A Rather Good Concert

Orkney is host to a major music festival every June; the St Magnus International Festival. It's very well attended, people come hundreds of miles to go to it, performers are drawn from far and wide, so it's rather a sad reflection on the OH and myself that until last week, in our 14 years of living here, we have been precisely once. (In this, it has to be said, the Music Festival is leading the equally famous and well attended Folk Festival 1-0, but that is rather beside the point.)

The reason we haven't been to the Music Festival is down to programming as they do very little where they have people singing. and to be honest we're not huge fans of just instruments. If no-one's singing we tend not to be interested, which is possibly a failing in us, or a sign of ignorance, but you know, these things are expensive to attend and if you go to a concert and your chances of enjoying it are 50-50 at best then perhaps you're better off keeping your money for something else that you know you will enjoy. 

The one time we went previously was in fact for a staging in the Cathedral of Peter Maxwell Davies' opera about St Magnus, and we probably wouldn't have gone to that had it not featured one of our favourite singers (Paul Whelan), sadly singing the bad guy, but you can't have everything. We enjoyed that, but there's never been anything remotely like it again. We did have tickets to a lute concert a couple of years ago but we couldn't go in the end; I can't remember why, possibly the OH had had to go south to sort out something for his mother. 

This year, like every year, I picked up the Festival Brochure and had a desultory flip through it, and saw that a major strand for 2019 was Scandinavian Choirs. That was interesting, so I looked at the various programs they were offering and then suggested to the OH that we might like the one by Ars Nova Copenhagen, an a capella group which specialises largely in the music of the 1500s. I neglected to tell him it was at 10 in the evening, largely I suspect because I hadn't really taken that on board myself. 

Anyway, to cut a long story short I bought the tickets and last Wednesday off we trotted to the Cathedral at ten o' clock at night for a concert and we enjoyed it very very much. The first half was modernish music, including some settings of poems by Orkney poets and the second half was largely Spanish from the latter half of the 16th Century. I have since googled Ars Nova Copenhagen and discover they are world renowned and we were therefore very lucky to have the chance to hear them. I have naturally added a few CDs, some by them, and some featuring their repertoire buy other people, to my Amazon wish list.

And who knows? maybe next year we'll go to the Festival twice!