that Thomson also commissioned settings from other continental composers such as Haydn, Weber, Hummel and Pleyel.  Haydn commissioned Thomson to set over 200 melodies at a fee of 2 ducats apiece!   About 15 years ago Glasgow University set up a project to create a sound archive of this material by sending the outstanding Scottish singers, Lorna Anderson and Jamie MacDougall, to Vienna to record them accompanied by an Austrian piano trio.  The aim of the meeting is to listen to some of these songs in the splendid setting of St. Laurence Church.