St Magnus festival, Carmen, Orkney Auction Mart/ Gemini with Alison Wells, Pickaquoy Centre, Kirkwall

Monday 25 June 2012

THIS year, the St Magnus International Festival veered off the beaten track, opening at Kirkwall Cattle Market.

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Rosenna East

Increasingly, when it comes to festival venues, no stone is left unturned. The more uninhabitable and impossible a place is the better, it seems. So if you've got a bull ring to hand, you're almost obliged to stage Carmen there.

Although use of a live bull on stage had been vetoed, 30 cows backstage during the show were able to enjoy the serenade. It was an immediate and close acoustic. Warm and rich voices of the impressive cast from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama did a fine job of conjuring up the heat of the Spanish sun while the rain dripped down, with enough panache and drama to give you goosebumps for the right reasons. It was a strong cast, and they rolled out the hit tunes of this much-loved opera, in the translation by Rory Bremner. The orchestra from the Royal Academy of Music also thrilled with its dark tremolos and rich string sounds. Spoken dialogue between arias was weak - if only opera singers could sound a bit more comfortable when acting. The next night, two more pieces of music theatre established Festival Director Alasdair Nicolson's 2012 theme of the exiled and dispossessed. Gemini presented Neikrug's Through Roses, a fairly dubious piece of music writing for small ensemble and narrator, based on the recollections of a violin-playing holocaust survivor. Neikrug's main trick is to weave cornerstones of the classical repertoire into the soundtrack of jarring screeches and hypnotic percussion, thus contrasting, both in text and music, the idea of the cultivated and the barbaric.Maxwell Davies's Miss Donithorne's Maggot followed – a challenging but more worthy piece of writing performed with impressive commitment by mezzo-soprano Alison Wells, and beautifully played by Gemini's musicians. But dabbling in video projection is risky. Audiences can't fight the hypnotic affect of the big screen, so if your material on it is nowhere near the level of what's being performed in front of it, your live effort is almost wasted. Multi-media might be the latest "maggot"' (here meaning whim or obsession) in the performing arts, but if you're going to use it in classical music, it's still got to be good.HHH/HH

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St Magnus festival, Carmen, Orkney Auction Mart/ Gemini with Alison Wells, Pickaquoy Centre, Kirkwall

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