Music 2025
This year we embark on musical journeys to many places – north to Faroe and Iceland, with fiddle and accordion; and then onward to Greenland with poetry and film blending in for stories of whales and whaling and of a search for lost ships, and a blend of sound reaching from Shetland fiddle music to creative improvisation with instruments, electronics and voice.
A choir from the Mearns bring us songs from land and sea, and with them come harp and bouzouki, harmonica and bodhran.
We tell the story of the role that the island of Helgoland played in the discovery of quantum theory, with music from the land round about and narration from the director of the island’s museum. We explore the quantum landscape with music from accordion and piano and a flow of images.
We hear the sweet sound of synthesizers in concert – and explore the mysteries of numbers in music with a composer who created an award-winning radio series on Scotland’s music that spanned centuries and millennia.
The synthesizer trio QRM perform a non-stop piece of electronic music heavily inspired by 70s/80s musical genres, shaped by their own style, accompanied by specially-created art from Hilary de Vries. The music follows quantum themes including entanglement, wavelike particles, and sometimes-random event outcomes.
Sit back and enjoy traditional music from Orkney and other parts of the north - from Norway, Faroe, Shetland, played by Lesley MacLeod (fiddle), Fran Gray (accordion) and Hamish Bayne (concertina), with Tom Ward (concertina and small pipes) making a welcome return to Orkney; and meet some of the northern guests taking part in the Festival.
There are numbers beneath the surface in music: you can count notes, bars, words and letters of accompanying text …. So, says musicologist and composer Dr John Purser, music offers a rich potential for composers interested in patterns of numbers. He provides examples: the late 13th-century Inchcolm Antiphoner, the 16th-century Carver Choirbook, and William Wallace’s Creation Symphony in the late 19th-century. He shows number patterns in music and words, illustrated too by some of his own work, played by Iain Campbell (piano) and Elizabeth Sullivan (violin).
The Mearns Singers, conducted by Irene Watt, with songs of the land and the sea, from Sunset Song to Partans in his Creel; and songs of other lands as well.
A concert of music to celebrate a great discovery and the island where it happened a century ago. Helgoland Museum director Dr Simone Arnhold, tells the story, with music from Orkney Camerata conducted by Iain Campbell; the Orkney Chamber Choir conducted by Robert Hersey; Hannah Firth (soprano) and Iain Campbell (piano). There is Haydn, Grieg, Elgar and Mogens Pedersøn; Edward Bairstow, Hindemith, Nielsen and Ronald Binge – and the world premiere of a new work by George McPhee in memory of the physicist Peter Higgs and his love of hillwalking and music.
After the concert, Twa Folk (Irene Watt and Graham White) welcome you with music and song from the North-East of Scotland. There are songs of land and sea, and their instruments include harp, bouzouki, harmonica and bodhran.
Arctic voyages searching for whales, and for lost ships – these form a collaboration between two musicians and a poet, in a blend of sound from traditional Shetland fiddle music to creative improvisation with instruments, electronics and voice. The music develops from the complex songs of the great whales, and the men who hunted them in hostile Greenland seas – and Captain Francis McClintock’s voyage in the yacht Fox to seek traces of the lost Franklin expedition.
Orkney-based accordionist Karen Tweed and Edinburgh-based quantum physicist and pianist Erika Andersson present a performance of music inspired by quantum physics. They share a passion and fascination for music, art, textiles and science and explore topics from entanglement to quantum computers. In each case the music expresses the essence of the concept.
