St Magnus Festival 2004

24 Jun 2004 in Festival, Orkney

Orkney, 18-23 June 2004

MANY JOURNEYS were undertaken in this Festival, and voyaging will be one of the themes featured next year. In the meantime, Peer Gynt’s epic quest will continue in a series of excerpts in Norway this summer, when a number of the cast make their way from Orkney to the International Peer Gynt Symposium in Gudbrandsdalen (the valley where Peer Gynt is supposed to have lived).

Making their way round Scotland with their revue In Flagrant Delicht, and very glad to be spending four nights in the same place for a change, were singer and songwriter Michael Marra and this year’s Festival poet, the writer and dramatist Liz Lochhead. This natural pairing of talents and personalities gave a hugely entertaining Saturday late-night show in Orkney Arts Theatre. Their routine seemed anything but that: a sparky onstage rapport kept everything very animated, and the individual performances gained a lot from the mock-quarrelsome development of the exchanges.

Michael Marra was the very type of the modest male: put-upon, wanting to sing about simple things like football, but kept in his place by the persuasive-assertive-feminine Liz Lochhead, who was of course entirely on top of the agenda. Which of course was love. Many aspects of this terrible force were turned towards us for our inspection, the erotic, the comic, the tender, the splitting of the record collection. It was a very successful collaboration, simply staged with chaise-longue, soft light and keyboard, and strongly played by two very experienced performers you couldn’t but warm to, who made it all seem very easy indeed.

As Festival poet, Liz Lochhead had a busy schedule, with three readings in as many days. Her audiences were very big, all three houses as full as I can remember since Seamus Heaney was here in 1994. Liz herself was last here in 1990, though it hardly seems any time at all.

The first of the readings usually takes place in the Pier Arts Centre, but since that space was unavailable, the venue was changed, very successfully, to Stromness Parish Church. This was too good a chance to miss, and Liz began her reading with a close look under the Eden figleaf, which warmed up the audience nicely. There was a lot of laughter throughout the hour, and a lot of appreciation shown, not just for the humour, but for the special quality she has of speaking from the heart about the things we all know in our own lives, taking them and giving them back to us with a fresh insight. There was something very agreeable about hearing those poems of love and loss from the very platform on which so many rituals of loss and love have been conducted.

“Although one little boy replied, simply “No” when asked on the way out whether he’d enjoyed the concert, it’s surely a concept worth repeating.”

The Festival itself went On Tour, taking the Grand Union Scottish Band to Sanday; Michael Marra (with his own gravelly, witty cabaret) and the Inchcolm New Music Ensemble to Hoy; the BBC SSO Ensemble to Stronsay; the Russian Patriarchate Choir to Flotta; and the Fitzcarraldo to Westray. All in all, there was much moving and – not least by children attending Walk the Plank’s version of Jules Verne’s classic adventure, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – some shaking.

Published only a few years after Peer Gynt , in 1870, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea also tells of a vast journey, though the central figures pursue different aims: true love in Peer Gynt’s case, terrible revenge for the destruction of his beloved family in the case of Captain Nemo, though there’s much treasure hunting and scientific research along the way. Interestingly, both stories end in the same part of the world – in Norway – though with Nemo’s final destiny left uncertain.

Adapted by Peter Grimes and created by Walk the Plank for touring aboard the Fitzcarraldo, “the UK’s only theatre ship” (also Norwegian in origin), this version of the story was fast-moving and entertaining, and took full advantage of a potential for clowning that’s, well, not obvious in the original. It is of course well-chosen for the venue, making clever use of the possibilities offered by the ship’s furnishings: ladders, doors, hatchways. Those were augmented by a tricky pair of panels upstage, on which images of fish, actors, maelstrom, and other subsea wonders were presented by video projection. Music, lighting and direction all made fantastic, full use of the potential offered by script, cast and venue – the sound of the engines, and the occasional movement of the ship adding, as one might imagine, to the whole effect.

It was very much a children’s show, though enjoyed, and admired, by the audience as a whole. Captain Nemo’s dark agony wasn’t allowed to unbalance our sense of the comical agony, the danger and distress experienced by the doughty trio, whose curiosity, loyalty and harpooning skill had left them clinging to the Nautilus’ hull. Arronax (Gregory Gudgeon), Conseil (Liam McCormick) and Ned Land (Josh Moran) were outstanding for their energy, audience rapport and skills in mimicry and mime…and at least in the first two, in their French. Down to earth (how he longed for the chance) Ned was English salt-of-the-earth yeoman rather than the original Canadian French, and a real champ.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea played seven times in all here, in Stromness and Kirkwall harbours, including two special children’s performances, and in Westray, as mentioned above. The voyage continues over the summer, all round the coast of Britain.

Another event directed at a younger audience (though most of the seats seemed to be occupied by older folk) was the Festival’s first-ever Family Concert. Far from the shadowy bowels of the Fitzcarraldo, it took place in the sunny late afternoon clarity of the King Street Halls, and was memorable for many reasons, but mostly, perhaps, for Max’s spirited narration of Prokoviev’s Peter and the Wolf .

The Nash Ensemble

A delightful concert by The Nash Ensemble, conducted by Martyn Brabbins, the programme also featured Mozart’s Adagio and Rondo, K 617, originally written for the “glass harmonica”, and Bizet’s Jeu d’Enfants: superbly imitative music, and played with evident pleasure. They really are one of the very best bands around, and not above a bit of fun – as when the three players of the Wolf’s motif stood up for their introductory parts wearing menacing dark shades.

Although one little boy replied, simply “No” when asked on the way out whether he’d enjoyed the concert, it’s surely a concept worth repeating. As for the wee lad, if he meets three musicians with shining blank eyes some dark night, let’s hope he was paying attention to the story.

“There are other summer music schools in the country, but none quite like this in its intensity and in the fact that participants have the chance to work with established professional orchestras.”

Another recent innovation in the Festival programme is the Orkney Conducting Course, which ran this year for ten days, before and during the Festival itself. Now in its second year, the course was the brainchild of Martyn Brabbins, and it tied in with a desire Glenys Hughes had of finding a replacement for Max’s composers’ course, which itself ran for eight years till the mid-90s. The Conducting Course will certainly run again next year, since at present its funding comes largely from a 3-year Scottish Arts Council subsidy, but it has been very successful and the hope is that it will continue beyond 2005.

There are other summer music schools in the country, but none quite like this in its intensity and in the fact that participants have the chance to work with established professional orchestras. There are eight places only on the course, and the successful applicants, out of the 39 who applied this year, came from Korea, Taiwan, Switzerland and the USA, as well as four from the UK. These are emerging professional conductors, who have passed through the conservatoires and need nothing now so much as the opportunity to work with major ensembles and established experts.

The patron of the course is Sir Colin Davis, and it is directed and led by Martyn Brabbins, with sessions also being led by Sian Edwards and Charles Peebles. This year, the course culminated for each student in the chance to conduct for forty minutes with the BBC SSO and for the same length of time with The Nash Ensemble, but the students were also given sessions with the Festival Chorus, and one on musical analysis with Max. Further, Paul Watkins, cellist with The Nash Ensemble, led a class on concerto accompaniment, something very rare indeed, and, rarer still, Charles Peebles led a session for local conductors. The sessions were well attended by festival-goers: four regular visitors came a week early to take advantage of the opportunity.

The lasting legacy of those composers’ courses, and the high esteem in which their founder is held, were shown in one of the concerts held in the great St Magnus Cathedral. As part of a programme including Max’s Seven Skies of Winter and quintets by Vaughan Williams and Dvorak, the Nash Ensemble played birthday tributes by five composers formerly associated with the courses: Sally Beamish, Simon Holt, James MacMillan, Ian McQueen and Alasdair Nicolson. These were strong and varied pieces, calling for the range and virtuosity for which this ensemble is justly famous. I happened to find myself sitting next to one of the composers at an earlier concert, and he told me about visiting Max one winter at Bunnertoon in Hoy. It was so cold that he himself hardly moved six feet from the fire – and yet there dwelt Max in all seasons, producing such wonderful music. “That man,” he said in admiration, “has a will of steel.”

“The overall effect of this complex and difficult piece was something too spare in its awful truth to be beautiful.”

The cathedral was also the perfect venue for two other visiting groups, the sonorous and soaring Russian Patriarchate Choir of Moscow, under Director Anatoly Grindenko, and the superb Mr McFall’s Chamber. The power and concentration of those dozen choristers, their perfect harmony and huge dynamic range, playing as it did off the vaults and chambers of that ancient church, with the rose window behind them growing an ever deeper indigo: it was magnificent. Such a range of faces too, above their uniform black cassocks: impassive for the most part, and showing no strain. But they could show enjoyment too, as was evident during the second half on Saturday evening, when they sang from their secular repertoire. Beautiful imagist lyrics and full-blooded military songs. Their encore, “Many Years” – regularly in demand one must suppose – features an astonishingly forceful bass part, and sung by Oleg Kovolev it was as though all of Russia was wishing you well.

Entirely in contrast to the choral recitals was Georgian composer Giya Kancheli’s heart-breaking, consoling Exil. Performed by Mr McFall’s Chamber, with the vocal part sung by soprano Susan Hamilton, this cycle filled the cathedral, to borrow a phrase, with “the space of absence.” The overall effect of this complex and difficult piece was something too spare in its awful truth to be beautiful. It strains a sound-world from the harrowing, sublime landscape of the words of the 23rd Psalm and the wrenching poetry of Paul Celan. “Count me,” as in the voice of the Nazi guards counting and counting, “among the almonds” – among the almond-eyed in what must have been exile beyond any place you might have imagined possible. And then the peremptory, incredible beyond-irony of the final poem, Hans Sahl’s Exile: “There’s really nothing more to /Say of that. /Too late” – as the music modulates from coolness to something like the redemption of spring in that consoling, terse cadence.