St Magnus International Festival reveals 2025 programme
Florence Lockheart
Monday, March 24, 2025
Running from 20 to 27 June in Orkney, this year’s festival is centred around the theme of Earth
Orkney’s St Magnus International Festival has revealed details of this year’s programme. The upcoming 2025 festival will focus on the theme of ‘Earth’, with seven days of concerts, workshops and events from 20 to 27 June.
The festival opens with a performance from the combined forces of Glasgow-based pianist Nikita Lukinov and the Resol String Quartet at St Magnus Cathedral with a programme bringing together Bach, Brahms, Beethoven and Babajanian. This also marks the opening of the festival’s four-part Piano Series which will also feature performances from Resol String Quartet and Mihai Ritivoiu, who performs on Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s piano in his final Orkney home of Sanday.
Festival director Alasdair Nicolson said: ‘This year’s overarching theme is Earth: the soil, the land, and the planet - where we look at how we interact with the place that we live, how much artistic creativity has taken this as its starting point and even how we recycle. There’s repurposed electric musical instruments in the unusual and eclectic theatre show Saved, a reflection of the life of the Orkney poet and nature writer Robert Rendall and new musical commissions that reflect upon the land and landscape in Fenella Humphrey’s solo recital.’
Artists in residence at this year’s St Magnus International Festival include Echo Vocal Ensemble, performing a programme of music about earth and sky from the renaissance to present day. The vocal ensemble also presents an afternoon of sung and spoken word with Niall Campbell at St Ninian’s Kirk by the sea in Deerness and a collaboration with the Festival Chorus for a performance of Dvorak’s Mass in D.
Other choral elements of the 2025 programme include Orkney Voices marking Viking festival Johnsmas Foy. The Johnsmas Foy celebrations continue with further music, visuals, live painting and poetry in the local dialect as well as Lynn Barbour’s promenade performance set amid the ancient landscape of Sandwick.
The festival’s literature strand also takes a musical slant, with James Runcie combining extracts from his novel focused on JS Bach, The Great Passion with performances violinist Fenella Humphreys who also performs Scottish premieres from Marcus Rock and Laura Shipsey at St Magnus Cathedral. Elsewhere, Master of the King’s Music and Orkney local Errollyn Wallen appears in conversation with director and composer Alasdair Nicolson
Alongside the festival’s first Orkney Accordion Course, the programme also includes performances from guitar, double bass and voice ensemble The Grant McQuade Duo, and The Stevens & Pound Duo which presents Ascending, a cross-genre concert reimagining popular classical works such as Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending and Holst’s The Planets.
