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St Magnus Festival - a celebration
St Magnus Festival, A Celebration explores the colourful life of Orkney's unique midsummer arts festival and features detailed interviews and contributions from the founders, international musicians and performers, poets, journalists, organisers and back stage crews. The book looks back over the past 25 years since the festival was created in 1977 and crystal ball gazes into the future to find out where this special event is going. But A Celebration also reflects the fun side of the festival with many amusing and happy anecdotes, including naked dancing by musicians at the mystical Ring of Brodgar!
It was a chance meeting between the Orcadian poet, George Mackay Brown, and London-based composer, Peter Maxwell Davies, in the beautiful surroundings of Rackwick Bay that led to Max making his home on the island of Hoy. The first seeds of an Orkney music festival were about to be sown. The idea of a musical celebration in Orkney was nurtured and fed (with homebrew amongst other things!) during lengthy early meetings in Archie and Elizabeth Bevan's hospitable home in Stromness. A local music teacher, Norman Mitchell became interested, but was it possible? Was it credible to pioneer a classical music and arts festival in far-flung Orkney?
Who would come? How would it be financed, the local council didn't seem interested? What if it was a flop? But in 1977 the St Magnus Festival was born after seemingly insurmountable obstacles of all shapes and sizes were scaled, bypassed, or removed altogether by careful and sensitive negotiation. A Celebration is the first detailed account of how the festival was created and sustained. Dozens of international stars tell of their St Magnus Festival experiences: the joys, the tears, the frustrations and the controversies. And staunch festival followers tell why the event is a 'must be there' for them year on year, regardless of cost (and weather!). |
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