Founded in 1977 by a group including composer Peter Maxwell Davies and poet George Mackay, the St Magnus Festival is week-long arts festival which takes place at midsummer on the islands of Orkney. This year is the 50th festival, running from 19 to 28 June 2026.
In this article, the festival's current artistic director, composer Alasdair Nicolson introduces his vision for the festival.
Half a century on from its founding, the St Magnus International Festival remains one of the UK’s most distinctive examples of what happens when artistic vision precedes infrastructure. Our 50th anniversary, celebrated this June, is not simply a mark of longevity, but a reminder of the continuing relevance of an idea first argued into existence around kitchen tables in Orkney in 1977.
The festival emerged from a meeting of local and artistic minds: the composer Peter Maxwell Davies, recently arrived on the islands, and the poet George Mackay Brown, and collaboration with the cathedral organist Norman Mitchell alongside a wider community willing to back what was, at the time, an improbable proposition. That a major international festival should take root in such a geographically remote setting required persuasion, persistence and a degree of collective faith. From the outset, it was not built around a venue or institution, but around a belief that new work and serious artistic engagement could, and should, happen here.
That origin has had lasting consequences. St Magnus has always been, at heart, a composer-led festival, and this matters just as much now. Max said to me when I took over; “You’ve been given the job because you are a composer, that’s important”. Festivals shaped by composers tend to balance process with product: commissioning and curation, collaboration and presentation. We invite audiences into an ongoing conversation about how music is made, rather than simply offering a sequence of finished works. That is the secret behind these festivals’ appeal and the joy and privilege of being the composer at the helm of this one these last 16 years.
Composers understand this instinctively. Maxwell Davies’s own engagement with the festival, including The Martyrdom of St Magnus performed in Kirkwall’s cathedral, set a template in which place and music were inseparable. But his wider legacy extends beyond Orkney. In an increasingly professionalised UK festival landscape, where programming can tilt towards the familiar and the marketable, composer-led events such as St Magnus Festival, act as vital counterweights. We create spaces for risk, for new voices, and for work that might struggle to find a home elsewhere. Without these culminating annual moments, the ecology of new music would look markedly thinner.
That ethos continues to shape our 2026 programme. Running from 19 to 28 June, the festival balances anniversary scale with a strong emphasis on renewal. A newly formed Festival Orchestra anchors the opening, performing music by Maxwell Davies alongside Mozart and Sally Beamish - a juxtaposition that places the festival’s origins within a broader musical continuum.
Around this sits a range of visiting artists and ensembles: the Marian Consort bringing old and brand new choral repertoire, pianists Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy offering a distinctive chamber partnership, and the Hebrides Ensemble continuing the festival’s longstanding relationship with contemporary music-making. New commissions, competitions and premieres remain central, underscoring the festival’s commitment to composition as a living practice and living composers represented in a large number of the events.
Threading through all of this is the festival’s 2026 theme, “Air”. Framed in terms of wind, breath, sound and movement, it resonates strongly in Orkney, where weather and environment are constant presences.
The theme operates less as a strict curatorial device than as an atmosphere, connecting works across scale and genre. It is audible in orchestral breadth and vocal delicacy alike, and extends beyond formal performance into the festival’s closing parade, Up in the Air, which carries these ideas – alongside newly built kites and new music for the Kirkwall City Pipe Band by Steven Blake - into the streets of Kirkwall.
As ever at St Magnus, our programming is inseparable from place. The festival continues to inhabit a shifting network of venues, from the St Magnus Cathedral to community halls and historic sites across the islands. This year includes the temporary use of Kirkwall’s Auction Mart as a performance space, consistent with a long tradition of transforming everyday locations into venues for artistic encounter. I take this approach to reinforce a central idea: that context shapes listening, and that meaning emerges through the interaction between music, environment and audience.
One such example of this philosophy is a new work with a local focus that I have the pleasure of bring to life. My new work, Jasper the Kirkwall Cat, is a large-scale work for children and professional musicians, drawing on the life of a well-known feline figure on the town’s high street. Jasper’s daily wanderings - through shops and offices (including the festival’s) - became part of the shared texture of Kirkwall life, and in his retelling, we elevate local anecdote into something approaching local lore.
Such projects are not incidental. They demonstrate the importance at St Magnus Festival of continuing to dissolve boundaries between the everyday and the artistic, between community participation and professional practice. In doing so, the festival returns repeatedly to its founding insight: that culture is most powerful when it is embedded in the life of a place.
As the anniversary unfolds, the festival’s significance lies not only in what it presents, but in how it continues to operate. It remains a space for making, testing and encountering new work, shaped by its environment and sustained by its community.
For ten days around midsummer in June, these elements come into alignment once more. Then they disperse again. What endures is less visible, but more consequential: not monuments, but living systems, responsive to place, and still, after 50 years, capable of change.
 |
| St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall, Orkney |
St Magnus Festival, Orkney - 19 to 28 June 2026 - further details from festival website.
The blog is free, but I'd be delighted if you were to show your appreciation by buying me a coffee.
Elsewhere on this blog
- Admirably reinvented for a small stage: Wild Arts intimate & vividly engaging account of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro - opera review
- Extraordinary in her time: Joseph Phibbs & Dominic Sandbrook's new opera, Mrs T, aims to explore Mrs Thatcher as a personality, see how she reacted to political events - interview
- Getting the keys to the toyshop: I chat to Ryan Wigglesworth about being Featured Artist at the 2026 Aldeburgh Festival featuring him as conductor, composer, & chamber musician - interview
- Beautifully well-matched casting & superb singing: David McVicar's production of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro at Covent Garden - opera review
- Mining the contemporary: two American opera releases by Ricky Ian Gordon & Tobias Picker take inspiration from the AIDS crisis & an historical figure of trans identity - feature
- In his passion for the music of Richard Wagner, Tony Cooper finds himself back in Germany attending Stefan Herheim’s widely acclaimed Ring cycle at Deutsche Oper Berlin - opera review
- Strauss & Korngold: little known works by well-known composers in passionate performances from Francesca Dego & Alessandro Taverna at Conway Hall - concert review
- A remarkable combination of headlong energy with care & attention: Igor Levit & Leonkoro Quartet in Schumann's Piano Quintet at Wigmore Hall's 125 Anniversary Festival - concert review
- Home
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment