Festival Theatre, Greyfriars Kirk, King’s Theatre and Usher Hall, Edinburgh, 15-16 August 2009

THE OPENING weekend of the Edinburgh International Festival offered an unusual amount of direct Highlands & Islands relevance in the programming, headed by a chance to see the Brussels production of St Kilda – Island of the Birdmen, a piece originally performed in different versions during Highland 2007.

St Kilda - Island of the Birdmen (© Christian Mathieu)

The Scottish end of the show took place at An Lanntair in Stornoway, but this was a recreation of the simultaneous show staged in Belgium, a fact which accounted for the large swathes of French language alongside the Gaelic and English.

It was listed under Opera in the festival brochure, but it is opera in a very contemporary guise, with little of the conventional trappings of the form. It is a multilayered work by many hands, incorporating singing, music, live performance and film projection, and kept the viewer in a state of high alert as the eye was constantly drawn hither and thither to some new piece of simultaneous action, incorporating not only the stage but also the orchestra pit and the balconies.

A meditation on the vanished way of life on St Kilda set just as the islanders were about to be evacuated from the land for the last time, its central narrative strand – as in the Stornoway production – involved a love story between two islanders that turns to tragedy when the man is one of three marooned on Borerey when their boat slips its mooring.

The story was told through an imaginative combination of live acting and film, interwoven in subtle and often allusive fashion around Jean-Paul Dessy’s contemporary musical idiom and the more ancient strains of Gaelic songs, beautifully performed by Alyth McCormack.

Acrobats performing on ropes on stage echoed the filmed aerialists shot on the cliffs of St Kilda, and the film material also included yet another narrative strand in which a present-day film crew revisited the island in search of the lost past of the people.

It all looked very beguiling, but it was a complex mix in terms of creating a coherent narrative, and no sur-titling was employed for the Gaelic or French. That left much of the detail rather opaque, but the essence of the story came through clearly enough in its poetic and historic dimensions, and the music spoke equally eloquently.

All three performances of St Kilda were sold out, as was the Lewis Psalm Singers’ appearance at Greyfriars Kirk. I hesitate to call it a performance as such – even though a number of the singers are well known performers in Gaelic song, the group would regard it as an act of praise, and the audience reserved their applause for the end rather than between the selection of psalms.

The distinctive sound of Gaelic psalm singing is built around a pentatonic (five-note) scale and a somewhat free approach to ornament and interpretation of the melodic line, in sharp contrast to the unison precision of choral singing in other contexts.

The eleven singers – Margaret Bennett, Kristin Kennedy, Catherine Joan MacDonald, D. R. MacDonald, Margaret Maclean, Torquil MacLeod, Calum Martin, Isobel Ann Martin, John Murdo Martin, Catherine Smith and Mary Smith – sang a series of Psalms in the established manner, with one singer acting as precentor giving the melody, and the others then joining in in that free style.

The improvisatory nature of the heterophonic singing and the sharing of the role of precentor around the group brought variation and individual expression to the songs, and made for a lovely sound in the Kirk. The Psalms were set to a series of tunes from diverse sources, from an old Scottish melody in ‘Montrose’ (Psalm 9) to Henry Purcell’s ‘Walsall’ (Psalm 13), ending on home ground with John Matheson’s ‘Stornoway’ (Psalm 133).

Irish writer Brian Friel is the subject of a strand in the programme this year, and the first of his three featured plays, Faith Healer, also has connections with the Highlands & Islands, albeit less direct. The play, arguably Friel’s most challenging work, tells the story of an Irish faith healer named Francis Hardy, who plies his calling around the decaying villages of Scotland and Wales (a pivotal episode in the unfolding story is set in Kinlochbervie).

The play is structured around four monologues, delivered in turn by Hardy; his wife, Grace; his manager, Teddy; and Hardy again. Friel skilfully manipulates our perceptions of both the events described and the characters themselves as we hear conflicting versions of the tales, building a rich and complex weave of character and narrative in the process.

The production from Dublin’s Gate Theatre was directed by Robin Lefèvre, and featured excellent performances from Owen Roe as the battered and bruised Frank, Ingrid Craigie as Grace, and Kim Durham as Teddy.

The Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s Made In Scotland programme featured the work of two composers with significant birthdays this year, Peter Maxwell Davies (75) and James MacMillan (50). It should have been a celebratory occasion, but clearly failed to grip the imagination of the Edinburgh audience, and the many empty seats rather detracted from that sense of occasion.

Maxwell Davies’s compact and intensely detailed one-movement Symphony No. 5 made a knotty opening to proceedings, although the orchestra – conducted by Paul Daniel – laid out its intricate structure in finely transparent style. His burlesque An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise was a rather obvious inclusion, and received a boisterous treatment from the players, complete with Highland piper in its festive conclusion.

James MacMillan’s parodic Britannia provided an equally knock-about opening to the second half of the concert, but it was his The Confession of Isobel Gowdie which finally set the evening alight. Inspired by the execution of Isobel Gowdie as a witch in Nairn in 1662 (and providing an echo of Rona Munro’s new play The Last Witch, set in Dornoch and due later in the festival after a premiere in Glasgow), it launched MacMillan on an international stage at the Proms in 1991.

It remains a deeply powerful work almost two decades on, and received a superb performance from the players.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2009

Links

• Edinburgh International Festival

Associated Pages

• St Kilda at EIF