A concert of music to celebrate a great discovery and the North Sea island where it happened a hundred years ago.

Helgoland lies in the windswept German Bight, well known from the Shipping Forecast, with Germany the nearest land and Denmark further north. Its lack of trees and pollen made it the ideal place for the young German physicist Werner Heisenberg to avoid hay fever in June 1925. And amidst the sound of the wind and the sea he completed the creation of quantum theory. The director of the Helgoland Museum, Dr Simone Arnhold, shares the story of the island and Heisenberg, amidst a musical backcloth.

The music is provided by Orkney Camerata conducted by Iain Campbell, and the Orkney Chamber Choir conducted by Robert Hersey, with Hannah Firth (soprano) and Iain Campbell (piano). There is Haydn, Grieg, Elgar, and also a work by the 17th-century Danish composer Mogens Pedersøn joined by the KTB Quintet. There are works from 1925 and after by Edward Bairstow, Hindemith and Nielsen; and Ronald Binge’s much-loved Sailing By. The concert closes with the world premiere of a new work by George McPhee, Hills Tell Old Stories. in memory of the physicist Peter Higgs and his love of the outdoors, walking and music: a setting of a text from a George Mackay Brown poem. It will be introduced by Peter Higgs’s close friend and colleague in Edinburgh, Dr Alan Walker.