Pickaquoy Centre, Kirkwall and elsewhere, June 2004

THE PARTICIPATION and involvement of children and the community in general has always been a central part of the St Magnus Festival. Glenys Hughes, the Festival’s Artistic Director, drew attention in her closing speech to the fact that this year a total of 1400 seats had been made available for schoolchildren at several of the events – including a special performance by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. She also pointed out that a record-breaking 400 local people, of all ages, had been directly involved in performances.

Orcadian poet, George Mackay Brown

Those included the massive Peer Gynt; Mozart’s Coronation Mass, which featured the considerable forces of the Festival Chorus; the revival of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ The Two Fiddlers, performed by pupils and staff of Kirkwall Grammar School; and A Johnsmas Foy , in which a large cast read and performed a selection of George Mackay Brown’s poetry.

There were also performances by Orkney Traditional Music Project, and by three well-known groups of local musicians: Three Peace Suite, Jennifer and Hazel Wrigley, and Saltfishforty. In addition, Glenys said, the number of people involved in voluntary supporting roles – administration, accommodation, front-of-house and transport – brought the overall total to about 600, “remarkable from a small community.”

Remarkable indeed, and the audiences were also huge (and enthusiastic) even for the usually more sparsely attended lunchtime performances. In fact, there wasn’t a bed or a car-hire to be had on the island at the time, and some performers made use of the camp sites for the duration. Thankfully, the weather held back from being too unwelcoming, and as always at this time of year the long evenings, with at least the chance of colour in the midnight skies, helped make up for any disappointment in that area.

“The heart-warming finale to the opera was a remarkable feat of organisation as much as anything else”

The Festival began on Friday 18th with Peer Gynt, adapted by Cengiz Saner and set to music by Kenneth Dempster. The production was staged in the Pickaquoy Centre in Kirkwall, the onl venue in the county large enough for something this size. Though there was a trade-off from time to time in the audibility of the voices as against the always excellent music, the opera was staged successfully on a set well-designed to accommodate not only the cast of nearly 150, but to serve as backdrop to the many locations through which the hero travels.

There were some outstanding performances onstage as well as in the orchestra, which combined Mr McFall’s Chamber with an equal number of local musicians. Peer Gynt was played and sung in the first half by Graham Garson: burly, animated, relentlessly foolish and interesting. Åse, his mother, nagging and indulgent, was played convincingly by Carolyn Chalmers, someone who like Ishbel Fraser (the beloved Solveig) has a lovely, clear singing voice.

In the second half, far as he was from the mountains and simplicity of home, but inexorably drawn back, the mature and much more tortured Peer Gynt was rendered convincingly by Bob Ross. The steadfast lover was played by Anna Whelan, who sang beautifully, and there were many fine cameo roles. I think however that a lot could be learned from Gill Smee (as the chilling Strange Passenger) in terms of voice projection in the spoken parts.

The heart-warming finale to the opera was a remarkable feat of organisation as much as anything else, as the whole company, including the up-to-then-offstage choir, The Mayfield Singers, presented themselves to the packed house for some thunderous applause. One should also mention the packs of peedie ones – playing troll-imps and nasties of all kinds – and their costumes and indeed the costumes of the whole cast.

So much more could be said… and only two public and one schools performance before the stage had to be struck for the series of orchestral concerts that followed it into the Picky. Unlike some former community drama productions from the Festival – Greenvoe and Barriers come immediately to mind from recent years – and unsurprisingly in view of its sheer size, this one won’t be going to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. However we hear that Kenneth Dempster may be keen to take it elsewhere, and wish him well with that.

“The Two Fiddlers was a vivid and colourful account of the ugsome trowies and the cruel sport they have with us well-meaning daylight folk”

The first of those orchestral concerts, by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, was on Sunday evening. As well as a rousing and beautiful performance, conducted by Ilan Volkov, of Berlioz’ Harold in Italy, and the alternately lyrical and terrifying Variations for Orchestra by Dellapiccola (both to be broadcast on Radio 3 at 7.30pm on Tuesday 29th June), we had the Coronation Mass and the St Magnus Festival Chorus conducted by James Grossmith.

The soloists here, in particular soprano Elizabeth Atherton, were superb. The Chorus itself, very smartly attired against the pale blue Festival wall hangings, sang with vigour and accuracy right from their first syllable, and that energy, and sensitivity, never faltered. The chorus – numbering well over 100 – rehearses weekly from February each year, with director Glenys Hughes and pianist Jean Leonard. It is a considerable commitment of time and they justify it always, as resoundingly as they did this year.

The Two Fiddlers, an opera for young people that is based on a story by George Mackay Brown, was composed by Maxwell Davies in 1978 and first performed by the pupils of Kirkwall Grammar School that year. Thereafter, they took it on a successful tour of Italy. Another Northern tale that has to do with trolls, this one is set some time ago, or in the recent past, or perhaps in the present-day, in Orkney, and the rather benevolent trolls of GMB’s story are recast as the agents of sloth and self-delusion in Max’s version.

The opera had two performances this year, in Orkney Arts Theatre. (It’s astonishing to think, by the way, that an earlier community play concerning some other shadowy companions of ours, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was accommodated in that small space, in the cramped pre-Picky days. A touch of magic there.)

The Two Fiddlers was a vivid and colourful account of the ugsome trowies and the cruel sport they have with us well-meaning daylight folk, creatively staged and well-performed by a cast who were fully engaged and brought off a tricky set of vocal lines very creditably. The Troll Queen, Charis Fraser, managed a challenging part with assurance. In fact, this was the same role her mother Ishbel (the Solveig of Peer Gynt) had taken in the original production of the play.

The two principals, Aaron McGregor and Craig Corsie, who played the eponymous duo, Storm Kolson and Gavin, showed what a training with Hadhirgaan, the Kirkwall Grammar School folk band, can do for confidence on stage and skill on the fiddle. Marvellous: as was the school orchestra, under Ruth Harvey, playing a full range of instruments with skill more than enough to match, again, a challenging and excitingly varied score.

“Here, then, was a further acknowledgement in recital and drama of one of the essential voices of Orkney, and of the islands’ greatest poet.”

The fourth of the events which featured mainly a local cast was The Storm: A Johnsmas Foy. The Foy itself was introduced into the Festival early in its development by Marjorie Linklater. Her idea was to have a kind of “Fringe” to the Festival proper, a showcase for local literature and local culture generally. However, as the Festival established itself, it grew in large part around the principles that Marjorie espoused, and the Foy, and the local voices for which it provided a platform, have long been at its very heart.

Here, then, was a further acknowledgement in recital and drama of one of the essential voices of Orkney, and of the islands’ greatest poet. George Mackay Brown was a key figure in the Festival’s inception, but long before that, in 1954, there was another beginning, with the publication of his first book of poems. That book, The Storm, was widely praised at the time, and hearing the poems read out made it very clear that, as the programme note stated, GMB had “mapped out his poetic territory” from the very start of his career.

Published in an edition of 300, at the poet’s expense, the book sold out in a fortnight. In spite of that success, it was never reprinted, and only three poems are to be found in the Selected Poems of 1991. The Collected Poems, edited by Archie Bevan and Brian Murray (John Murray/Hodder Headline), will, however, be published in June next year.

Brian and Archie also devised the programme for this production, and the players were directed by Jane Hunter. As mentioned above, it was presented by a sizeable cast, fluently, simply, with humour and sensitivity. Music also played a part: Seona Dunsmuir sang Further than Hoy to her own guitar accompaniment, and played fiddle in the second half, as GMB’s own dramatisation of Hamnavoe Market was enacted by the rest of the cast. All very much enjoyed by a near-capacity crowd in the lecture theatre of the poet’s own school, Stromness Academy.

© Alistair Peebles, 2004