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St Magnus Festival
The St Magnus International Festival is an annual, week-long arts festival which takes place at midsummer on the islands of Orkney, off the north coast of mainland Scotland. History and management The festival was founded in 1977 by a group including the composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, who was a resident of Orkney, and the Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown. The artistic director is Alasdair Nicolson, who succeeded Glenys Hughes in 2010. The artistic programme consists mainly of music alongside drama, dance, literature and the visual arts, and is managed by a small staff and many local volunteers, who also offer accommodation for visiting artists. Artists and repertoire Artists who have appeared at the festival include Vladimir Ashkenazy, Nicola Benedetti, Colin Currie, Evelyn Glennie, John Harle, Angela Hewitt, Steven Isserlis, Paul Lewis, John Lill, Tasmin Little, Joanna MacGregor, Lisa Milne, Steven Osborne and Isaac Stern. Many orchestras and ensembles have visited the f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lisa Milne
Lisa Milne (born 22 April 1971 in Aberdeen) is a Scottish soprano described by the BBC as "one of RSAMD's best-known alumni", who was among the first artists to be invited to the BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists scheme in 1999-2001. Known for her work as a member of the King's Consort and her recordings with Roger Vignoles, Iain Burnside, Malcolm Martineau and others. She has performed at the Edinburgh Festival and the BBC Proms The BBC Proms or Proms, formally named the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts Presented by the BBC, is an eight-week summer season of daily orchestral classical music concerts and other events held annually, predominantly in the Royal Albert Hal .... The Scottish soprano Lisa Milne studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. She was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2005. She was also awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Aberdeen and Robert Gordon's University. A renowned recitalist, she has appeared at E ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Simon Holt
Simon Holt (born 21 February 1958) is an English composer. Biography Simon Holt was born in Bolton, Lancashire on 21 February 1958. Educated at Bolton School, Holt immersed himself in organ, piano and visual art during his sixth form years. In 1976, he attended Bolton College of Art for a year where he fulfilled a foundation course in all areas of visual representation. Shortly before achieving a diploma in composition from the Royal Northern College of Music, where he studied with Anthony Gilbert for four years from 1978 to 1982, he received a commission from the London Sinfonietta, which became ''Kites'' (1983). He was soon firmly established with a series of commissions and fruitful collaborations including not only with the Sinfonietta, but also the Nash Ensemble and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, resulting in pieces such as ''eco-pavan'' (1998), ''Sparrow Night'' (1989) and ''Lilith'' (1990) respectively. Inspired by Messiaen, Xenakis and Feldman as well as vi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Judith Weir
Judith Weir (born 11 May 1954) is a British composer serving as Master of the King's Music. Appointed in 2014 by Queen Elizabeth II, Weir is the first woman to hold this office. Biography Weir was born in Cambridge, England, to Scottish parents. She studied with John Tavener while at the North London Collegiate School and subsequently with Robin Holloway at King's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1976. Her music often draws on sources from medieval history, as well as the traditional stories and music of her parents' homeland, Scotland. Although she has achieved international recognition for her orchestral and chamber works, Weir is best known for her operas and theatrical works. From 1995 to 2000, she was Artistic Director of the Spitalfields Festival in London. She held the post of Composer in Association for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra from 1995 to 1998. Weir was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1995 Birthday Honours for se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James MacMillan (composer)
Sir James Loy MacMillan, (born 16 July 1959) is a Scottish classical composer and conductor. Early life MacMillan was born at Kilwinning, in North Ayrshire, but lived in the East Ayrshire town of Cumnock until 1977. His father is James MacMillan and his mother is Ellen MacMillan (née Loy). He studied composition at the University of Edinburgh with Rita McAllister and Kenneth Leighton, and at Durham University with John Casken, where he gained an undergraduate degree and then a PhD degree in 1987. At Durham he was a member of the College of St Hild and St Bede as an undergraduate student and the Graduate Society while studying for his PhD. He was a lecturer in music at the Victoria University of Manchester from 1986 to 1988. After his studies, MacMillan returned to Scotland, composing prolifically, and becoming Associate Composer with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, often working on education projects. As a young man he was briefly a member of the Young Communist League. R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
National Theatre Of Scotland
The National Theatre of Scotland, established in 2006, is the national theatre company of Scotland. The company has no theatre building of its own; instead it tours work to theatres, village halls, schools and site-specific locations, both at home and internationally. The company has created over 200 productions and collaborates with other theatre companies, local authorities, and individual artists to create a variety of performances, from large-scale productions through to theatre specifically made for the smallest venues. Many different spaces have been used for productions, as well as conventional theatres: airports and tower blocks, community halls and drill halls, ferries and forests. The creation of a national theatre was one of the commitments of the Scottish Executive's National Cultural Strategy. Formation After Scottish devolution in 1997, long-discussed plans for a national theatre for Scotland began to come to fruition. In 2000, the Scottish Executive invited t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Andrew Motion
Sir Andrew Motion (born 26 October 1952) is an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009. During the period of his laureateship, Motion founded the Poetry Archive, an online resource of poems and audio recordings of poets reading their own work. In 2012, he became President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, taking over from Bill Bryson. Early life Motion was born on 26 October 1952 in London, to (Andrew) Richard Michael Motion (1921-2006),Essex Clay, Andrew Motion, Faber and Faber, 2018, dedication page a brewer at Ind Coope, and (Catherine) Gillian (née Bakewell; 1928–1978). Richard Motion was from a brewing dynasty; his grandfather founded Taylor Walker, but this had been absorbed by Ind Coope by Richard Motion's time. The Motion family were wealthy armigers who lived at Upton House, Banbury, Oxfordshire, and were prominent in the local area; Richard Motion's grandfather Andrew Richard Motion was a Justice of the Peace for Es ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Liz Lochhead
Liz Lochhead Hon FRSE (born 26 December 1947) is a Scottish poet, playwright, translator and broadcaster. Between 2011 and 2016 she was the Makar, or National Poet of Scotland, and served as Poet Laureate for Glasgow between 2005 and 2011. Early life Elizabeth Anne Lochhead was born in Craigneuk, a "little ex-mining village just outside Motherwell", Lanarkshire. Her mother and father had both served in the army during the Second World War, and later, her father was a local government clerk. In 1952, the family moved into a new council house in the mining village of Newarthill, where her sister was born in 1957. Though she was encouraged by her teachers to study English, Lochhead was determined to go to Glasgow School of Art where she studied between 1965 and 1970. After graduation Lochhead taught art at High Schools in Glasgow and Bristol, a career at which she says she was "terrible" Career Having written poetry as a child and whilst studying at Art School, Lochhead won a B ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gwyneth Lewis
Gwyneth Denver Davies (born 1959), known professionally as Gwyneth Lewis, is a Welsh poet, who was the inaugural National Poet of Wales in 2005. She wrote the text that appears over the Wales Millennium Centre. Biography Gwyneth Lewis was born into a Welsh-speaking family in Cardiff. Her father started teaching her English when her mother went into hospital to give birth to her sister. Lewis attended Ysgol Gyfun Rhydfelen, a bilingual school near Pontypridd, and then studied at Girton College, Cambridge, University of Cambridge, where she was a member of Cymdeithas Y Mabinogi. She was awarded a double first in English literature and the Laurie Hart Prize for outstanding intellectual work. Lewis then studied creative writing at Columbia and Harvard, before receiving a D. Phil in English from Balliol College, Oxford, for a thesis on 18th-century literary forgery featuring the work of Iolo Morganwg. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jackie Kay
Jacqueline Margaret Kay, (born 9 November 1961), is a Scottish poet, playwright, and novelist, known for her works ''Other Lovers'' (1993), ''Trumpet'' (1998) and ''Red Dust Road'' (2011). Kay has won many awards, including the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1998 and the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award in 2011. From 2016 to 2021 Jackie Kay was the Makar, the poet laureate of Scotland. She was Chancellor of the University of Salford between 2015 and 2022. Biography Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1961, to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father. She was adopted as a baby by a white Scottish couple, Helen and John Kay, and grew up in Bishopbriggs, a suburb of Glasgow. They adopted Jackie in 1961, having already adopted her brother, Maxwell, about two years earlier. Jackie and Maxwell also have siblings who were brought up by their biological parents. Her adoptive father worked for the Communist Party full-time and stood for Member of Parlia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Justin Heaney (; 13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.Obituary: Heaney ‘the most important Irish poet since Yeats’ ''Irish Times,'' 30 August 2013.Seamus Heaney obituary ''The Guardian,'' 30 August 2013. Among his best-known works is '''' (1966), his first major published volume. H ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Gallas
John Edward Gallas FEA (born 11 January 1950) is a New Zealand born poet who in 2016 was the Joint Winner of the Indigo Dreams Pamphlet Prize and the St Magnus International Festival poet. Biography Gallas was born in Wellington in New Zealand and is of Austrian descent, the son of Frederick, ''né'' Fritz Eduard Gänzl, an educator, and Nancy Gallas, ''née'' Agnes Ada Welsh. He is the younger brother of the historian and writer Kurt Gänzl. He attended the University of Otago in his native New Zealand, and won a Commonwealth Scholarship to Merton College, Oxford to study Medieval English Literature and Old Icelandic and has since lived and worked in York, Liverpool and various other locations in England as a bottlewasher, archaeologist and teacher. ''The Little Sublime Comedy'' was Gallas's tenth Carcanet Press collection. Gallas is the editor of books of translations, including ''52 Euros'', ''The Song Atlas'' and ''Rhapsodies 1931'', also published by Carcanet, and the libr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
