Various venues, Orkney, 22-27 June 2012

THE exuberance of this year’s festival is obvious from the programming – it’s bursting out of the straight-jacket that’s a week.

EVENTS start before the opening reception and carry on after the traditional end date. There’s also been a lot of constructive thinking, I’m guessing, about how to cope with budget cuts – it’s important to remember that it’s still the norm for local people to put up most of the performers – a big ask – but there are enormous travel bills to foot, and wages to pay. Maximising audiences, while not compromising on quality, has been the objective.

Alasdair Nicholson (© Paul Foster-Williams)

I detect other differences, on new Artistic Director Alasdair Nicholson’s watch. The theme of dispossession is big enough to link most work together; but there’s a clear political thread running through this year’s offerings which gives an edge to things.

Magfest, the rather well brought up offspring rather than badly behaved bastard bairn of the ‘big’ Magnus mamma, hasn’t quite succeeded in grabbing a younger audience (the profile is still overwhelmingly over sixty, white middle class) is smaller this year, and may shrink away completely. You can’t, after all, fund an edgy café culture fringe – it grows of its own accord. But while the audience remains stubbornly the same – and very enthusiastic and dedicated – the performers are younger.

Catherine Wyn-Rogers (© Paul Foster-Williams)

The big names are here of course – The Royal Scottish National Orchestra; Catherine Wyn-Rogers and James Baillieu performing lovely lieder; but there are many many new, fresh faces. There’s less of Peter Maxwell Davies, which is right and proper – and interestingly, Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot, his Miss Havisham in musical theatre (except she’s not Dickensian, she’s Australian), complete with football rattle sandpaper and policeman’s whistle, and that’s not even beginning on what mezzo soprano Alison Wells had to do with her voice, wasn’t an audience hit – perhaps they’d all seen it before, or perhaps, teamed with Through Roses, an Auschwitz story full of unease and discord – it was all a bit too bleak.

Best of all, there are now three courses for folk at the start of their careers – a singing course joins the composers and poets. Seems obvious, doesn’t it, but only once it’s there!

The Magnetic North

These week long masterclasses are probably the most important thing the Festival does – because they stimulate creativity. A packed audience enjoyed tea and cakes in Stromness followed by very assured performance from eight poets mentored by the indefatigable and inspiring duo, Pam Beseant and Jen Hadfield. Betwixt and between, a handsome (sorry – but he was) young cellist belted out some Bach, with nice unfussy explanations of what he was about.

My neighbours had come from Macclesfield. They come to the Festival every year, love it, wouldn’t miss it. ‘Why?’, I said. ‘It’s the venues, the settings,the lack of stuffiness, the friendliness,’ they said – ‘the fact we can go and talk to that young chap on the street, or that poet. This is another great strength the Festival has – there’s no room for bow ties and pearls here – it’s caguls and sharing. Democratisation of the high arts, that’s what goes on down these streets.

It’s also a tale of venues. Health and Safety has squeezed the blood out of many a proposal – but we had Carmen in the bull ring at the Orkney mart, ENSA giving it laldy at Ness Battery, musical excursions to Skaill and Deerness, the Italian Chapel, and Hoy. It’s amazing to be in St Magnus with a houseful under the rosy pillars. Yes, there are sound black holes and blocked sight lines – but that doesn’t matter. The audience satisfaction is enormous.

Carmen in the Mart bull ring kind of sums up what I feel about the value of the Festival – it smelt very authentic; it was a tiny, almost impossible space to work in; it felt precarious. The production had glaring faults – the sort of elephant in the room faults it’s hard to talk about, like the fact it was utterly unsexy and very very pretty – but also great strengths – the singers, from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, threw themselves into it and – here’s the bit – they’ll have learned an awful awful lot about how hard opera is, how you have to act and talk and sing and inhabit shoes and dresses, and move furniture all at once. The audience, knowing all this, loved them to bits for trying their damndest.

Ness Battery draped in Union Jacks, ‘We’ll Gather Lilacs’, a magician and reminiscence – It Aint Half Cold Mum was another crowd pleaser. It did what it said on the tin.This marks an interesting shift in programming, I think. There’s no big community drama production this year – a sensible move, since it really hasn’t ever worked very well; the Johnsmas Foy, traditionally the Orkney talent showcase, is also needing a bit of an overhaul. What we have instead is a determinedly populist piece, sitting fairly sentimentally in a traditional corner, gaining most of its power from the venue’s sense of history.

There’s a freer movement between genres that’s refreshing – we had lots of folk music (the Wrigley Sisters! Soloists from Trondheim!), a concert performance of The Magnetic North, a debut album by Orcadian Erland Cooper’s new band – we had the Bolivian Choir Arakaendar singing the most beautiful baroque harmonies from the Jesuit Missions. Again, this choir had only performed in Britain once before, and festival favourites Florilegium coaxed them from timidity into full throated glorious sound – and they wowed the festival club with their folk songs too.

The Bolivian choir Arakaendar (© Arakaendar)

On top of all the events there are talks, films, exhibitions, and the opportunity to see extraordinary things – Alice Oswald, like a latter day Cassandra, electrifying the Kirk (reducing folk on both sides of me to tears) as she performed Memorial, her verse take on the Iliad – the version looking, not at heroes, but at ordinary men.

I say performed, because, as the question and answer session revealed, she ‘hears a rhythm’ – she doesn’t read her verse. Rather, she takes us back to an earlier tradition – it is an oratorical experience, like hearing a saga-teller – all the rhetorical devices are there – repetition, alliteration, assonance – but the verse itself is stark and simple, strong as anything.

A dishevelled (in an untidy, creative good way..!) enthusiastic bunch of performers and their audiences, full of vim and vigour. Best of all, perhaps, the youngest – in the world premier of A Little Book of Monsters, a song cycle by Stephen Deazley and Matt Harvey. It’s tough, working with children, but worth it. There are a lot of talented happy bairns out there who’ve got a taste for performance now. They’re the legacy of the St Magnus Festival.

Perhaps there’s a metaphor here, about growth and change – what began fairly solemnly, all those years ago, in the teeth of opposition, has matured and softened. Maxwell Davies must feel a bit like a proud grandpa, watching the new generation bounce around in his footsteps.

© Morag MacInnes, 2012

Links

• St Magnus International Festival