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The author Sir Michael Morpurgo has spoken of the importance of taking the arts to places off the beaten track as he prepares for a recital of new poetry inspired by Vivaldi at a festival on and around Bodmin Moor in Cornwall.
Morpurgo agreed to perform at the inaugural Music on the Moor festival, partly to draw attention to inland areas of Britain’s far south-west often missed by visitors heading for the coast.
He said the festival, which begins on Wednesday, was being staged in “the middle of wonderful nowhere”.
Morpurgo, who lives across the border in Devon, said the arts survived relatively easily in towns and cities. “There are more people there to come to concerts and plays and theatres. We are left certainly down in the West Country with very little. When someone starts up something like this in the middle of wonderful nowhere, it must be supported. Local people have a longing for this sort of thing. I love it when someone says, we’re starting up a festival.”
The events are taking place in the villages of Blisland, St Breward and St Neot, as well as the town of Bodmin. Murpurgo will recite his re-workings of poems believed to have been written by Vivaldi as an accompaniment to The Four Seasons.
The poems will be heard at St Petroc’s church in Bodmin alongside renditions of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons by musicians including Krysia Osostowicz, the first violinist of the Brodsky Quartet and players from Cornwall and Devon.
Morpurgo said: “It’s a church in not the richest town in Cornwall. It has high levels of unemployment and difficulty but we’re doing it in that place. The thought of bringing Vivaldi to Bodmin with the grey skies and the storms is so completely wonderful.”
The writer said The Four Seasons was as relevant and vital now as it had always been. “We are so often detached from our seasons. Seasons become a nuisance to us. We complain about the weather, and the seasons are changing because of global warming. But it is the case that there is this rhythm to life. And we have been guided by this rhythm for centuries and centuries and centuries. It’s in our DNA. And I love to be reminded of that.”
Osostowicz, who is also the festival’s artistic director, said: “When you read about Cornwall in the news it’s all about the coast and tourists and fishing. Nobody seems to think about inland Cornwall very much and it’s just a wonderful area.”
A focus of the festival is “music bouncing off other art forms”, Osostowicz said. Other highlights include the poet Ruth Padel and the Brodsky Quartet performing together at the church in St Neot. Earlier, there will be a talk on the church’s medieval stained glass.
The festival opens at Blisland on Wednesday with How Pots Sing, a demonstration by the potter Chris Prindl accompanied by music by Bach, with tea and cakes also available.
