The centre-piece of the Cappella Nova debut performance at the Festival was A Hoy Calendar, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies' setting of a poem from the GMB sequence Fishermen with Ploughs.

A girdle round the year in five minutes. In twelve clear, simple images George Mackay Brown's poem turns through the months of Orkney life, and as it turns so the modal music moves it on its way, with images of matching lucidity.

NB: published as 
A Child's Calendar

No visitors in January.
A snowman smokes a cold pipe in the yard.

They stand about like ancient women,
The February hills.
They have seen many a coming and going, the hills.

In March, Moorfea is littered
With knock-kneed lambs.

Daffodils at the door in April,
Three shawled Marys.
A lark splurges in galilees of sky.

And in May
A russet stallion shoulders the hill apart.
The mare trembles.

The June bee
Bumps in the pane with a heavy bag of plunder.

Strangers swarm in July
With cameras, binoculars, bird books.

He thumped the crag in August,
A blind blue whale.

September crofts get wrecked in blond surges.
They struggle, the harvesters.
They drag loaf and ale-kirn into winter.

In October the fishmonger
Argues, pleads, threatens at the shore.

Nothing in November
But tinkers at the door, keening, with cans.

Some December midnight
Christ, lord, lie warm in our byre.
Here are stars, an ox, poverty enough.

George Mackay Brown
from 'Fishermen with Ploughs' 1971
and in 'The Collected Poems' 2005