Although travelling off the islands threatened to be a great deal more problematic, I arrived in Orkney last Saturday in time to make it a six-event day.
The St Magnus Festival gets you busy that way, and even that schedule meant there were more concerts and shows I missed that day than I saw. Since I last managed to visit the festival, the programme seems to have expanded under director Alasdair Nicolson - this was the first of his festivals that I have attended. Where Sunday was previously always the day for going to Stromness, now there is a full programme there all Saturday too, as well as in Kirkwall, with excursions to Hoy, Deerness, Shapinsay and Papa Westray during the seven days also available for the bolder traveller.
I recognised many familiar faces among the audience and not just local residents. When the St Magnus Festival is on your agenda, it would seem that it is very hard to remove it, such is the unique and special nature of its offerings as well as the setting. Serendipitously, it almost seemed as if the event was programmed to remind me that I had been posted missing. The Saturday concert at the Pickaquoy Centre, the multi-purpose sports and performance arena that was still a bit of a novelty on my first visit to Orkney, was built around a lovely suite, Ring of Strings, that I'd heard at its premiere in 2006, and which composer Eddie McGuire had written to combine the talents of visiting professional string players with the amateur and young players on the island. The fact that it the concert also included work by some of the first folk I knew from Orkney, fiddlers Jennifer Wrigley of the Wrigley Sisters and Fionn McArthur, of The Chair, who would then take up a post at BBC Radio Orkney, only compounded the coincidence.
After that parallels were wherever I looked. Another violinist, Fenella Humphreys, followed pianist Christian Ihle Hadland's wonderfully explanatory Stromness recital of Bach's Goldberg Variations earlier in the day, with a programme constructed around a section of a Bach Partita. My most memorable performance of those was at another St Magnus Festival, when Alexander Janiczek played two of them in the intimate environs of the Italian Chapel on Lamb Holm. Although I missed Duncan McLean's new play, Telling the Truth Beautifully, a fascinating local tale of contraband gin from 140 years ago that we must hope is given a revival so that the rest of Scotland can see it, I did catch the same cast giving a performance of George Mackay Brown's first novel Greenvoe, in an adaptation by poet-in-residence Stewart Conn with a soundscore by Alasdair Nicolson, penned long before he took up his current post. A BBC Radio Scotland commission, it first been played by members of the Scottish Symphony Orchestra at St Magnus in 1998, which is before the festival coverage baton passed from Michael Tumelty to myself, but the resonances were still powerful, not least because it was dedicated to Archie Bevan, who died last year and was responsible for so many introductions of visitors to the people and culture of Orkney, not least the one that brought together Peter Maxwell Davies and George Mackay Brown and sowed the seeds for the festival. The fact that the Greenvoe plot might have been written with the current concern over fracking in mind was another timely resonance.
Next year's St Magnus Festival in Orkney will be the 40th. It is a gem of priceless quality in contemporary Scottish culture, and if the government in Holyrood and its cultural funding agencies are not planning to give it a big financial boost to mark the occasion, it can only be because not enough of them have made the trip to experience the festival at first hand.
Keith Bruce flew to the Orkney Islands with Loganair
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