Wedding Interlude

The receding of the snow a week ago coincided with a family wedding, which took place on a cool but sunny day in the Fife fishing village of Anstruther.  Scott, third son of my wife’s cousin Meg, was marrying Isla in the local town hall, a charming building and an appropriate setting for such an event.

Though weddings are not usually a feature of this blog, the music at the ceremony included Peter Maxwell Davies’s touching little piano piece, Farewell to Stromness, a more northern fishing port, performed during the signing of the register. Davies, whose recent death has been much on my mind, composed it in 1980 for the St Magnus Festival in Orkney, where he lived in a bothy near the Old Man of Hoy, and where it formed an interlude in the Yellow Cake Revue which he wrote for Eleanor Bron (with himself on that occasion as pianist).

The cabaret was a characteristically political attack on Orkney’s new-fangled interest in uranium mining, a big issue at the time, against which Davies led a vigorous campaign - yellow cake was a pejorative nickname for uranium ore.  But Farewell to Stromness (Orkney’s second largest township which lay close to the projected uranium site) did not reflect the ferocity of his opposition. It was a quiet and wistful keyboard meditation with a recurring, gently prodding Scotch snap rhythm, musically more to the point than the jollity of his  famous Orkney Wedding with Sunrise, the orchestral showpiece he wrote for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, whose success was dependent on its bagpipe climax.

But the bagpipes, it seems to me, have never been a particularly Orcadian instrument - fiddle music is more relevant to the place -  and the piano piece, though serving as background music, was more appropriate to last week’s wedding in Anstruther than the rollicking Orkney Wedding with Sunrise would have been.

It was good to hear the music  again and to know that, though the Yellow Cake Revue, like Orkney’s uranium plan, is in the past, the eloquent simplicity of Farewell to Stromness lives on.
8 May 2016