MORAG MACINNES talks to the outgoing Artistic Director of the St Magnus Festival as she hands over after 23 years at the helm

Glenys Hughes in Malawi

IT’S BEEN a successful 33rd year. Sold out performances. The audience profile is changing. The programme is broader, edgier, funkier. This year’s Polish theme worked well. Glenys is perched at her desk with a cup of herb tea dealing with the bits that the audience probably never notice, the fiddly bits which are part and parcel of the job – tidying up, essentially, on a big scale.

If you look at early photos in the excellent compilation St Magnus Festival – A Celebration (edited by Pam Beasant and published by The Orcadian) she looks impossibly young and rather shy, behind her big 70s glasses, standing a little behind her shockhaired, charismatic husband, Dick.

Three decades of performer angst and venue tribulation later and she’s still very youthful. Added to that is an air of having come into her own. This doesn’t feel by any means like a retirement chat; it’s about pausing, shifting direction, and plunging into things again.

MORAG MACINNES: You first came to Orkney as teachers, is that right? Was it Dick’s idea?

GLENYS HUGHES: Yes, we had been on holiday in Scotland, and we both felt like getting away from London and the huge comprehensive we were teaching in. There happened to be two jobs going in Orkney for music teachers, and a house with the job. Dick had an interview, and we both came. We arrived in August 1973, thinking it would be an interesting and fun thing to do for a couple of years! Dick taught in Kirkwall Grammar School and I taught in the Grammar School and in several primary schools.

MORAG MACINNES: And the Festival hadn’t even been thought of?

GLENYS HUGHES: The Festival started in ’77. Neither of us were involved at the beginning. It was the brain-child of Peter Maxwell Davies, who had come to live in Hoy a few years earlier. The then cathedral organist Norman Mitchell was artistic co-director along with Max. George Mackay Brown and Archie and Elizabeth Bevan were the core of the first committee. Dick became involved in 1978, when Kirkwall Grammar School performed Max’s opera The Two Fiddlers, and subsequently took it to Italy.

We weren’t involved in the organisational side until after 1979 – Norman Mitchell left and Max invited us to join the committee. I was asked to be secretary – I had no secretarial skills! I suspect it was because I was the only woman on the committee! I did it for two years – it was all pretty straightforward really, I wrote all the letters by hand. But my real interest was the artistic side of the Festival and the possibility of involving the schools I was teaching in.

I wrote to Max after Two Fiddlers, saying it would be lovely if primary children could be involved, and he responded by writing the Kirkwall Shopping Songs for Kirkwall Primary School, now Papdale Primary.

George MacKay Brown and Peter Maxwell Davies

MORAG MACINNES: In my memory of music tuition, primaries didn’t get much input in the seventies?

GLENYS HUGHES: Well, Orkney had a team of itinerant teachers and I was one of those. The curriculum was based mostly on singing and working with percussion instruments … there wasn’t at that time a great deal of creative music making. But there was a strong tradition of music within the schools and the wider community which the Festival could build on.

And the expressive arts were beginning to be recognised nationally as an important part of the core curriculum. Max had started his professional career as a teacher in Cirencester and even as a student I was aware of the amazing work he was doing there. So he had all that background to draw on when he began writing his Orkney children’s pieces.

And if you are going to ask me about highlights, I would probably say that whole period, from the early 80s to the 90s, were the most fun for me. It was such a privilege to have pieces written for the schools I was teaching in – pieces which could be tailored to the interests and abilities of the children. Many were music theatre pieces involving drama, dance and art work and sometimes linked to particular projects. I remember The Spider’s Revenge, which arose from a project on mini-beasts.

In 1980 Max wrote the children’s opera Cinderella, then Songs of Hoy in 1982, and later, songs for St Andrews School and for Sanday – there was a whole series, which were subsequently published by Longman and I wrote the teachers’ notes.

MORAG MACINNES: Presumably there’s a solid legacy now in the sense that performers have grown up with you?

GLENYS HUGHES: Someone who sang in the Shopping Songs when he was 8 is now a bass in the Festival Chorus, so yes! And we’ve had members of the Festival Board who have grown up with the Festival. It’s nice to think there’s a generation who have gone through school, gone away and come back to be a part of it all as adults.

Max had always said that he would give the Festival 10 years, by which time it would or would not have taken root within the local community. In 1986 he asked me to become co-artistic director with him. The following year he stepped down. Archie Bevan then joined me ‘on the bed of nails’, as he described it; then we were joined by a third co-director, Ian Ritchie, managing director of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, with whom the Festival had developed a close relationship.

Then Ian left Scotland, Archie retired, and so I was left as the sole director. I was still teaching, everyone involved had busy day jobs and the Festival was expanding! It could no longer be run solely by volunteers. In 1998 we finally got funding from the Scottish Arts Council and Orkney Islands Council to create the paid post of Festival Director. I gave up teaching at that point.

John Kenny and the carnyx (© Frank Bradford)

MORAG MACINNES: Did the creative person in you get swamped by production pressures and admin?

GLENYS HUGHES: No… though I wasn’t so directly involved in school productions, I was still very hands-on with other community projects. I’ve always been involved with the Festival Chorus. Dick founded the Chorus in 1980 and directed it till he died in 1996. I had always been accompanist. After he died, I took over the direction and I’m going to continue with that.

The creative part of the job is devising the programme, developing themes, selecting artists. In terms of time, funding applications probably take up 50 per cent, probably more, but the artistic planning is creative. Then there are the school and community productions, managing them and keeping them on track, because often they’re happening over six months or more.

MORAG MACINNES: You actually went away at one point.

GLENYS HUGHES: I did. In the mid-80s, we began to think that the time was right to make a move and we looked round for other jobs. I found an advisory job in Bristol. But nothing attractive came up for Dick. A year plus a term later I came back to Orkney. Probably the best thing I ever did!

MORAG MACINNES: Did the Festival divide the community in the early days?

GLENYS HUGHES: The first production, [Peter Maxwell Davies’s chamber opera] The Martyrdom of St Magnus, was a BBC commission for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. There were debates apparently as to whether the premiere should be in Orkney or London, and it was decided that it should be here. Max’s group The Fires of London performed some chamber music concerts around the weekend, and that’s how the first Festival started.

The opera sold out, there was much media interest – Max’s music always created a buzz – and there weren’t many festivals around then. Yes, there was opposition, and for several years each Festival would be followed by letters in the local press complaining about this ‘elitist imposition’.

MORAG MACINNES: How were people pulled round?

GLENYS HUGHES: I think in two ways. Max started writing music for schools, music that was perceived as being less alarming, and the children, then their parents, became involved. And the programming broadened with community drama, professional theatre, the Johnsmas Foy, visual arts, poetry. The opposition faded away the more the focus widened. But it took a long time, and there were some very hurtful things written in the local press.

From the start, too, there was a large number of local people involved in the organisation. Now, if you count hosts as well as box office, front of house, technical staff, etc, around 200 people are involved voluntarily behind the scenes. It’s a huge local enterprise and people want to be part of it. And the MagFest strand of programming has been very successful in attracting people whom the Festival might otherwise pass by.

Malawi Music Project

MORAG MACINNES: Tell me about that.

GLENYS HUGHES: We were awarded 3-year funding from EventScotland for marketing to new audiences. The first year, 2006, we held a 2-night pop/rock concert the weekend after the Festival in the Pickaquoy Centre. It was a big hit, attracting an audience of around 3,000, and people wanted and expected the same kind of event the following year. But we always intended MagFest to offer something different each year. So in 2007 we brought a Spiegeltent from Belgium for a programme of circus, comedy, cabaret and late-night music.

MORAG MACINNES: An inspired move, planting a wooden mirrored venue in the middle of Kirkwall.

GLENYS HUGHES: Well, we had to work hard with the marketing as people had no idea what a Spiegeltent was! But eventually the main show, Oiseau Rouge, did sell out, and when we brought the Spiegeltent tent back two years later it sold out very quickly. The idea with MagFest is that it’s slightly quirky – and that it can be anything – one year it was a spectacular outdoor performance outside the Cathedral.

MORAG MACINNES: What’s been your worst moment?

GLENYS HUGHES: My dog bit a visiting pianist, Joanna Macgregor, in 1996, three hours before she was due to play! She was whisked off for a jab, so performed with a bitten finger and a sore arm! That was my absolute low point!

MORAG MACINNES: Was she OK with you after?

GLENYS HUGHES: Weee-ll, she was a bit cool! But she did get some mileage out of the story. A few weeks later she told the story on Desert Island Discs. Then, apparently, when she went into a rehearsal in London, the orchestra all started barking at her.

Joanna MacGregor (© Peter Williams)

MORAG MACINNES: And now you’ve turned your attention abroad?

GLENYS HUGHES: That’s right. Between 2004 and 2005 I took a year off from the Festival. I felt the need to do something else for a while and I went to Malawi as a volunteer. I knew the music would be interesting and I’d never been to sub-Saharan Africa before. I taught in the schools, ran training courses for local teachers and worked with choirs.

When I came back I managed to get funding to bring one of the choirs to Orkney, to the 2006 Festival. And at the same time I set up the Malawi Music Fund. The Fund runs residential weeks for orphaned children, focussing on music and the arts, and offers bursaries to support the children’s secondary education. The project has transformed the lives of the children, who are among the most needy in the country. So I’m looking forward to having more free time to visit Malawi, develop the project and renew links with the local musicians and teachers there.

MORAG MACINNES: How do you feel about handing over to Alasdair [Nicolson]?

GLENYS HUGHES: I’m very happy that Alasdair has been appointed. He’s an islander [Skye rather than Orkney – Ed.], he already has strong connections with the Festival and he’s a composer. He’ll have new ideas, and he’ll put his own stamp on the Festival. It’ll be strange not coming to this office every day – but I won’t miss the responsibility for fundraising, especially in the present climate!

MORAG MACINNES: I notice he said programming was a bit like doing a mosaic ….

GLENYS HUGHES: Yes, or a jigsaw – that’s a very good metaphor. A creative jigsaw, and I’ve enjoyed my years of fitting the pieces together, always backed by strong local team. And the core is always music.

MORAG MACINNES: Thanks, and good luck with the next project!

© Morag MacInnes, 2010

Links

• St Magnus Festival