How Peter Maxwell Davies put Orkney at the heart of the St Magnus festival

This midsummer marks the 50th St Magnus festival, founded in Orkney in 1977 by the composer Peter Maxwell Davies and the poet George Mackay Brown. The inaugural event opened with the premiere of Maxwell Davies’s opera The Martyrdom of St Magnus, staged in Kirkwall cathedral, the red sandstone church first established in 1137 by Earl Rognvald.

By choosing that opera and that setting, Maxwell Davies made a deliberate claim: Orkney was not remote or marginal but a centre for musical culture. Over the following decades the festival sustained that claim through premieres of operas and symphonies, music-theatre works written for local communities and the composition courses Maxwell Davies led.

Composers from Judith Weir to James MacMillan, and the festival’s current artistic director Alasdair Nicolson, trace part of their debt to his work. Maxwell Davies’s music, made in and of Orkney, remains underappreciated and underperformed.

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