BBC Symphony Orchestra at the St Magnus Festival - #1

Yesterday I travelled to Kirkwall with BBC Symphony Orchestra string players Philippa Ballard, Audrey Henning, Sarah Hedley-Miller and Marie Strom as the advance guard for a full-scale invasion of the Orkney Isles by the entire band, starting tomorrow.

The SO are in residence at this year's St Magnus Festival, performing two full-scale concerts conducted by Alexander Vedernikov, one strings-only concert (conducted by Andrew Gourlay), a conductors' masterclass and a 'Side by Side' concert in which local musicians will join the SO to play a programme of popular classics with the Festival Chorus under conductor Ben Gernon.

As the orchestra truck with all the equipment and the instruments makes its way by land and sea from Maida Vale via Scrabster and the short (but often hairy) crossing of the stormy Pentland Firth, the players will be cramming into the scheduled flights which serve the Orkneys and Shetlands with 30-seater Saab turboprop aircraft - that's 'real' flying, and I can tell you that there is barely room for a laptop on those planes, let alone an instrument, so the players must endure the separation from their beloved fiddles and whistles until the truck arrives on Friday morning…

As the 35-page tour manual reveals, this is an unusual trip and the players will be accommodated in a variety of hotels, guest houses and private houses with festival volunteer hosts. About a dozen bikes belonging to the players are stashed on the truck and I got the very last hire car on the island - necessary as my digs are 20 minutes away on the site of a former seaplane base overlooking Scapa Flow and the mountainous island of Hoy where Peter Maxwell Davies once made his home on the remote shingle beach of Rackwick. My trip to Houton Bay traverses rolling, treeless landscapes richly endowed with Neolithic sites, startling geology, a large number of evidently contented bovines and a selection of feathered friends including curlews, oystercatchers, lapwings, terns, skuas, and redshanks ...

Eating out in the Hamnavoe Restaurant in Stromness (Hamnavoe is the name the Vikings bestowed on the settlement) I met Theo Prendergast, working the tables while he waits to begin an undergraduate course at Stirling University. It turns out that Theo plays percussion with the Orkney Youth Orchestra and he's in the Side-By-Side Concert. 'I can't wait for O Fortuna from Orff's Carmina Burana,' he says. 'That's my big moment!' 'Excuse me,' interjects his boss. 'I don't suppose you could spare anyone from the orchestra to take his place in the restaurant that night - we're really busy on Saturdays.' I'm poised to offer my services but it's a leg-pull. The owner, incidentally, remembers playing woodwind when Max originally came to the islands and set up the Festival: 'It was Les Jongleurs de Notre Dame, and we played it through the streets, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin ... Fantastic!

• Find details of the St Magnus Festival programme
• Visit the BBC Symphony Orchestra website
• Find out about visiting Orkney