St Magnus Festival 2004 Preview

3 Jun 2004 in Festival, Music, Orkney

Working Wonders on Orkney

ALISTAIR PEEBLES looks ahead to a busy programme of music and theatre at the 27th St Magnus Festival in Orkney, including a large scale community production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt

I READ WITH interest recently that a new production of Peer Gynt had opened in Edinburgh, with a cast of six. I was interested not just because the community production for this year’s St Magnus Festival is also based on Ibsen’s 1867 “dramatic poem”, but in particular because the Orkney line-up, including orchestra and off-stage choir, numbers 150.

Size matters, numbers matter. It’s a small island, it’s a big Festival, it’s the 27th. There are 33 events plus the nightly Festival Club, and the events on Orkney’s outer isles; we go 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, we have Three Peace Sweet and Saltfishforty, The Nils Økland Trio, Two Fiddlers, Seven Fishermen and Six Sanday Tunes, to number but a few.

And we have, to name but a few more, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, The Nash Ensemle, the Russian Patriarchate Choir, Grand Union Scottish Band, the Inchcolm New Music Ensemble, a Pier Arts Centre exhibition of ceramic work by Richard Slee, and many another fine solo artist and musician. But the number beating at the Festival’s heart this year is 70, for that is the age that it will help Sir Peter Maxwell Davies to celebrate.

It is no news to anyone, of course, that Max – his music and his values – is as central to the Festival as the Festival itself is central to the musical life of the county, and it is fitting that the final performance this year is his own Birthday Concert, featuring the BBC SSO, pianist Jean-Philippe Collard, and the Sanday Fiddle Club. In addition, a new work by Max, Seven Skies of Winter, commissioned jointly by the Festival and the Nash Ensemble, will be premiered by the Nash on Tuesday 22nd in St Magnus Cathedral, along with birthday tributes by Sally Beamish, Simon Holt, James MacMillan, Ian McQueen and Alasdair Nicolson.

“Glenys wanted “a big community project for Max’s 70th birthday”, concentrating on such strands in his thinking as the mix of local and professional artists and performers.”

Ten years ago, the festival finale was Happy Returns: “a birthday retrospective of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s Orkney music for children”. That was a stunning account of his contribution over the previous sixteen years – featuring children from sixteen of Orkney’s schools. Performance number 1 this year, the community opera premiere of Peer Gynt, was conceived by Glenys Hughes, Festival Director, as a complement to that. She describes it as a celebration of some key ideas in Max’s work, rather than looking back over the pieces in which those ideas have found expression.

Music for the opera is by Kenneth Dempster and libretto by Cengiz Saner: they have worked together before, and both have participated in previous St Magnus Festivals. Glenys wanted “a big community project for Max’s 70th birthday”, concentrating on such strands in his thinking as the mix of local and professional artists and performers. Thus the collaboration between Ken and Cengiz is combined with the equal forces of Mr McFall’s Chamber and eight local musicians, and combined also with the very large cast, which includes 80 primary schoolchildren: the threadballs, leaves, trolls and imps of the piece.

Other strands from which this Peer Gynt has been woven include Max and the Festival’s tradition of mixing youngsters and adult performers, as well as their belief in music theatre. Max’s acknowledged involvement in encouraging young composers, particularly young Scottish composers – something that was evident in his annual summer schools on Hoy – is reflected in the choice of Kenneth Dempster for this commission.

Ken describes working on this project as “a great privilege”, saying that Orkney has a terrific reputation in community productions, that he and Cengiz are both very impressed with local musicianship and dramatic skills, and that he is pleased with progress so far. He himself attended the Hoy Music School in 1991, at a pivotal point in his working life, and it helped shape his work and his life ever since. Encouraged by Max and by James MacMillan who was there as well that year, he returned from London to set up base in his native Edinburgh a few months afterwards, and he has pursued a successful freelance career from that time on. Ken, who is also musical director for Peer Gynt, has dedicated the score to Max.

“Once again it looks as though the Festival committee, and all concerned, will have achieved wonders, given Orkney’s location and the limitations that presents.”

If Kenneth Dempster conducts for the rehearsals characteristically on tiptoe, Cengiz Saner’s body language as he moves among the multitudes onstage confirms your impression of him face-to-face. Dynamic, patient, confident and clear in what he wants to achieve, he describes their approach to Peer Gynt in terms of a reappraisal of the relationship in opera between music and libretto.

There are stretches for example in which music is altogether absent, except in the language itself, where the words function musically: with repetition, reprises and patterns of leitmotif. Cengiz’s work hitherto has included theatre, films, TV and opera in many parts of the world. He produced Kenneth Dempster’s And the Bridge is Love for Broomhill Opera, and directed Grand Union’s Dr Carnival for the St Magnus Festival in 2002.

Cengiz and Ken, who have made seven trips to Orkney since February, are now in residence here till the Festival itself. The cast will only hear the orchestra from the weekend before the Festival begins, and the musicians similarly will have an intense few days getting familiar with the action. Funding for the project has come largely from the Scottish Arts Council, but Glenys is very grateful that Loganair has sponsored the travel. It will be fascinating to see and hear how it all comes together.

Once again it looks as though the Festival committee, and all concerned, will have achieved wonders, given Orkney’s location and the limitations that presents. Of course they’re building on a truly remarkable record of achievement over the years, hand-in-hand with a truly remarkable island community. It’s a shame in a way that all the work that’s gone into the opera will result in only two performances, plus one for schools. (I suppose that’s where a production in Edinburgh with a cast of six and a choice of theatres wins out.)

Some of the performers have been given the opportunity to travel to Gudbrandsdalen in Norway later this summer, however, to present excerpts from their production at a Peer Gynt symposium there. So like everything else to do with Orkney’s Midsummer Festival, it’s about much more than mere numbers and the actual size of the place, just as Peer Gynt is about much more than how many scrapes he gets into.

As for numbers as regards availability of tickets for the Festival, it seems they’re going down rapidly. It’s still worth trying, however, and the Box Office can be contacted on 01856 871445.

The 27th St Magnus Festival takes place in Orkney from 18-23 June 2004.