Kirkwall and Stromness, Orkney, 20-22 June 2009

Lisa Milne

I DON’T usually do transcendence. That’s the inevitable outcome of a Scots Presbyterian upbringing. What does the ‘Wee Book of Calvin’ say? ‘Viewed one way, midsummer is the first day of winter’. Not in Orkney, not this midsummer. The sun shone, the oystercatchers and the curlews and the larks made a terrific noise, and transcendence was very much in the air.

I hadn’t been to the St Magnus Festival for some years, and I was delighted to find it in rude good health. The programme was mouth-watering, each event I was at seemed sold out or close to it, and every second shop in Kirkwall was visibly reminding everyone that the Festival was happening. Of course, one of the pleasures of St Magnus is that you meet people you never expect to (in my case from Banchory and Benbecula, both with strong Orkney ties I hadn’t been aware of), and you then go on meeting them for the duration of your stay.

The visual arts have sometimes been the poor relatives at St Magnus in the past, and the recently enlarged Pier Art Centre (fresh from yet another triumph, this time at the Europa Nostra Awards) now offers much greater opportunities to present exhibitions of the same importance as the performing arts programme in the main Festival. This year, as part of the National Galleries/Anthony d’Offay ‘Artists Rooms’ project, the Pier was able to host four major works by the American video artist Bill Viola.

Morag MacInnes has written eloquently about this exhibition already for Northings. Read the Bill Viola review. It’s clear that Viola is aiming for transcendence, as an integral part of an American tradition that reaches back to the Transcendentalist movement of the mid 19th century that included Thoreau and Emerson, and which also embraces composers like Charles Ives, Abstract Expressionist artists like Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, and Viola’s contemporary, James Tyrrell, whose obsession with light and form has led him to reshape an entire extinct volcano.

But if Viola aims, does he hit the target? These videos from 2001 are clearly intended to be spiritually profound and moving. But not for me. I found them stimulating and exciting for what they say about Bill Viola’s engagement with the Great Tradition (and it needs capitals!) of Western Art. I could write an entire thesis on how these videos comment on that tradition. But I was not lifted out of myself. Others may be, not least because the installation in the Pier is so meticulously and beautifully prepared to present the works in their best light (literally). But, in the end, I feel that these works are less about the religious experience than they are about the trappings of religiosity.

If I may be forgiven a bit of special pleading, can I make a plug for the Pier’s hosting of Robin Gillanders’ touring exhibition (and book) ‘Highland Journey’, following in the 1930s footsteps of Orcadian Edwin Muir? HI~Arts played a small part in funding this venture, and it’s a bracing and thoughtful reflection on what the Highlands and Islands have become in the two generations since Muir’s book was published.

It may be coincidence, but moving from the Pier on Saturday afternoon, to the Pickaquoy Centre that evening, the transcendental link seemed very strong, for the main work in the RSNO’s concert was Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony, setting the words of Walt Whitman, including explicitly the very phrase ‘O thou, transcendent’. This may have been the loudest unamplified noise yet heard in the Pickaquoy. On their first visit to St Magnus, but under the vibrant direction of Festival regular Martin Brabbins, the RSNO were playing at the top of their game (especially the brass!).

The St Magnus Chorus were stiffened with a contingent from the Huddersfield Choral Society, and the result was literally hair-raising. The young VW was out to impress, but also to overwhelm with his, and Whitman’s, vision of the soul transcending the limits of the body as it sets out on the final great voyage.

It was as if every member of the chorus was completely infused with that vision, and was determined to sing his or her heart out to express it to the full. It would be a curmudgeonly Presbyterian indeed whose heart was not wrung by this magnificent performance. The concert, it should be said, also included the brilliant James Crabb as soloist in Sally Beamish’s Accordion Concerto. This is a highly engaging and accessible work, one of this composer’s finest, and it clearly won many admirers in the packed audience.

Poets have always had a special place in St Magnus, and this year Wendy Cope and the newly knighted Andrew Motion were very much in evidence in a variety of roles. Both demonstrated very forcibly, in their readings, how poetry can transcend the mundane nature of everyday words and everyday experiences. Not surprisingly, copies of their books were disappearing like snow off a dyke, but for myself, I was very glad to become better acquainted, and more impressed by, the work of two fine writers who, previously, I had been more aware of through their contributions to the BBC’s excellent Poetry Season.

Our Orkney correspondent Morag MacInnes can’t write about this year’s Johnsmas Foy, because she was its author! The Foy is an integral part of St Magnus, one element that is entirely locally generated. This year it picked up the Festival theme of lighthouses, with a delicately written little drama in which two former lighthouse keepers, and their wives, revisit a now derelict lighthouse residence, rendered redundant by the automation of the lighthouse network.

The Foy always foregrounds the Orcadian dialect, usually-as in this case-to considerable humorous effect. This was an object lesson in how to stage ‘amateur drama': a tight, effective script, a simple but telling staging, and performers who have had the time and guidance to immerse themselves in their characters. The play was bookended by two touching numbers from the Songshop Choir.

In recent years, St Magnus Director Glenys Hughes has sought to widen the Festival’s appeal with a parallel programme under the banner of ‘Magfest’, this year held in the exotic surroundings of the Moulin Rouge Spiegeltent. I sampled this on Sunday evening, to hear Scottish soprano Lisa Milne (radiant soloist the previous evening in the Sea Symphony) in a programme of Jacques Brel songs.

Now, I have to admit that before this I knew little of Brel beyond ‘Ne me quitte pas’ (and spending the night in a flat above his museum in Brussels!). As I write this, I’m listening to Brel himself (courtesy of Spotify) and I have to say that Milne’s performances lose nothing by the comparison. Each song was made an extraordinarily intense little drama and, once again, the hairs on the back of the neck were firmly on end.

Usually (with a very few exceptions) when opera singers attempt ‘popular’ repertoire, the result is stodgy and/or embarrassing. Not with Ms Milne. It’s total heresy, so whisper it, but I found her interpretations even more shattering than Brel himself!

Of course, one can’t write about St Magnus, and not reflect on the importance of the Orkney environment as a crucial ingredient in the Festival mix. On Midsummer’s Eve we went straight from hearing two works by Festival founder Sir Peter Maxwell Davies in St Magnus Cathedral, to the Ring of Brodgar, one of the greatest and most affecting Neolithic monuments in Western Europe.

Anywhere else a site like this, on this night, would have been overwhelmed by the worst excesses of New Agery. At midnight, we stood within the stones along with just eight other people, and one dog. And millions of birds. On the horizon the orange afterglow of a late sunset was still visible, while above us patches of delicate blue showed through the clouds. There may be festivals with comparable settings, but surely none that surpasses this.

This was a short, sharp intense venture into the rich mix that is the St Magnus Festival. We’d chosen a programme over our three days that was as varied as possible to get the best impression of the totality of the event. The finale for us (but not for the festival), before we caught the ferry the next morning, was Trio Mediaeval in St Magnus Cathedral. Morag has also written very perceptively of this concert. Read the Trio Medieval review. For me, loving this extraordinary 13th century repertoire of monody, polyphony, conductus and canon as I do, this was a truly ravishing experience.

These three remarkable Norwegian singers were playing the great old Viking Cathedral as if it was an instrument. This was no dry academic reconstruction, but a vividly theatrical experience, beautifully judged and rigorously controlled. If transcendence is about losing all sense of time, of diurnal troubles, of the irritations of the self, then this performance was, indeed, truly transcendent.

Robert Livingston is the Director of HI~Arts

© Robert Livingston, 2009

Links

• St Magnus Festival