ALISTAIR PEEBLES continues his appraisal of this year’s St Magnus Festival, focusing on the Bosnian strand of the programme.

THE FESTIVAL was launched this year in Kirkwall Town Hall, and in the context of the exhibition she had brought to that venue from Norway, the remarks made by Ragna Sophie Grung Moe (Acting Director of the Edvard Grieg Museum in Troldhaugen, Norway) seemed to resonate with what this Orkney event itself is all about.

Edvard Grieg – Art and Identity, has travelled widely throughout Europe since opening in 2000 in Prague. Grieg himself, we were told, was politically active, indeed awkward, and both “a Norwegian nationalist and a cosmopolitan” (and the great-grandson of an Aberdonian). At the same time he valued the individual spirit, saying that all true art “grows out of that which is distinctively human.”

The music of many nations was represented in the 2005 programme, and as ever there were many distinctive individuals present – in addition to the energetic and inspiring people who live here all the year round. Archie Bevan, bedrock of the Festival for so long, is 80 this year, and the moment was not allowed to pass uncelebrated at the launch. We add our congratulations now.

Ian Ritchie has made Orkney his home for a year and more. As is well known, he took over the job of Artistic Director from Glenys Hughes, whose sabbatical year in Malawi will shortly be over, and, we learn, whose new experiences there will add another national flavour to the mix at midsummer 2006.

Undoubtedly the most noticeable national presence at the Festival this year was Bosnian, and if next year’s Malawian contribution will reflect Glenys’s experiences, that Balkan element reflected the involvement Ian Ritchie has had in recent years in reconstruction efforts there.

The performances by the virtuoso accordionist Merima Kljuko, singer Teo Krilic and poet Goran Simic as well as a short, early morning season of documentary films on the war and its effects, its victims and healers, contributed impressively to one of the core themes around which much of the programme was constructed – war and the capacity of the arts to help restore dignity in its aftermath.

A sombre theme no doubt, and perhaps an odd one for a “festival”, but just as Grieg was active in response to the violence of his era, and Maxwell Davies has been similarly outspoken in the present day, there’s every reason why that aspect of the arts should, in the terms used in the Festival’s own motto, be “celebrated”.

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Made for visibility and doubtless for inspiring either fear or courage, or both, this fairly versatile instrument certainly drew attention

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The Festival began with a children’s production, Notes in Time of War, a piece of music theatre directed by Chris Giles and Gemma McGregor (musical director and composer). With a cast of around 100, this was an energetic and at times quite moving response in song, gesture and dance to what the children had discovered about wars and violence in various parts of the world, largely through the words of people their own age.

It was a magnificent piece of organisation, and if the vocal amplification was a bit muffled, the music came over loud and clear, in its various national colours. The whole piece was well choreographed and danced and when the action and feeling rose as they did at several climactic points it provided a very absorbing spectacle.

The production featured both local and professional visiting musicians – in particular a quartet from the Royal Scottish Academy Brass, a group that provided several ensembles at events at venues outwith the Festival proper, and bookended the Festival with their performance at the final concert.

Also making the first of several appearances was John Kenny with the celebrated carnyx, a reconstructed Pictish war horn. Made for visibility and doubtless for inspiring either fear or courage, or both, this fairly versatile instrument certainly drew attention, particularly when matched with its master’s vivid waistcoats, which also provided a welcome spot of colour in the context of the orchestral players’ generally uninspiring dress code.

The men don’t dress up anymore, apparently because they don’t want to look like waiters. (What’s wrong with waiters?) Instead they look as if they’ve just finished a shift at the office, thrown off the ties of conformity and set out to unwind with this or that horn or fiddle.

They only look like that, of course. They play superbly well. Should it matter? Obviously it does.

On then to the Cathedral and two youthful soloists, Merima Kljuco, already mentioned, and cellist Claudio Bohorquez. With instruments such as theirs (and in a venue such as that) it hardly mattered what they wore, though I can report from my seat quite near the front that they were very well turned out.

Enough about dress. This was a fantastic performance, hard to enjoy at times perhaps, but important to attend to. Of course Bach’s cello suites are among the most important things in the world, and in the incredibly mobile hands of Bohorquez its succession of dance movements was as close to the heart of what art can achieve in response to the charge of being alive, and the need to celebrate that fact, as one might find.

This concert introduced “Sevdah” to the Festival. It’s the traditional music of Bosnia, and both a musical form and an intensely felt national spirit, with roots and influences from around the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe. Its importance to Bosnians has been magnified enormously as that people finds its way forward out of hideous conflict. Sevdah featured here and there throughout the programme, including a Scotch-Bosnian combo “Strath-Sevdah” at the Festival Club one night – illustrating again how much the Festival was about putting new things together.

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We have to have faith that the artists of the world know what they’re doing, and we must pay them the attention that is their due

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I found the combination of accordion and cello at the Cathedral that opening night a fascinating one, and while I learnt much more about the amazing range of effects – some of them uncannily ventriloquial – that are possible on the accordion, I was grateful to composers Sofia Gubaidulina, Sally Beamish and Astor Piazzolla for the way in which their music explored both instruments, and for the fact that it gave those fine musicians ample scope to show how well the two quite different voices could speak to one another.

Later on I did hear voices grumbling about some of the material on the programme. And that’s fine – the important thing is to be there and listen. We have to have faith that the artists of the world know what they’re doing, and we must pay them the attention that is their due. But at the same time we mustn’t make it too easy for them – what they’re dealing with matters too much for obsequiousness or sentimentality.

And for thick-headed utilitarianism. The banality you hear from some quarters of Scottish political life these days from those who would measure or indeed “brand” art – and life – as commodities.

George Mackay Brown couldn’t have lived further from that world. The world of voyaging about which he often wrote is of course symbolised in the Cathedral he loved. “The great stone ship that was to bear the people of Orkney through many generations,” as he described it in the context of Earl Rognvald’s 12th century expedition to Jerusalem.

The “Sails in St Magnus”, painted all of 12 years ago by Erlend Brown, Dave Jackson, Mary Scott and Andrew Parkinson to texts by GMB were aired again in the Cathedral nave. They offer glimpses of that journey that are as fresh as ever and welcome to see in place again. The Festival does the performing arts proud, not always so well the visual arts, though perhaps when the Pier reopens new possibilities will emerge.

But that was the other theme of the Festival this year, sea journeys. Of course it was the commerce of the sea that took Alexander Greig (that became Grieg) to Bergen, and in general made that part of Norway so cosmopolitan. Like Orkney, and its midsummer Festival.

© Alistair Peebles, 2005