Exclusive ticket offers for East Neuk Festival

One of the highlights of summer in Fife is the East Neuk Festival, 3-7 July, which combines an exciting and innovative musical and literature programme with wonderful venues, from exquisite churches to beautiful gardens. Nature is even more to the forefront this year, as the East Neuk Festival celebrates birds and birdsong. In its music programme there are masterpieces by Beethoven and Ravel as well two pieces by the outstanding Alaskan composer, John Luther-Adams. Its Littoral programme, curated by Catherine Lockerbie and Jenny Brown, aims to inspire, enquire and explore through writers and writing. This year, Littoral brings some of the finest nature writers from across the UK to join highly distinguished local authors to reflect on how we observe and interact with our environment.  The Festival has offered StAnza special ticket prices for the following Littoral and Music events:

LITTORAL: £5 tickets (instead of £10) for people quoting: ENFStAnza5

Thursday 4 July  | 18:00hrs  | Largo Kirk  | GAVIN FRANCIS

Adventurers including Alexander Selkirk, immortalised as Robinson Crusoe, are associated with this historic kirk, so it’s a fitting place to hear Fife-bred explorer Gavin Francis. After a year as doctor to the British Antarctic Survey, he speaks eloquently of a world of ice, silence and Emperor penguins.

LITTORAL: £10 (instead of £15) for people quoting: ENFStAnza10

Saturday 6 July  | 14:30hrs  | Cambo House and Estate  | CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP WITH LINDA CRACKNELL

Join experienced author and tutor, Linda Cracknell, in a workshop including forays outdoors into the beautiful Cambo Estate. Aimed at both new and experienced writers, the workshop will inspire you to explore your own associations with landscape through writing.

LITTORAL: £5 tickets (instead of £10) for people quoting: ENFStAnza5

Sunday 7 July  | 11:30hrs  | Crail Church Hall  | A SILENT SUMMER?

Join in a highly topical discussion with some of our leading authors and thinkers. Fifty years after Rachel Carson’s seminal Silent Spring warned of the threats to our environment, what now are the dangers, and the signs of hope and success? Speakers include TC Smout, Sir John Lister-Kaye and Esther Woolfson.

London Conchord Ensemble

MUSIC: £10 tickets (instead of £15 & £12) for people quoting: ENFStAnza15 (for £15 to £10 tickets) and ENFStAnza12 (for £12 to £10 tickets)

Thursday 4 July  | 11:30hrs  | Cellardyke Church  | Wit Mystery and Youth 

London Conchord Ensemble

Poulenc: Sonata for Clarinet and Bassoon, Messiaen: Abîme des Oiseaux, Mozart: Sonata for Cello and Bassoon K292, Janáček: Mladi 

London Conchord Ensemble’s clarinetist is none other than SCO principal, Maximiliano Martín. He plays solo Messiaen and features in youthful Mozart and Poulenc, both full of wit and brilliance. Janáček, ebullient and spry in his 70s, looks back to his own schooldays in one of his most uplifting works, Mladi.

MUSIC: £10 tickets (instead of £15) for people quoting: ENFStAnza15 

Friday 5 July  |  20:00hrs  | Cambo Barn  | The Tallis Scholars

John Taverner: Missa Corona Spinea

Thomas Tallis: Lamentations of Jeremiah

In their 40^th Anniversary year, The Tallis Scholars bring masterpieces of the Renaissance to East Neuk. Taverner’s mass has the sweeping glory of Kings College Chapel: he was the greatest English composer of Henry VIII’s time, and his mass settings are magnificent choral spectaculars – vast and dramatic. Tallis’ Lamentations are profound, timeless – a great contrast.

MUSIC: £10 tickets (instead of £15) for people quoting: ENFStAnza15 

Sunday 7 July  | 17:00 hrs  | Cambo Barn Closing Concert 

Scottish Chamber Orchestra: Christian Zacharias, conductor

Messiaen: Appel Interstellaire; Ravel: Ma Mère L’Oye (Suite); Beethoven: Symphony No 6 “Pastoral”

Cambo Barn invites something a little out of the ordinary so you are invited to take a journey in music from deepest space to the natural world right outside the venue. Zacharias conducts a perfect programme to close the 2013 Festival.

BOOKING INFORMATION

Hub Tickets: +44 (0)131 473 2000 / www.hubtickets.co.uk. These offers apply to telephone and online bookings and in person at Hub Tickets, The Hub, Castlehill, Royal Mile, Edinburgh EH1 2NE. To take advantage of these special ticket offers, you must quote the references given above.

For more details about the East Neuk Festival programme, visit their website.

Writing a place, invoking an instant: Jean Atkin on writing off the scale

Our guest blogger, Jean Atkin, has much to say that is relevant in this Year of Natural Scotland, having written extensively about  landscapes and places, including her recent pamphlet The Dark Farms (Roncadora Press). She will be launching her first full collection, Not Lost Since Last Time (Oversteps Books), at her StAnza reading on 9 March.

When I was 14 or so and dipping into a borrowed Penguin Classics paperback (no internet on those long 1970s afternoons) I read the words of an unknown Irish poet who had lived in the eleventh century.

‘In the black season of deep winter/ a storm of waves is roused along/ the expanse of the world./ Sad are the birds of every meadow plain/ at the clamour of winter, except/ the ravens that feed on crimson blood./ The dogs are vicious in cracking bones/ and the iron pot is put on the fire.’

I was astounded by the dizzying, momentary sense the words gave me of seeing a long-lost place exactly then through the eyes and thoughts of another person – even if they’d been dead for almost a thousand years and even if the coast country in question was now under a car park.

Dark Farms Glenhead

Place is strangely and intimately important to humans.  It’s our backdrop to memory, our stage set for pain and joy.  We grasp human emotion through the evocation of place.  Place holds significance so deeply that we visit scenes of atrocity with a sensitised perturbation about what we made be made to feel there.  There are ghosts.  The natural and built environment surrounds us all, and both is, and symbolises, who we are and what we inherit.

When poets write about place, they explore cycles of continuity and disruption.  Esther Morgan’s wonderful poem Bone China traces the event of the servant girl who smashed the dinner service and disappeared
‘That dawn she walked out of her story forever,

though her flavour salted the servants’ tongues for months,
and clearing the ground a hundred years later

of this self-seeded scrub of ash

I can still piece bits of her together – white and sharp –

as if the earth were teething.’ 

In her poem Glid, Jen Hadfield calls up measures of our own lives against an atavistic, ancient sense of place when she turns the camera on her ‘dissolving self’ and then
‘I turn the camera on dazzled
Everything – 

Plain rain – the loch –

The incandescent horses

 

Forged black against the broch – ‘

Place is so very near to us.  Philip Gross’ poem Globe blurs the distinction between.

‘on the half-landing newel post, a near-

sphere, scratched and grainy, oiled

with the sweat of our palms,

            our turns and hesitations on the stair,

 

till it reflects, no, recollects us – ‘

And we know what he means.  Have you ever been back as an adult to the house you lived in until you were 6?  It’s most peculiar.

Places shape our memories and help to make us who we are.  They are more than backdrop – places are nothing less than creative atmosphere and texture for the stories we all tell ourselves to help make sense of life.  Places become mapped in our heads in flashes of detail: the particular click of a particular door closing in your face; the dark step you sat brooding on when you were banished from the family dinner table; the field where once you galloped on stubble, years ago, with horse sweat greying the backs of your fingers.

It’s not the Ordnance Survey.  It’s off the scale.  What you need is a poem.

Jean Atkin  http://thedogdaysofdumfriesshire.blogspot.co.uk/