WHAT makes a successful festival? Scotland has plenty of examples to illustrate the answer, from the flagship city-based Edinburgh International Festival to long-standing out-of-the-way perennials such as the St Magnus Festival on Orkney. Common to them all is a uniqueness of setting, an ambience that says: “This event could only happen here.”
Which is why one of the most remarkable cultural success stories in recent years has been the explosive emergence of Fife’s East Neuk Festival. Within four years it has grown from a rough-cut experiment featuring various permutations of sundry musici
ans from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra to a fully-fledged, multifaceted festival, throwing together some of the most interesting, and occasionally unlikely, musical and artistic combinations.
This summer’s event, which takes place from 2-6 July, is the most ambitious yet. Size has never been an issue with artistic director Svend Brown, who has wisely kept his newly-released 2008 programme compact. “We usually have three or four different residencies interlocking during the festival, and one of the greatest pleasures of programming the event is the process of teasing out connections, links and ideas in common between these artists’ proposals, allowing themes to emerge and possibilities to arise,” he says.
Into this year’s mix go: Mongolian throat-singing; Romantic string quartets; the bizarre but brilliant Welsh pianist Llyr Williams; a barn-dance ceilidh; orchestral music from the SCO; and literary readings that include ghost stories in the haunted dining room at Elie’s famous Ship Inn.
Out of that wild concoction comes a package that is both unified and varied, eclectic as well as focused. Moreover, Brown has built the character of this festival around an interwoven tapestry of musical and literary themes, artist residencies and quirky venues, none of which would connect but for the special quality of the location itself.
Even before he unveiled his very first programme in 2005 at the behest of festival chairman, founder and Edinburgh businessman Donald Macdonald, the East Neuk – that magical corner of Fife that lies south of St Andrews, hugging the Forth Estuary from Crail to Largo – was a festival location crying out to be exploited. With a regular audience base now extending through the UK and overseas, there is no going back.
The 2008 programme has all the promise of being the best yet. For instance, there’s nothing like getting in first: a prominent Mendelssohn theme might have seemed the obvious choice for 2009, when the musical world will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the German composer’s birth. But as Brown gathered together his artists for this coming East Neuk Festival, all the signs pointed to a pre-emptive strike.
The Mendelssohn theme emerged from conversations Brown had with cellist David Watkin about Beethoven’s influence on Mendelssohn’s string quartets. Watkins is the dynamic, tousle-haired principal cellist of the SCO and is also a member of the Eroica Quartet, an ensemble renowned for its feisty performances of the Romantic string quartet repertoire, described in the New York Times as “refreshingly impetuous”. The group is in residence throughout this year’s festival, where it will present three programmes combining quartets by Beethoven and Mendelssohn. “The aim is to explore the more rugged side of Mendelssohn”, says Brown of a composer more often tarred with a reputation of being sentimental and flighty.
Other festival residents are in on the act: the Eroica doubles up with the Skampa Quartet from Prague for a performance of the famous Mendelssohn Octet, Op 20 in the acoustically superb Crail Church. And in a closing concert by the SCO, a newly-commissioned narrative to Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Fife-born author Christopher Rush provides a potentially cracking night in the atrium of the Fairmont St Andrews Hotel.
But Mendelssohn doesn’t hog the limelight – he’s just one of several focuses. In contrast to the Eroica’s heady programmes, the Skampa Quartet centre their performances on music from their own Bohemian homeland – quartets by Suk, Janacek, Smetana and Dvorak. “I wanted to complement Mendelssohn with music that shared some of the same heritage, but viewed from an utterly different perspective”, says Brown.
Slotting neatly into these interwoven themes is one of the festival’s most intriguing prospects – the Welsh pianist Llyr Williams. Known through successive Edinburgh Festival appearances for his intense introspection and idiosyncratic pianism, Williams has never seemed a natural collaborator. Yet his East Neuk residency sees him join up with Watkin and violinist Alexander Janiczek for Mendelssohn’s D minor Piano Trio and, more curiously, with Richard Holloway in a sea-themed presentation that combines readings from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves with Debussy’s picturesque Preludes for piano. In solo appearances, Williams performs works by Chopin, Schubert and Janacek.
On a different tack, the Orlando Consort present a vocal series called Ancient and Modern, combining music from medieval St Andrews with new works by Giles Swayne and Tarik O’Regan.
Much of the music on offer may seem standard fare, but the venues for the festival’s 22 events are anything but. They range from chamber music recitals in the stunning cliff-edge setting of St Monan’s Church to one of the festival’s most bizarre events – an incongruous collaboration between the straight-laced Orlando Consort and Mongolian throat singers Huun-Huur-Tu in a Cold War aircraft shelter at RAF Leuchars.
It’s that touch of the surreal that gives this festival its own fascinating signature. East Neuk may be a relatively new kid on the block, but already it comes with a five-star recommendation.
• The East Neuk Festival runs from 2-6 July. For further details, log on to:
www.eastneukfestival.co.uk