In the first of two extended reports, ALISTAIR PEEBLES looks back on another successful St Magnus Festival and addresses the mystery of how do they do that in Orkney?

HOW TO BEGIN. And how did it all begin – the Festival, Scotland, music, the universe…? Those were some of the large questions raised and answered in the course of six gloriously full days and six short midsummer nights in Orkney 2005.

And what’s it all for, this Festival, and how on earth does it keep going – and keep going from strength to strength? And how can it still be so fresh and vital in spite of all the constraints of geography, travel, funding, tradition and – not least by a long way – despite its unending dependence on the good will, time and enthusiasm of all the volunteers and helpers who turn out annually and are still turning out smiling with everyone else at the end?

And further, where’s it all going? And why is Orkney so uniquely the vehicle to get it there? Why, as Sir Peter Maxwell Davies – Founder, President and much else besides – said on the closing night, is this Festival “Something we will never replicate anywhere else in the world”?

A big subject. But I’ll begin somewhere else in the world, with a parable that was recounted by Goran Simic, author of the irresistibly assonant “From Sarajevo with Sorrow”, during the presentation with that title, hosted by composer Nigel Osborne. Goran is strong and tender, funny and serious, as a man and as a poet, a survivor of the siege of Sarajevo.

He told us that foreign journalists would pop up in the city from time to time. One of them found a long queue of people, and asked the man at the end what they were waiting for. “Ask the man at the front,” he shrugged.

“I just had a sore head and so I stopped here in the street,” the man at the front replied to the same question. “And then a line of people appeared behind me.”

“So why don’t you go home?”

“Go home? Are you crazy? I’m first in line!”

In the course of the Festival this year I asked many of the people in the line that has gathered over the years in its support, what they were there for, why they kept their places, why they didn’t just go home, In fact I was intensely curious as to what, really, this Festival was all about – apart, of course, from the music.

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Hospitality is a fundamental part of life everywhere, and in Orkney it has a particular depth, largely because the place is so close-knit and neighbourly, and because the population is fairly stable.

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For many supporters it is a huge commitment, taking up most of their free time from February until June. For some, the commitment is year-round, for others it is all they do for the fortnight when the practical arrangements on which the Festival rests need their concentrated attention.

But none of them mentioned the time it all took, except in passing, and no one said to ask the man at the front. That they do it simply for the love of doing it was obvious, and any suggestion of absurdity, for example, in rehearsing a choral piece for 20 weeks for a single performance lasting as many minutes, evaporates when those minutes are recalled with such joy as George Rendall, chairman of the Board, expressed the next day, characteristically also praising the effect that Garry Walker had had on them, “pushing them up a full notch.” His praise was reciprocated by the conductor, I heard, and the choir and the whole concert were given a glowing report by the critics.

There’s that annual build up and release, then. Something that’s now as much a part of the fabric of the participants’ lives as any of the big rituals that occur year on year. In Sarajevo in the early 90s they formed queues; in Orkney 2005, it’s the Ba’, Christmas, Hogmanay, the Shows, and festivals. In fact the Festival has existed for so long now that it must, like all those events, be part of the lives of most families in Orkney in some way.

Hospitality is a fundamental part of life everywhere, and in Orkney it has a particular depth, largely because the place is so close-knit and neighbourly, and because the population is fairly stable. Of course there’s curiosity too, and an islander’s innate desire to exchange. Without accommodation freely given to the performers by a whole network of supporters, and a general willingness to go out of your way to provide transport and directions for them, nothing would work. The Festival is as much a celebration of hospitality as it is of music.

And those two things are intimately related in the kind of programming that’s characteristic here. We give a welcome and a hearing to many unfamiliar pieces of music, and turn out in numbers perhaps unimaginable elsewhere in the country to new and very new work. Nigel Osborne was very clear on the special quality of this festival in that respect. He calculated that there was more new work on the 2005 Orkney programme than the Edinburgh Festival’s by a factor of 600%.

When I asked him why this should be the case, I got the clear impression that the men at the front have a great deal to do with it – of course. Osborne had strong views on some of those in charge in Edinburgh, and no doubt the situation here is a direct reflection of the vital impact Max has had throughout the history of the Festival (and Glenys Hughes, Archie Bevan, Ian Ritchie…).

But very important also is the fact that the queues form here so readily. The Cathedral can be packed for quite unfamiliar music, as it was for a programme featuring accordion and cello on the opening night this year – albeit that Bach was rubbing shoulders with Sofia Gubaidulina and Sally Beamish.

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That team-quality, of pulling together and knowing on whom you can rely, knowing where you’ll have to be at a particular time on a particular day each year, is another fundamental aspect of this Festival.

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The fact is, as one local woman reminded me, we don’t have much choice, and you have to have faith, as people generally do, that the Festival’s artistic direction is secure as well as inventive. Again, that kind of trust gathers slowly – and it’s a very precious asset of the Festival’s.

While some people I spoke to had felt a little unconvinced by some of the programming, the clear balance of opinion was that in his year here Ian Ritchie had done an excellent job – bold and forward-looking, but with a careful sense of what the Festival represents in the longer term. And as befits an island festival, reaching out over long distances.

More of that in a later instalment, but in the meantime back to my question of how it all works as an event. It’s not just notes on a page after all, but how those notes are made to dance for us. So while others were whooping it up on the dancefloor with the Scots-Bosnian band “Strath-Sevdah” (Teo Krilic, Aidan Burke, Merima Kljuco and Ian Lowthian, with local support), I went through to the bar at the back of the Festival Club where three strong men were quietly sipping beer. The Stables bar, the Festival home of the “All-Blacks”.

Seeing the Technical Crew in action – up to sixteen local men – is not of course their intention. They move swiftly and efficiently where they know they are needed – not at all showy, but very proud of what they do. And again, their contribution is entirely voluntary.

As their nickname suggests, they are a team. In fact they are one of many intersecting teams (one might say families in more senses than one) that keep this festival going. The man at the front in their case is Ian Rushbrook, QS, son of Norman – Lighting Manager, from whom he learned the job – and Dorothy, for so long the organisational heart of the whole event.

Their work begins on the weekend before the festival, and only ends the weekend after it finishes. Two full weeks, in other words. No wonder they were conserving their energy well away from the hectic bustle and crush next door.

That team-quality, of pulling together and knowing on whom you can rely, knowing where you’ll have to be at a particular time on a particular day each year, is another fundamental aspect of this Festival. Front of House, Box Office, Festival Chorus, and so on – all teams of people who derive more than merely organisational satisfaction from close involvement with one another. A particularly encouraging thing to note about the All-Blacks is the presence this year of two new members, aged sixteen and seventeen.

It’s a mature Festival, in other words, with a support structure as complex and robust as a festival like this requires and a place like this makes possible, and it looks very definitely as though it’s here to stay. Not so much a line or a queue as a network of people makes it happen, and I got no sense at all that there was any doubt that network will still be holding fast when those lads and their generation are in charge.

An that, for what it’s worth, is the answer I put together to my question about what this Festival actually is. It’s the music of course, and the time of year, and the architecture of the Cathedral and many other things, but fundamentally it seems to me to be an expression – one of the greatest and most widely important, nationally and internationally, as well as locally – of what Orkney is today.

© Alistair Peebles, 2005