Peter Maxwell Davies

Farewell to Stromness & Yesnaby Ground

Farewell to Stromness and Yesnaby Ground are piano interludes from The Yellow Cake Revue, a sequence of cabaret style numbers first perfomed at the St. Magnus Festival, Orkney, by Eleanor Bron, with the composer at the piano, in June 1980. The Yello Cake Revue takes its name from the popular term for refinded uranium ore, and concerns the threat of the proposed uranium mining at the economy and ecology of the Orkney Isalnds which islanders are determined to fight, down to the last person. Stormness, the second largest town in Orkney (pop. 1,500) would be two miles from the uranium mine's sore, and the centre most threatened by pollution etc. Yesnay, is the neary clifftop beauty spot under whose soil the unarnim is known to lie.