This week's wine: Cloudy Bay

Served by my son at lunch between Christmas and New Year, this for many people is the wine of wines, hard to get, delicious to taste, living up to the mystique of its name, and making other New Zealand whites seem hard and aggressive in comparison.

Some of my friends went for no special reason to New Zealand for Christmas this year.  If it was to drink Cloudy Bay, I can see why. Is it all it is made out to be? On this evidence yes, even if at times you may suspect it is over-hyped and deliberately kept in short supply. Light and silky, yet sumptuous, it matched to admiration the prawns, Parma ham, potato salad, cheese and the home-made chocolate truffle cake brought along for the lunch by my youngest daughter.

Amazon, I discovered the other day, was down to its last bottle, by no means overpriced at £21 and thus a great temptation to buy. But since a second bottle does not always seem quite so good as a first, we moved on the following day to a ridiculously cheap Tavel I had bought at Lidl’s. Pink wines are traditionally summer wines, but Tavel - once considered the best of all French pinks, though now somewhat neglected - has a bit of body and seemed to go fine with Christmas odds and ends.

A product of the Rhone, it is deeper in colour and richer in flavour than my favourite pale, astringent Provencal pink. It made a nice change, and I shall be going back for more.
30 December 2014

Face to face

With the death of John Freeman at the age of 99, memories of Face to Face, the benchmark television interview series of half a century ago, come flooding back. These were real interviews - direct, probing, lucid, revealing, properly serious - with real celebrities. 

Everything fitted in, from the superb Felix Topolski sketches to the introductory music from Berlioz’s Francs Juges overture - “ what’s this?”, people continually asked as  the memorable strains kept unwinding. Then the first glimpse of the interviewee and the back of Freeman’s head - you never saw his face. Useless to say now  that he will be missed. He has been missed for fifty or sixty years,  after he went on to become a diplomat. 

But the interviews with Otto Klemperer, Evelyn Waugh, Bertrand Russell, Lord Reith, Tony Hancock, and Gilbert Harding linger on, and some of them, including the gloriously laconic ones with Klemperer and Waugh, can still be viewed on You Tube. Watch them and admire.

22 December 2014

Christmas wines

Belatedly,  I am about to start buying my Christmas wines - a fizz, a white, a red, a pudding white, the things that traditionally keep us going throughout the day. Usually I do it sooner than this, which is why, for the sake of simplicity, I am confining myself to Waitrose. Along with M&S it is my favourite supermarket for wine and, though its best bottles are not cheap, it is by no means  so expensive as it is made out to be.

So my choice is going to be:-

 Prosecco. Waitrose sells a good selection of this popular Italian fizz. The one I like best is a Valdobiandene Oro Puro, a benchmark Prosecco Superiore, light, delicate, and appetising, currently reduced from £13.49 to £8.99.

Chablis. My favourite white burgundy, superb with good smoked salmon or other fish. With the right mixture of mineral and steel, and with a sensation of butter, this one, a 2013 from the established house of Louis Moreau ,is reduced from £13.99 to £9.99.

 Not quite a claret, but outstanding of its kind, this First Press Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon fr0m California is something special to match your main dish. An outstanding, complex tipple reduced from £17.99 to £14.39.

Not yet decided, but if we can rise to it a half-bottle of Waitrose’s special luscious Sauternes, Chateau Suduiraut at £16.99, might do the trick.  Otherwise it is likely to be Muscat de Beaumes de Venise at £7.99 a half bottle as usual.  21 December 2014

Celebrating Carl Nielsen

John McLeod’s latest work, commissioned from the 80-year-old Scottish composer by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra for performance  in January, is both timely and apt. A tribute to the volatile Dane, Carl Nielsen, whose 150th anniversary falls in 2015 along with that of Sibelius, it is piquantly entitled Out of the Silence and takes the form of an imagined conversation - unpredictable and disputatious - between Nielsen and McLeod himself,  thereby anticipating a request in the latest issue of Standpoint magazine for Nielsen, rather than Sibelius, to be the focus of attention in the coming year.

Given the choice between the two Nordic composers for his tribute, McLeod, a third Nordic composer, had no difficulty making his decision. The quirky, maverick Nielsen was his man.  Sibelius, in comparison, seemed too stern and awe-inspiring, and what McLeod has produced is in many ways a merry, as well as sympathetic,  portrait filled with the warmth and diversity of Nielsen himself.

Significantly it is not a theme and variations - the traditional tribute from one composer to another - but a response to two of Nielsen’s works, the Inextinguishable Symphony and the Clarinet Concerto, which hover and tumble and explode around McLeod’s score like aspects of the Northern Lights - apart from the fact that McLeod’s music, like Nielsen’s, is full of humanity.

I first heard a Nielsen  symphony during my adolescence, when Walter Susskind and what is now the RSNO performed the Sinfonia Espansiva in the early 1950s. When Leonard Bernstein recorded the same work, along with the other symphonies, a decade later, it sounded much tamer. Bernstein was a conductor you had to see in order to savour. But Nielsen still stands in need of the devotion Susskind and Bernstein gave him. Which,  of course, is one reason for McLeod’s forthcoming tribute - which will be played, with Joseph Swensen as conductor, alongside Nielsen’s Clarinet Concerto and Sibelius’s very different Symphony No 4 - as well as for the article in Standpoint.
18 December 2014

The editors in my life (22) - Lunches

The Scotsman’s Edinburgh Festival lunches continued throughout my entire career on the paper, but the best of them were the formal ones presided over by Alastair Dunnett, the originator of the idea and the editor best equipped to make it blossom.

 Though formal, they were not stiff. Guests, interwoven with critics, were astutely positioned along both sides of the board room table. Dunnett sat at the top and his assistant editor Eric Mackay, who was less enthusiastic about these events, opposite him at the other end. Dunnett, rightly, got the principal guest to sit beside him, but discussions were impressively democratic, with everyone joining in.

Only once do I remember someone grabbing the limelight and that was the violinist Isaac Stern, who addressed us all non-stop. Dunnet liked him a lot, for his ability to sustain conversation but I thought him a bit of a loudmouth. The people I liked best were the quieter ones, such as the conductors  Sir John Barbirolli and Carlo Maria Giulini, whose tears flowed as we discussed the beauty of Monteverdi’s madrigals and whose first music teacher looked “just like Brahms”. I had the good luck to be seated next to each of them.

On another occasion, sitting opposite the Festival director Lord Harewood, I discovered that we had a mutual interest in the  Peebles-born music critic Cecil Gray, long since dead. Gray, a composer of lofty Berliozian operas on Virgilian subjects, was a vituperative critic of most other composers, with the exception of Bartok and the mysterious sinister Bernard van Dieren, and who wrote  a destructive book called Contingencies - worth tracking down - in which he demolished Tchaikovsky as  a composer of mincing waltzes.

I never met him - he was slightly before my time - but Harewood had once gone on a river trip with him and recalled him as a rather fat, perpetually sweating man - “wonderfully outspoken but basically sad.”

Perhaps the best moment of all came when I found myself sitting opposite Leila Gencer, the Turkish soprano whom Peter Diamand, Harewood’s successor, had invited to sing Mary Queen of Scots, and whose threadbare performance I had  reviewed in the paper that morning. She chatted politely to me, but Diamand, who was also at the lunch, came up to me afterwards with his Cheshire cat smile saying he had been greatly entertained by the fact that Gencer and I each pretended that we did not know who the other person was.
17 December 2014

This week's wine: Brouilly

Brouilly, like Chenas and Morgon, is one of the best reds of the Beaujolais region, but rather hard to find. Yet it was in an Edinburgh supermarket, Lidl, that  I came upon a particularly nice Brouilly the other day, part of a substantial offer of good French wines attractively priced.

This one was from those admirable Beaujolais producers Collin-Bourisset. At £6.99 a bottle for the 2013 vintage, it seemed startlingly good value.

Lidl, though not famed for its wine department, has clearly been trying to catch up on its great  rival Aldi, whose wine is highly rated, and with a master of wine as consultant it is making  notable strides. In  flavour its Brouilly is a true Beaujolais, very quaffable, though my personal favourite remained Beaujolais-Villages.
 To buy a few bottles of Brouilly  for Christmas drinking would be a good idea. No doubt a good Chateau de Brouilly from the same producers would be even better, so let  us hope that  Lidl get a consignment of that also.

Meanwhile another Lidl red is worth a try.  It is a 2013 Gigondas, flower of the Rhone. Though a little on the young side, it is a big juicy wine with overtones of Chateauneuf-du-Pape, but better than many supermarket specimens of that much bragged about wine.
11  December 2014

The debate continues

It now seems that the coughing child whose parents Kyung Wha Chung rebuked in the middle of a Mozart violin sonata at the Royal Festival Hall was not only coughing but giggling and distracting  people sitting close to her in the front row of the stalls.  So what could reasonably have been done about it other than in some way take action?

To intervene oneself could have been counter productive. Not all members of an audience would respond amicably if nudged and asked to control their offspring.  If a similar offence was committed by someone texting on a mobile phone, the situation could indeed quite easily have turned nasty.

Sir Georg Solti knew what he was doing when he got attendants to move the member of the audience who was sitting coughing directly behind him while he was conducting at Covent Garden. How he did it in the midst of a Wagner performance is hard to say, but it certainly worked.

For a performer to intervene publicly, however, tends to be tricky. When Kyung Wha Chung did so  the other day, she clearly irritated the critic of The Times, who evidently did not seen to be enjoying the concert very much  in any case.

The occasion a few years ago when the Hungarian pianist Andras Schiff stopped his performance at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, announced lucidly to the audience “A little pause for coughing” and walked off the platform for a few minutes, seemed to cause more shock than useful effect.  The atmosphere did not grow toxic, as The Times claimed it did at Kyung Wha Chung’s recital, but it did grow uncomfortable - though Schiff was right, I thought, to make his point without singling out an individual member of the audience for attack.

Whenever James Loughran,  in his days as conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, came on to the platform before the audience was fully settled, he stood staring balefully into the auditorium until silence reigned and everyone was sitting down . Only then did  the performance begin.

But the irascible Finnish conductor Paavo Berglund went further than that while conducting the RSNO one night  in Aberdeen in the 1980s. Distracted by unrest in the auditorium, he stopped the orchestra and did not restart until order was restored.
9 December 2014

The Kyung Wha Chung incident

Even if I had been present at Kyung Wha Chung’s recital in London - which I admit I was not -  I would perhaps have been wrong to take on trust the statement made by the critic of The Times about what the violinist said to the parents of the coughing child between movements of a Mozart sonata.  John Duffus, though he was not there either, presents the picture somewhat differently in his reply to my earlier blog on the subject.  The Royal Festival Hall is a big, acoustically imperfect auditorium. The Korean violinist was unlikely to have spoken very loudly. How many people in a packed house actually heard what she said? Enough to turn the atmosphere, as The Times put it,  instantly “toxic “?

Some people who say that they did hear what Chung said have suggested that the violinist asked the parents to take the child out for a glass of water, and not that they should wait until she was older before bringing her to a concert.  It sounds possible. But, on a night of generalised concert-hall coughing, was the perhaps  highly-strung player right to single out the child in any way at all?  Was Kyung Wha Chung not simply giving an intimate sonata recital in the wrong surroundings? Does a performer have any right to draw attention publicly to one innocuous member of the audience?

As a long-established critic, I am aware that audiences often behave badly. For a performer to answer back when irritated  is nothing new. I can recall an occasion when Sir Georg Solti had a  cougher ejected from a seat immediately behind the conductor’s podium at Covent Garden.    And I can remember an occasion during a Ring cycle at Bayreuth being personally chided by a fellow member of the audience for persistently being the last in row H to return  to his seat after the interval. But at least I could reply with a smile, since the orchestra had not yet started playing - though you cannot at Bayreuth see whether the conductor is present or not.
6 December 2014

Curbing your cough

Though Kyung Wha Chung’s recital in Perth the other day passed without incident, the same was not the case in London where, between movements of a Mozart sonata at the Royal Festival Hall, she drew attention to a coughing child - many other members of the audience were also  coughing - by telling the girl’s parents that it would have been better to wait until she was older before bringing her to a concert.

After such a put-down, reported the critic of The Times, the atmosphere in the hall turned toxic. No doubt, after a ten year absence from the concert platform caused by a damaged finger, the famous Korean violinist was in a high state of tension. Audiences can be irritating, as the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas recently  made plain when a similar incident involving a child occurred during one of his concerts in America.

But coughers will always be with us, and singling out an inoffensive child for remonstrance sounds like over-reaction to me. And to The Times, which reduced its estimate of her recital to a two-star rating.
5 December 2014

The editors in my life (21)

My first Edinburgh Festival as The Scotsman’s music critic showed me how much had changed in my absence. With Lord Harewood as director, programmes had become more focused  and padding had been swept away. Janacek, previously little more than a name, was composer of the year.  A flop in London, he was transformed by the Prague National Theatre into one of the poets of the operatic stage, his Katya Kabanova hauntingly performed by singers wholly inside their roles, the action - one scene beneath a beautiful big tree stays rooted in the memory - perfectly matched to the haunting and touching  realism  of  the plot.  When Chekhov first gained his foothold in Britain in the 1920s, with John Gielgud among his exponents, the effect  must have been a bit like that.

As Katya’s obverse, in a fiercer, more abstract production, there was From the House of the Dead, again masterfully sung. Having the chance to write about these performances was one of my first great operatic moments as a serious newspaper critic. And Alastair Dunnett, one of the most dedicated of festival-goers, gave me full editorial support, with lots of space,  attentively reading what I had written and never interfering.

As a total believer in the Festival, Dunnett backed Lord Harewood in various ways, delighting in John Calder’s literary conferences and proposing to me  that I write a full-scale profile of Harewood,  giving me all the time I wanted - he did the same when Harewood was succeeded by Peter Diamand - to produce it. I needed no second bidding.  And in the background Dunnett also did the things an enlightened editor should have done, initiating the board room lunches when, six times each festival, he introduced his staff critics to major festival performers, enabling us all  to converse while he, sitting at one end of the long table with his deputy Eric MacKay at the other, presided over the flow of talk.

Sometimes he sought help, and I recall one occasion being asked if I could collect the guitarist Julian Bream, whose morning recital I had been reviewing at Leith Town Hall, in a taxi and whisk him to The Scotsman. Though this clearly went beyond a critic’s normal duties, Dunnett was such an ingratiating person I did not mind, and neither, for that matter, did Bream.

That was the time when, arriving late in the board room, I slipped on the polished floor and fell flat on my back at the feet of the aloof Bernard Levin who, doubtless assuming me to be some  drunken Scottish mediocrity, stared disdainfully down at me and immediately turned his back. Not all Dunnett’s guests were gracious - though the conductor Sir John Barbirolli, asking quietly  if I could sneak him another glass of whisky, certainly was.
3 December 2014

Memories: La Cenerentola

Scottish Opera’s new production of Rossini’s Cenerentola, which is being shared with Strasbourg, received such glum reviews, especially from The Times, that it brought memories flooding back of the famous old Edinburgh Festival production staged at the King’s Theatre during Peter Diamand’s reign as Festival director. With Teresa Berganza, the brightest star in the Diamand firmament, as Cinderella, it marked one of the first appearances of Diamand’s own Festival opera company, in a  striking black-and-white production by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle that was eventually taken to La Scala,  Milan.

Those were the days, my friends, which we thought would never end. It was not that the production was the greatest imaginable - it had its characteristic Ponnelle flaws - but  it was staged with such style, wit, polish, and irresistible zest that it stuck in the memory. The cast was classy, and not just dependent on a single singer. Claudio Abbado, on his way to becoming the most masterly Rossinian of his period, conducted. The Scottish Opera Chorus, which then still existed and knew how to show its paces, provided dapper support.

By the time the show reached La Scala, it had been slightly modified, but not to its detriment. The chorus’s monochrome  costumes had changed to red. Berganza was succeed by the similarly gifted Frederika von Stade. But  the gloriously spindly Paolo Montarsolo was still the tetchy Don Magnifico and Francisco Araiza and Claudio Desderi were the brilliant Ramiro and Dandini.

Happily the Scala version  dated fron a time when internationally celebrated performances could go straight on to DVD, which was why I found myself watching it, with renewed pleasure, a week or two ago. Abaddo’s conducting was seductively spruce, though it was sad that there was not a glimpse of him on screen.  The Italian articulation was as zippy  as could be. Though Von Stade struck me as not quite so haunting as Berganza, she sang exquisitely. And Montarsolo was a wonderful old rascal, even better than Ian Wallace in Glyndebourne days under Vittorio Gui’s conductorship. The way that DVD keeps fine productions of yesteryear alive is one of the miracles of opera.

A pity this did not happen when Scottish Opera staged Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers at the Edinburgh Festival in  the 1970’s or when Janet Baker sang in the Trojans.
1 December 2014

This week's wine: Montagny

Montagny, like Saint Veran, is a good white burgundy rather hard to find in supermarkets but always worth searching for.  Not even M&S, with its quite substantial Christmas list, appears to be stocking it at present, though the wine supplier I currently use for deliveries most often - Naked Wines of Norfolk - does list one from the experienced  producer Dominic Hentall which can be recommended.

 At  £11.99 to customers - around £16 full price - it is not the cheapest white burguny on the market. A  good Chablis would cost about the same, but this 2012 Montagny is a fine, subtle   specimen of what is undoubtedly a classy aperitif or fish wine, and thus worth its  price, especially at Christmas.

Elegant and full of flavour, it is something worth buying more than once, its grapes harvested from stony soil, its taste impressively intense. It is not the only Hentall burgundy stocked by Naked Wines - there is a somewhat cheaper but also admirable Cote Chalonnaise  similarly worth investigating, which I have been drinking for a while, but the 2012 Montagny  would certainly get your Christmas lunch off to a  good start.
30 November 2014

The editors in my life (20)

Stepping from the sleeper in Waverley Station, I was greeted by the early morning smell of  breweries - an old familiar Edinburgh aroma I had not experienced for years.  I was home. The deal had been done and I was The Scotsman’s latest music critic.

Since 6am seemed too soon to head for Davidson’s Mains, where I would be temporarily residing with  an old school friend while searching for a new house,  I decided to climb the steps of the Fleshmarket Close to The Scotsman’s back door and find my way to my new room - formerly occupied by my predecessor Christopher Grier - for  a spot of settling in.

The Evening News - which, when I left Edinburgh in 1959 had been my old alma mater the Evening Dispatch - was already stirring.  My room, one floor higher, awaited me, with the erratic Eric Blom edition of Grove’s Dictionary and every book in the Master Musicians series neatly arranged in the bookcase. A metal cupboard contained a stack of LP records which Christopher had left for me to review. On my desk was a reading light, an in-tray, a large empty diary, and the morning edition of The Scotsman.

Years later, following the same process, I would climb the steps from the London sleeper after a trip abroad, open the door of my office, and find Peregrine Worsthorne of the Sunday Telegraph sitting at my typewriter writing an article before departing  for London. He had been given permission to use my desk in my absence, though it was a shock to see him at that time of day  sitting drinking a coffee from the Melitta equipment I had by then installed in the room.

Meanwhile, back in the 1960s, I sat at the music critic’s desk for the first time, opened the drawers, slid my fingers over the typewriter keys, and set to work. None of The Scotsman’s editorial staff was yet on duty, so after typing a few notes  set off along the corridor to explore. A few steps down from my room lay the empty sub-editors’ room leading straight through to  the offices of Alastair Dunnett and Eric Mackay, the senior editors. Off to the right were the leader writers’ cubicles. Nearby lay The Scotsman’s elegant wood-lined gentlemen’s toilet, and further along the corridor the reporters’ room with its array of files.

It was still a quite  old-fashioned newspaper office, though the scene of many a news-break and many a merry jape. One day, taking a group of visitors into into the  reporters’ room and finding it a scene of journalistic badinage, Dunnett announced “And this is the disreputable side of the paper.”

For the moment, however, it was as empty as everywhere else. Sauntering back to my room, I planned my day, which would include  a sentimental lunch at the nearby Cafe Royal and an  evening of Telemann by an Edinburgh orchestra in the YMCA Hall, off Princes Street - not much of an event with which to launch my career as The Scotsman’s music critic, I felt, though I  was cheered by the sight of Robert Crawford, old friend and sterling composer of chamber music, sitting near me and reviewing the performance for the Glasgow Herald, which at that time had no staff music critic and would not recruit one for a further two years.

After the concert I had two hours, until  midnight, in which to write my review - in those days The Scotsman was slack with its deadlines  - and  strolled back to the paper gathering my thoughts. As I knew from past experience, most Edinburgh concerts - perhaps most concerts everywhere - were neither good nor bad. The problem lay in finding something sage to say about them.

Today I would be more generous to Telemann than I was on that early occasion. But the next night I faced something more challenging in the  Scottish National Orchestra’s  weekly concert at the Usher Hall. My seat was the one that had been traditionally occupied by Christopher Grier, in the back row of the grand tier. Despite tradition I instantly disliked it and my first action was to change my ticket. Having the overhang of the upper tier so close to my my head did not strike me as acoustically advantageous. So I moved forward a few rows and found myself beside Hans Gal, a somewhat peppery member of the university’s music faculty who had escaped from Vienna and settled in Edinburgh at the time of the Nazi takeover.

A composer of somewhat Richard Straussian persuasion, he had backward-looking tastes and would never become a buddy. But he gave me a grumpy welcome as we settled down to hear Alexander Gibson, who had recently succeeded the dreary Hans Swarowsky as the orchestra's musical director, conduct Debussy and Bizet. The performances were lightweight, better heard from my chosen seat than from further back.

My new career had begun, though it would be some time yet before Gibson displayed his mettle and bowled  me over with the way he conducted - of all unpromising works - Gounod’s Faust in Glasgow. It was my  first experience of Scottish Opera, which Gibson had founded a few years previously, and I was startled by its impact. Something was happening in Scotland and I was exhilarated to feel that I was going to be its chronicler.
27 November 2014  

This week's wine: More Macon

Macon, as I remarked last week, is a difficult wine which you need to choose wisely. To the handful I recommended - including the lovely Macon-Lugny Les Charmes, a really classy old favourite - I would now  like to add another, a 2013 Macon-Villages Chapelle aux  Loups, which Waitrose has reduced from £11.99 to £8.99 a bottle.

The new price seems about right to me. It is not a great white Macon but it is an enjoyable one. good with shellfish or on its own, and with an eye catching name, though what chapels and  wolves have to do with it I cannot say.

Waitrose reductions are usually worth watching for, since they draw attention to wines you might not otherwise buy. Here is one which deserves  a look, bright in taste, not too strong, fruity but not dull the way Macons - whether white or red - too often are.
25 November 2014.

Memories: The Milano, Edinburgh

Among Edinburgh’s Italian restaurants around half a century ago, the trend setter was the Milano at the top of Victoria Street. Originally it was going to be called Ferrari, after the name of its owner, but since its aim was to serve benchmark Milanese cooking, the Milano was what it became.

 It was a good place at a time when there was a dearth of good Italian restaurants in Edinburgh. Cosmo Tamburi, whose basement room in Forth Street had been a brilliant one-man show, served the best Italian food in town, but had recently moved to posher premises in Castle Street where the atmosphere was wholly different.  Vito’s, a good though not very handy place in Fountainbridge, was soon to move to Dundas Street. Valvona & Crolla was still exclusively a food shop. Gimi’s, a lively trattoria in Cockburn Street, had Tito Gobbi as a customer when he was here for the Festival, and invariably, or so it was said,  persuaded him to sing.

But one way or another  there was scope for the Milano and it deservedly prospered. A long, narrow room, decorated with quiet elegance, it was not overpriced (as Cosmo’s, alas, became) and  its team of waiters included Giancarlo Tinelli and Bruno Raffaelli, both whom would soon move to  restaurants of their own - Tinelli in Easter Road and Raffaelli in the West End, though both would later vacate these excellent long-established places.

The Milano continued to win acclaim for its north Italian veal dishes,  its calf’s  liver and osso buco, its superb old-fashioned portions of  Parma ham and melon, its well priced bottles of Barolo and Dolcetto. But even Mr Ferrari in the end moved on to open a high-quality Italian delicatessen halfway down Dundas Street, not quite big enough to make a real impact.

Before long, as a result of family problems, he returned to what I think was his hometown south of Milan, but he and his restaurant are still missed, certainly by me.
23 November 2014  

Programme planning

A  concert which begins with Beethoven’s earliest string quartet, Op 18, No 3, composed at the age of 30, and ends with Mozart’s last, K590, composed at the age of 34, shows a very special sense of programme structure.

I do not think I have ever heard the two works performed on a single evening,  and the fact that  the Belcea Quartet has chosen to do so at the Queen's Hall  in Edinburgh on December 8  speaks eloquently for itself. Written eleven years apart, the works represent two aspects of the enlightenment. It will be wonderful to hear them side by side, with a new work by Mark Anthony Turnage as the cntral panel of what promises to be a compelling musical triptych.

Turnage, now in his middle fifties, began as one of the bad boys of modern British music, an equivalent of the angry young men - John Osborne, John Wain, Kingsley Amis, Arnold Wesker, to name but four - who pervaded the world of English literature and drama in the middle of the twentieth century. His opera entitled Greek, an update of Oedipus Rex, was brought from its Munich premiere to the Edinburgh Festival in 1988, and with its hero called Eddie it caused a few festival shocks.

Other works by him have included a trombone concerto entitled Yet Another Set To, a flute concerto entitled Five Views of a Mouth, and a conflict between jazz and classicism entitled Blood on the Floor.

But his string quartet, entitled Contusion, is somewhat different. . Inspired by a poem written by Sylvia Plath a week before she killed herself, its emotional charge is of another sort. This concert, forming part of the fiftieth anniversary season of New TownConcerts is something to look forward to.
22 November 2014

The editors in my life (19)

To be music critic of The Scotsman in its heyday was the job I had envisaged from boyhood.  But as the paper’s cultural correspondent in London in the early 1960s, I continued to deem it a far distant prospect. What suddenly brought it within my reach was the decision of my predecessor Christopher Grier to resign after sixteen years of reviewing the Scottish National Orchestra on Friday nights at the Usher Hall.

Summoned to Edinburgh to discuss things with my editor, Alastair Dunnett, I could not help feeling that Christopher had decided wrongly.  A tall,  peaceful, genial man, he had been educated at Glenalmond before working for the British Council in Scandinavia. At ease on the ski slopes, he seemed well suited to the Scottish life. Dunnett described him as a diplomat. Wearing his fur hat, he fitted the name, and maybe that was what he should have been. He had  simply, I think, become bored, because Scotland at the time was far from being a nest of singing birds. What he did not realise was that it was on the brink of a musical renaissance, and it was my good luck to succeed him and to chronicle what  was happening.

Once it was agreed that I would be the next music critic,   I was granted a day of talks with Dunnett and his assistant Eric Macaky, who would eventually become his successor. Dunnett was not only an editor but a great  impresario, whom you could imagine wearing a coat with a fur collar. Striding into the office, he would accost you in the corridor and ask “How is culture?” He liked to receive good tidings, but even if he didn’t he was happy to reply, “Give them waldy” - an expressive Scottish word for “tear them to bits.” Whatever he thought privately, he never stood in the way of me writing what I thought, and always encouraged me to speak out, whenever I thought it was the right thing to do.

But we had not yet reached that point. I was still the newly  appointed novice music critic, and he wanted to hear my views on criticism and how I was to pass my time. The ground rules were as expected. I would review all major Scottish musical events. Inside and outside Edinburgh, and a good many minor ones also.

Once a fortnight I would write a “Log,” which was the space on the leader page traditionally filled by Wilfred Taylor’s witty and popular  column, “A Scotsman’s Log.”  In alternation with the elegant drama critic Ronald Mavor, I would enable Wilfred to have a day off each week and be given a chance to air my views on important topics of musical interest.

Christopher had regularly devoted this space to record reviews, but Dunnett said he wanted a change. I said I would be pleased to supply one. It was, after all, one of the best spaces in the paper, and Taylor and Mavor were big names to be sharing it with.

Dunnett also had other changes in mind. Conscious of my work in London, he suggested that I might like to become the paper’s art critic as well as its music critic. This was an example of his  one-size-fits-all attitude to the arts.

I did not feel too sure about it, but I complied in the knowledge that it might never happen. It didn’t. I was far too busy, not least because I agreed to continue the Saturday column I had begun in London on the arts in general and  would continue writing musical profiles, something Christopher never did nor felt any urge to do.

Thus were the  lines of my job set out. Moreover there was a little perk I had not been told about. The Scotsman music critic had an  annual budget for foreign travel,which Christopher cherished  and which amounted to what, in those days, was the princely sum of £300 - enough for three or more trips a year.

With the details of my new appointment fixed, I returned to London for my final months there. Tom Dawson, my London editor, was displeased and said that going back to Scotland was retrogressive. I did not agree and was soon proved right.
20 November 2014

Runnicles does it again

Runnicles does it again

The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s Sunday afternoon concerts in Edinburgh are gaining the status of Festival events. To celebrate the 60th birthday of its principal  conductor, the Edinburgh-born Donald Runnicles, this week, the players were  teamed with the Festival Chorus for what was clearly a very special performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

The Usher Hall was packed. Runnicles made an introductory address from the podium telling the audience that as an adolescent he sang in the chorus’s debut performance of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony in 1965 with Alexander Gibson  as conductor.

Since then he has held major appointments in Berlin and San Francisco and has given riveting performances of Britten’s Peter Grimes at the New York Metropolitan (available on DVD and highly  recommended). Regretfully, because it clashed with a family birthday, I did not attend this week’s Beethoven, which has been recorded for television.

But there is more ahead. In February, in tribute to Sibelius’s 150th birthday, Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony and Violin Concerto will be performed by the BBC SSO  at the Usher Hall, with Guy Braunstein as soloist,  flanked by Beethoven’s Coriolanus and Leonora No 3 overtures.

We must make the most of Runnicles while we have him. Scottish Opera should have sought his services years ago, but can now presumably no longer afford him. And what has the RSNO, for which he once sold programmes at the Usher Hall, specially done on his behalf?

For the SCO he has conducted a memorable account of Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night. But it is sad to think how many opportunities to hear Runnicles in Scotland have been lost. It is significant that a Scottish blog was founded some years ago under the name “Where’s Runnicles?” When he leaves the BBC SSO in 2016, we must be ready to say, very assertively,  haste ye back.
18 November 2014
 

This week's wine: A few good whites

Though Macon is the least reliable of white burgundies, there are plenty of good ones to be found, if you know what you want, and dull ones are merely a matter of ill luck.

A good one which has come my way, and which I have not encountered before, is a 2012 Macon-Uchizy from the expanding list presided over by Naked Wines of Norfolk.

 Produced by the youthful team of Eric and Catherine Giroud from   Le Moulin de l’Oeuvre, it has the piquant  mineral taste that, in my experience,comes with other Macon-Uchizy wines, faintly reminiscent of Chablis,  without being too austere. At £10.49 to subscribers - and £14.99 full price - it is nor exactly a snip, but if you buy a bottle I think you may fancy buying a second one.  The benchmark 2011 vintage is sold out, but the 2012 has now arrived.

If supermarkets are your preference, Macon-Lugny Les Charmes  at £10.50 from Waitrose continues to live up to its pleasing name, but if that seems too dear a Cave de Lugny at £7.99 from the same shop is a happy, if slightly edgier, bargain.

Waitrose Macons are established favourites,  but I have just received a present of a different white altogether, a 2012 Spanish Godello Monterrei bought from M&S. At £9.99 a bottle, this is Spanish white at its cleanest and snazziest, refreshingly uncluttered, 13 per cent proof and strongly recommended.
17 November 2014  

Usage or misusage

From America comes news of a fresh phase in the war between mobile users and misusers in places of entertainment. It has been reported in a recent edition of Variety that at a Hollywood festival screening of Mr Turner, Mike Leigh’s acclaimed film of the life of the painter JMW Turner, a woman using a mobile phone was asked repeatedly by a man in the row behind to switch it off.

When, after a few minutes, she had failed to do so, he tapped her on the shoulder, he prompted an unexpected response.    Turning round, she sprayed a stream of  mugger-deterrent into his face. The man immediately left the auditorium, and shortly afterwards the woman was escorted out.

Mr Turner has been showing this month  in Edinburgh, where a set of  Turner’s watercolours are a cherished possession of the National Gallery ofScotland.

Though it was not a performance of the finale of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony that was marred by the incident, as recently happened in New York, it seems that in America such happenings are getting nastier. Or  was the woman to be commended for her handling of what she clearly regarded as an invasion of her rights?
16 November 2014

This week's wine: Gruner Veltliner

With Swiss wines, to which I am very partial, becoming harder and harder to find in Scotland, I am turning more and more often to their Austrian equivalent, Gruner Veltliner, which is  somewhat easier. But good ones are growing conspicuously more expensive.  Waitrose, my usual source of supply, is charging £10 or more for the top of its range - steer clear of its inferior £7 version -  and I am becoming resigned to the fact that anything up to double that is becoming the norm for something better.

My latest purchase has been from Naked Wines of Norfolk - a supplier whose list is increasingly worth a look and whose Rotes Haus Gruner Veltliner is a model of its kind with a touch of lime behind its very slight petillance. True,  at £12.40 to customers and £16 full price, it is even dearer than Waitrose’s, but it is a delicious drink, as full of flavour as a fine Alsace, and infinitely quaffable as an aperitif or with veal or chicken,  which is probably what the Viennese like to drink it with. I am impressed.

Although my own Viennese days are probably over, I love the place for more than its music and still recall my first trip to Grinzing, on the outskirts of town, for a sampling of the new wine - not always with the best Viennese food, just as the wine itself was  not usually very special. But it was always rich in atmosphere,  evoking memories for me of Erich Kunz’s sentimental old Viennnese songs. which I collected in my boyhood on ten-inch Columbia shellac discs.

That is what I continue to associate with the best Gruner Veltliner and what I now  possess, not quite so satisfyingly,  on CD, to match my wine palate to something appropriate. The first time I saw Kunz was long ago as Don Alfonso in Cosi fan tutte at the Edinburgh  Festival. The last time was in The Bartered Bride at the Vienna Opera. Happy days. Let’s open another bottle.
14 November 2014

Wagner Nights

I have started watching, belatedly, Tony Palmer’s nine-hour biography of Wagner, filmed thirty years ago and now reissued, which I have received as a birthday present from my son Nicolas.

With Richard Burton (a year before his death) in the title role, it looks like an attempt to remake Abel Gance’s epic Napoleon, which had one virtue that  Palmer’s Wagner does not have - it was a silent movie. That Wagner was a great composer but a nasty, offensive, belligerent  man is not something I would dispute. Indeed he was a model - there have been various others - of the great genius who failed to be  a great man.

Deliberately or not, Palmer’s film makes this point strenuously, depicting, with Burton’s abrasive support, Wagner as hectoring, hostile, garrulous, and insufferably bellicose - no wonder Hitler admired him.

Yet the film, despite the uproar and gunfire of its opening episode in Dresden, is riveting in its way, and I am continuing to watch it. Whether or not you like the gravel-voiced Burton as the anti-hero, it has a terrific cast, including Vanessa Redgrave as Cosima, even if some of the senior actors (Sir John Gieldud, Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir Ralph Richardson) have minor roles. All the same there are some nice cameos, including Ronald Pickup as Nietzsche, Joan Plowright as Mrs Turner, Wagner’s Scottish patron in Bordeaux, and Sir William Walton as King Frederick Augustus of Saxony,  who all claim the attention.

What I am less enthusiastic about is some of the handling of the music which, though conducted by Sir Georg Solti, focuses too much on sinister and loud passages of The Ring and brassy excerpts from other operas. But the scenery, specially in Switzerland, is wonderful. I am still glued to the screen, though tempted to wear ear-plugs, ang shall have more to say in a later blog.
11 November 2014

This week's wine: Gewürztraminer

Gewurztraminer, the most cheerful of Alsace wines, is the one most people  like best. With its flavour of lychees, it goes well with Asian - particularly Chinese - dishes. No wine is easier to identify, or simpler to enjoy, either on its own or with appropriate food.

Yet because it is claimed that  Gewurztraminer is always the same  - though it is more subtle than that - it is easy to dismiss it as boring. A good one (and some are specially good and infinitely delicate) should nevertheless soon refute that argument.

But what are the best ones? Since most Alsace wines tend to be dear, you do not want to make a  mistake. Being  quality whites, they  can take a bit of bottle age, so do not be put off by something which, if it were a Muscadet, you would suspect of being on its last legs.

Hugel’s Gewurztraminer is deservedly one of the most admired, but is not always as easy to find as you might expect.  Supermarkets tend to steer clear of Alsace wines, but Waitrose sells a Turckheim Gewurztraminer for £10.49 or, if you are feeling flush,  a Paul Blanck for £15.40.

Cheaper Gewurztraminers can sometimes seem rather raw and aggressive, especially if they are not from Alsace - Hungarian ones are best avoided. But M&S’s authentic Baron de Hoen Gewurz at £9.99 is a good buy and, despite its somewhat industrial label, Benoit Dreyer’s Gewurz from Naked Wines in Norfolk is a gentle specimen of its  kind, with a hint of Riesling finesse, at £13.99 full price or £10.49 to subscribers.
9 November 2014

The editors in my life (18)

Enlivening though much of it was, my period as a London drama critic was no more than an interlude in my journalistic career.. The more I devoted myself to it,  the more it seemed a sideline from which I might never escape.  My desire to return to full-time music criticism preoccupied me, though I knew it might mean quitting The Scotsman as my workplace.  Music criticism was my metier, and I increasingly wanted back to it.

Suddenly I received three simultaneous opportunities. From Edinburgh came a letter from Christopher Grier, The Scotsman’s staff music critic, saying he had done the job for sixteen years and had had enough of it. He was coming to London to try his luck on a freelance basis, with a weekly column on The Listener as his starting point. I wrote back  to him instantly, asking if this meant that the Edinburgh job - the one for which, since my schooldays, I had always yearned - was now open. He replied that it was, and since nobody yet knew about it, there were meanwhile  no contenders.

He said he would consult Alastair Dunnett, The Scotsman editor, on my behalf and, almost by return of post, Dunnett wrote asking if I would like to be Christopher’s successor in Edinburgh. Those were the great days when serious British newspapers had staff music critics - something that is now a rarity - and I was on the point of saying yes when two further offers came my way.

The first was from Holland, proposing an extension of my old job as sleeve note editor for Philips Records in Baarn. Not only was I offered an enhanced version of what I had done previously but a house to go with it. Would I like to fly over for a few days and take a look?

But in London, too, things were happening. The leading music agent Wilfred Stiff, a nice man for whom I had interviewed musicians and written profiles of them, asked me if I would like to join him on a full-time basis.  Some careful weighing up clearly needed to be done. My visit to Holland proved inviting, but the job, I thought, could probably have been handled from London. Was a house in Holland - perhaps for life - be enough of a temptation or would it be an anchor round my neck? I had worked in Baarn before and liked it, though with reservations. I wavered, and said no.

I also said no to Wilfred Stiff, because I did not really want to work for an agent, despite the attraction of his offer. It was The Scotsman, and my native Edinburgh, for which I opted, and for which I worked for a further 25 years.

It was the right decision. Musically they were the best years of my life, and though they ended in disgruntlement and two editors who gave me great displeasure, they were great while they lasted - the acme of what a newspaper music critic’s life should be like, with opportunities for travel of a sort I had never anticipated and offshoots, such as writing about food and wine, which suited my lifestyle.

So I said yes to Alastair Dunnett and, so long as he and his eventual successor Eric Mackay were in charge, I never regretted my decision.
8 November 2014

The editors in my life (17)

During my spell as The Scotsman’s London arts correspondent, my resident boss was Tom Dawson, a subordinate of Alastair Dunnett, senior editor at the paper’s head office in Edinburgh.   Dawson’s role was one  that traditionally led  to a major Edinburgh posting - his predecessor Eric Mackay became Dunnett’s assistant editor on North Bridge and finally his very impressive successor as editor.

But Dawson’s ambitions, whatever they were, did not lie in a return to his native Scotland. He had become a Londoner and would later inform me, when I myself was preparing to return to Scotland, that it was all very well becoming a big fish in a small pool. It would surely be better, he said, to remain in London and  become a bigger fish in a much bigger pool. If this was his own ambition, it was soon sadly  denied him. He died, still  young,  during a round of golf.

As my London editor he had been not specially inspirational, but at least he seldom got in the way and was content, for the most part, to leave me to my own devices, respecting me enough to let me get on with my job while he concerned himself with more important matters. Brooding quietly in his office; while  chain smoking cigars, he seldom demanded to examine what I had written before I sent it north to Edinburgh. It suited me fine.

Where Dunnett was concerned, he was, I thought, a bit of a yes-man, not a person who defended his staff against Edinburgh intrusion, but more inclined simply to pass on orders from the north. His main cultural interest lay in art - he had many artistic friends - and as London art correspondent (as well as arts correspondent) I occasionally found myself being leaned upon to write, or not to write, something which, one way or the other,  had not been greatly on my mind.

Usually, as I was to discover, Alastair Dunnett himself was in some way involved with the issue, if it could be called an issue. For example, some of the artists I interviewed in London were Scots who had moved south, achieved a degree of success or notoriety, and referred to themselves as “outcasts” whose work was appreciated in London but unwelcome in Scotland, indeed sometimes actively disliked back home.

I detected here a recurring theme, which struck me as something worth writing about, not necessarily defensively or admiringly but simply as a matter of interest. But Dunnett, it seemed, would have none of it. Without approaching me personally, he sent Dawson an edict that The Scotsman had published enough of such pieces. The point, such as it was, had been made, and no more interviews with grumpy artists - I think the word employed was scum - were to appear in the paper. Dawson passed on the information to me with a faint smirk, and that was that. Since my life in London was busy and wide-ranging, involving several theatre reviews, news stories,  and at least one major interview per week, I was perfectly willing to drop one minor aspect of my arts coverage.

Scottish artists who lived in Scotland but who occasionally exhibited in London mattered more to Dunnett as editor of The Scotsman, and I was certainly happy to interview them and review their exhibitions. One of these was the great Joan Eardley who, not long before her early death, had won a name for herself  in Cork Street.  I met her around the time of her first major London show. The gallery, I recall, was seething with experts, some of whom advised her that various tiny details in her paintings would benefit from alteration. Eardley was my idea of an exciting  artist and the paintings looked fine to me. But then I was not, and never would be, a London art critic, merely a journalist with an interest in art.  However, it gave me a hint of one aspect of the London art scene which  I did not like  and which I was soon glad to free myself from.

Drama was a different matter. Although, compared with London’s team of drama critics in the nineteen-sixties, I was a nonentity, writing for a readership far away in the north, I enjoyed reviewing first nights and developed part of my craft as a music critic from doing so. I never got to know the aloof Kenneth Tynan, and was ignored by Bernard Levin (with whom, years later, I exchanged many a friendly letter on aspects of music) but the plays I saw - Peter Hall’s productions at the Arts Theatre, the latest John Osborne at the Royal Court,  Paul Scofield’s granite-voiced King Lear at  the Aldwych - have stuck forever in my mind.

Trips to Stratford - The Tempest staged to admiration - resulted on one occasion in a stroll along the Avon with Tom Fleming, who disclosed his plans to build a Scottish National Theatre on Cramond Island. Though this  never happened, his later directorial residency at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh showed what it might have been like, even if it failed to last. Fleming was an under-appreciated man for whom I had great admiration and fondness.

And what of music? Though my own subject had to lie dormant, apart from a chain of illuminating interviews - one of them with the young Vladimir Ashkenazy, newly settled in North London and advising me to listen to some of the worst Stalinist composers (surely he was not serious). But its time was coming. By 1964 my career had reached a crossroads which, despite other enticements, would bring me back permanently  to Edinburgh and permanently to music. But that is a subject for another blog.
5 November 2014

This week's wine: Klein Riesling

Riesling remains a great but tricky grape, source of some of Germany’s best wines and many of its worst. It can also be a major disappointment in Alsace, in comparison with Pinot Gris or a zippy Gewurztraminer.

What is its problem? In a word, sweetness. At its most mediocre it tastes like a brand of sugar water and hardly like wine at all. At its best it is sumptuously luscious - but still sweet. The great drawback of Liebfraumilch and similar popular wines is exactly this. It is something that makes them easy to resist - and, for many people, easy to like - though it is not the happiest of attributes, even if, in Britain, we still drink them in quantity as cool  thirst quenchers.

Almost any bottle featuring the words Rhine and Riesling on the label needs to be treated warily unless you know that it comes from a reputable German wine producer, which of course makes a big  difference. So, very often, does the addition of a single magical German word to the label information. The word is “trocken,” which means dry and which, when you sample a good example, introduces you to a different experience altogether.   In Germany nowadays the word is quite prevalent, though you do not see it so often here in Britain, hooked as we are on the soppier German wines.

A benchmark example of a trocken Riesling comes from the young German producer Peter Klein, available by delivery from Naked Wines of Norfolk for £15.99 full price or £11.45 to regular customers identified as “angels.” It has a refreshingly flinty, somewhat mineral taste, the opposite of the Rhenish norm. Though the 2012 vintage is now sold out, the 2013, which I have yet to taste, is now in stock.
2 November 2014

The trouble with Harry

Peter Heyworth of The Observer would have been Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s ideal interviewer, because he understood what the music was about and cared deeply about what it said.  But he died before he could be persuaded to write a book  about Birtwistle comparable with his great two-volume study of the conductor Otto Klemperer and the Birtwistle book based on a penetrating series of interviews has been written by Heyworth’s successor as Observer music critic, Fiona Maddocks.

Though not perhaps quite as enthralling as Heyworth’s might have been, it is well written, if somewhat straggling in presentation and a bit prone to employ old-fashioned touches of interview technique, such as the tendency to round off quotations with the addition in brackets of such words as “laughs” or, irritatingly and more frequently,  “chuckles” whenever Birtwistle says something amusing which she thinks deserves to be amplified. Court reporters once did this  when a judge made some witty comment, but it seems out of place in a book about a modern composer whose music is as serious as Birtwistle’s, and it soon becomes distracting.

Perhaps Birtwistle’s laughs and chuckles were themselves distracting enough to merit mention but the writer should have found a different way of saying so. 

Never having met him I cannot supply a personal observation but at least  the text of the book is interesting enough to survive this minor blight. 

Birtwistle’s thoughts on his music are invariably worth reading, and it is good that Maddocks generally lets him speak out, even if she permits herself a fair amount of deocoration. Happily she incorporates comments on him by his three  gifted sons  from his three gifted sons (though none of them is specially musical) in constructing her portrait of this peripatetic genius who has lived in Lancashire, Scotland, France, America, and, at theage of eighty,   Wiltshire, often moving house on the spur of the moment to new surroundings (on one occasion one of his sons treks home from London  to visit him in the Hebrides only to find that he has suddenly moved to a bleak part of southern France). But somewhere in the book an even better book seems forever to be lurking, and does not quite get out.

There is sometimes something slightly schoolmarmy about Maddocks’s questions which gets in the way of the natural flow of their conversation but Birtwistle - known to friends as Harry - is probably not the easiest of people to interview (he refuses, for example, to discuss his schooldays, although, apart from one beating, which is not  dwelt upon, nothing very significant appears to have happened to him). 

That he is a great composer, however,  is never in question and much of the book is enjoyably enlightening, not least when he talks about his trees and gardens and the construction of dry-stone walls, which he treats as meticulously as his music.

30 October 2014 

Triumph of time

Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s new piano concerto entitled Responses, written in celebration of his eightieth birthday, is a recurring, and fascinating, topic in the recent book of Birtwistle interviews by Fiona Maddocks, music critic of The Observer.

As usual, while writing the piece, he needed to be convinced that he was on the right track, and thereby convince the reader that the work was going to be another Birtwistle masterpiece. Maddocks, as well as the composer himself,  certainly knew how to whet one’s appetite. 

As a long-term devotee of his music, I thought that his whole characteristically indivudal  approach to the art of the piano concerto rang true.  But when the work was premiered the other day in Munich’s marmoreal Hercules Hall with Pierre-Laurent Aimard - who better? - as soloist, the Financial Times systematically destroyed it, declaring that it was hard to tell which was worse, the performance or the densely written piece itself. Though the critic, one of the paper’s German correspondents, admiited that reviewers sometimes get first performances sensationally wrong, her review lacked nothing in brimming self-confidence. 

But to call Birtwistle’s music dense is par for the course. That is how it sounds a lot of the time and that is part of its fascination. Birtwistle is surely well accuustomed by now to the fact that people - though surely not a German-based correspondent  of the Finncial Times - use this as a weapon against him. 

It has been a rebuke frequently suffered by his operas and his major  orchestral works as well as, notoriously, the piece he wrote for the Last Night of the Proms. Up to now he seems  to have taken such  diatribes, which go right back to his early opera Punch and Judy in the claustrophobic surroundings of Aldeburgh’s Jubilee Hall, quite successfully in his stride. But when Peter Diamand brought the querulous Punch and Judy to the Edinburgh Festival it was the triumph it deserved to be at the King’s Theatre.

Nevertheless here in Scotland, though he lived for a while on the remote island of Raasay, the trouble is that so little of his music is ever actually heard. His old friend Peter Maxwell Davies, another islander, is our man, while Birtwistle remains perplexingly neglected. Where is Gawain, the greatest of his operas? At one time, Scottish Opera would have staged it. Fat chance of that happening now, though   Covent Garden and the Salzburg Festival have both performed it. 

Yet the occasion when the great Paul Sacher came from Switzerland to the Queen’s Hall  and conducted  the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in a performance of Endless Parade sticks indelibly in the memory. Alexander Gibson and the RSNO played his exquisite Melencolia II in their Musica Nova series. 

And now the piano concerto. Fiona Maddocks makes it sound worth hearing. But shall we ever hear  it?

28 October 2014 

Back down the Reichenbach Falls

“Moriarty”:  the title of Anthony Horowitz’s latest Sherlock Holmes pastiche is, of course, arresting.  The book starts at the point where Conan Doyle originally intended Holmes to meet his death on the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland but was persuaded by admirers to let the great detective survive.

 Doyle, in a later story, explained how this came about. Horowitz in his new book provides a more elaborate outcome which will surely entice all fans.  Was Professor Moriarty - Holmes’s devious and implacale enemy - really his alter ego? The suggestion has been made more than once, quite strikingly in the recent updated BBC film of the original story. 

Read  Horowitz’s new book, which sticks to the original period,  for a fresh and fascinating  look at the last meeting between them and what happened after it. Keep your eye on Inspector Jones.

27 October 2014

Jolly omelettes

Time again for an omelette. A desire to make better domestic ones - my wife’s have already reached a state of perfection - has prompted me to look online at what kinds of pan are  currently available. 

At present I use a smallish Jamie Oliver nonstick pan which cost me £18 - a pretty standard price - and is certainly nice to hold. Its drawback, though I suspect most pans have drawbacks, is that it is prone to tilt when you place it on the cooker and thereby spill its contents everywhere, unless you are quick enough to grab it before it does so. 

Our other omelette pans (we possess a few standard models) are less accident prone, which makes me suspect that the fault with the Oliver one is not necessarily mine. Because I like using it I put up with its its quirks, but know that the day is coming when I buy another. 

That’s  what you do with omelette pans unless you are completely satisfied, as Elizabeth David was,  with what you have. Since my wife can make good omelettes in all the pans we have, maybe I am just being fussy and cackhanded. 

Glancing at Amazon’s unending pictorial list, I notice that the dearest comes from Le Creuset and is a heavy duty model costing £68 with a nice blue exterior. No doubt it makes superb omelettes if it does not fall on your foot, but I don’t think I can afford it at the moment, nor do I specially want it.

There are also various gadgety pans, one of which transforms itself into a poached egg pan - nice if it works - but a temptation I think I can resist. There is an oblong Japanese pan with a lid, which perhaps folds your omelettes for you, though I would have my suspicions about the result.

Perhaps just another simple Tefal is the answer, and surely preferable to a microwave omelette pan - or am I being fussy again? - costing £4.99, “only fourteen left in stock.”   I’ll let you know.

25 October 2014 

This week's wine: White Burgundy

Lidl - like Aldi - is a supermarket whose wine shelves are invariably worth a look. Though their display bins can be confusing - with  bottles and prices too often different from those listed up above - they are worth perseverance, especially as some good wines turn out to be correctly displayed at surprisingly low prices.

 One of these, a pale pink Cotes de Provence at £5.99, I have already recommended.  Another, which forms part of a sales promotion called Wines from 16 October, is a white burgundy which lives up to expectations. This  2013 Domaine de Rochebin, at only £6.99, is certainly a find, not a great wine - how could it be at such a price? - but less edgy than  many a basic Macon,  a touch edgy but a useful aperitif, or fish wine, and all the better for being a genuine bargain.

Since not all branches of Lidl carry exactly the same stock, you may have to shop around. But the question, as usual, is whether to go to another shop -  not  necessarily a Lidl - and  pay a bit more for something better.

 Lidl itself, you should note, sells a top-class Chablis for £12, which is a good price for a wine of that quality.
23 October 2014

Runnicles is to depart

The news that Donald Runnicles is to resign as chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in  2016 is alarming but hardly surprising.

By then - indeed by 2015  -  BBC Radio Three will have a new administrator whose task is expected to include orchestral cutbacks of various sorts. Since the BBC SSO has always been in the firing line for such things - in the 1970s it was faced, not for the first time, with disbandment - the question is bound to be asked: is the old threat about to surface again?

It was on that occasion in the seventies that Hans Keller, the BBC’s resident musical pundit, accused me of being a “sinister” critic. Considering how sinister he could be himself, this seemed a bit rich. But when a fine orchestra - much finer now than it was then - stands in danger, we need to give it all our support.

Maybe the danger will pass, but we must be watchful. The closing concert of this year’s Edinburgh Festival, in which Ilan Volkov conducted the BBC SSO in an exhilarating performance of Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass, stood out as something very special.  Even if no more than the orchestra’s repertoire is likely to be interfered with, it is more than enough.

Tomorrow (Thursday) in Glasgow, Runnicles himself is conducting what promises to be a sensational semi-staging  of Berg’s Wozzeck with the BBC SSO at the City Hall. The last time this twentieth-century masterpieces was performed in Scotland was by Scottish Opera more than thirty years ago.

And what is Scottish Opera doing at the moment?  (read Richard Morrison’s piece in The Times this week). The BBC SSO, now in top form, requires our backing. The forthcoming departure of Donald Runnicles can only be regarded as ominous.
22 October 2014

Transplanted tributes

High Heels and Horse Hair, the young violin and cello duo who brought their skills to Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden on Saturday, are bringing them back in the spring to the Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh, for a repeat of their picturesquely devised programme entitled Transplanted.

Though the repertoire for violin and cello can hardly be called vast, Alice Rickards and Sonia Cromarty have been transforming it with the eighteenth-century Scottish composer James Oswald as their inspiration. Using his compendium of 96 Airs for the Seasons, each of them depicting a different plant or flower, as their starting point, they invited eight present-day Scottish composers -  David Fennessy, Martin Kershaw, Stuart MacRae, Edward Maguire, Chris Stout, Hanna Tuulikki, David Ward, and the gifted Judith Weir (now successor to Peter Maxwell Davies as Master of the Queen’s Music)  to do likewise by producing miniature musical depictions of flowers and plants of their own choice. The only condition has been that each piece be confined to a single sheet of paper, of admittedly flexible size.

First to hear the resultant programme was an audience at the Threave Garden Visitor Centre at Castle Douglas on October 10, with Greenbank Gardens, Glasgow, and the lecture hall at Edinburgh’s Botanic Garden to follow. Birnam Arts Centre and Ardkinglas House, Argyll, will be visited later this month. with Huntly and Newtonmore in November.
20 October 2014

This week's wine: Pinot Grigio

Pinot Grigio can be an attraction - or a deterrent - depending on which of the countless versions of it you come upon. Buying it by the (usually large) glass in a wine bar - or by the bottle in a mixed case from a wine suppier - can be two ways of getting your hands on something unpalatable. By the glass, unless you know your Pinots,  it tends to be considerably overpriced. In a mixed case, not so very differently perhaps, it seems  too often like a worthless add-on to the rest of what you have bought.

But as a restaurant house wine from Valvona & Crolla, or in what used to be Centro Tre in George Street, it is a safe buy because these places  themselves buy from safe producers, invariably in northern Italy, though the grape - and the wine -is spreading like an epidemic to other Italian regions.

Indeed my latest find - which comes from a consistently interesting supplier, Naked Wines of Norfolk - is not Italian at all, but Australian.

It is the 2013 vintage of a wine unappealingly (or perhaps wittily) named Heresy Pinot Grigio, and it comes from the SW Australian producer Kevin McArthy, whose family have been making it for quarter of a century.

It is clean, bright, and crisp, not by Italian standards an immediately recognisable Pinot, but a pleasing aperitif and good with all  the dishes, including pizza, that Pinot traditionally accompanies.

At £7.99 to Naked Wine customers, coyly identified as Angels, it is worth sampling, as also is the northern Italian Vivolo Pinot Grigio, costing a pound less. Also  from Naked Wines, and undeniably mass produced, it is something I have gone back to more than once and have not quite tired of yet.
17 October 2014

The Carmen caper

The  Western Australian dispute over the banning of a planned production of Bizet’s Carmen because Act One of the opera (composed in 1875) is staged in a cigarette factory - see previous blogs - has been heating up.

According to reports, the Western Australian government has insisted that Australia’s “Healthway”  health promotion agency - which was  responsible for financing the cancellation of the production -  must withdraw its bribe, which has been causing an international outcry. The performances, it has been decreed, must be allowed to go ahead, even though the state opera company, it seems, was perfectly happy to accept the cash to withdraw them.

The health organisation has agreed to back down, even although it is continuing to claim that the performances could be a bad influence on people’s smoking habits, and - at least for the moment - the opera company has said it is happy to restore Carmen, widely considered the most popular opera ever written, to its schedule.

Meanwhile operatic plans for the Edinburgh Festival - where one of the greatest and costliest productions of Carmen was staged at the King’s Theatre in 1977 with Teresa Berganza and Placido Domingo in the leading roles and Claudio Abbado as conductor - are evidently proceeding smoothly with news of Ivan Fischer’s revolutionary Budapest staging, or semi-staging, of  The Marriage of Figaro, a work whose success in the 1780s was also endangered politically, though perhaps for less trivial reasons.
15 October 2014

So it's a sponsorship deal

The banning of Bizet’s Carmen in Western Australia because its opening act is set in a cigarette factory and could thus be considered to encourage smoking - already commented on in this blog - is apparently to continue for two years. According to reports, what lies behind it is a sponsorship deal.

But what kind of sponsorship deal?  It would be interesting to know.   If the production displayed smokers furiously puffing on cigarettes, demands to modify it might be understandable, if not necessarily excusable. But in Carmen nobody actually needs to smoke at all.

If Scottish Opera announced a new production of Carmen, would anyone try to block it, other than for financial reasons? The best response so far has come from Australia’s prime minister, who has declared that all opera is “an exaggeration.”
14 October 2014

The editors in my life (16)

The celebrities - the genuine ones - whom I interviewed for The Scotsman during my Fleet Street years were a matter my editor Alastair Dunnett left largely to me. If there was someone he specially wanted me to interview - such as Lord Harewood during his Edinburgh Festival period - it was invariably someone I myself greatly desired to meet.

Nobody was forced on me, as happened to my chagrin with at least one of Dunnett’s successors.  So long as my own  choice of subject seemed relevant and sufficiently interesting to an editor, Dunnett was happy to print whatever I produced for him.

Only once do I remember him drawing the line at one of my suggestions.  He was searching for something in his briefcase when, on my way home, I dropped in on him in his room - by then I had moved permanently  from London to the paper’s main office on the North Bridge  in Edinburgh - but he seemed pleased to chat for a bit about this and that - “Ah Conrad, how is culture?” was ever his favourite opening gambit. So I promptly  raised the topic that was concerning me.

Stravinsky, I said, was coming to London to conduct his latest work, a cantata about Abraham and Isaac.  My plan was to arrange an interview and review the performance at the Royal Festival Hall. Dunnett’s eyes gleamed.  We talked  amiably about the possibilities of such an article. Stravinsky, he said, was among the greatest of musicians, now clearly in his  last years. There was much to be written about him. What a subject it would be.  Then he said no.

Suddenly London seemed a very long way away. “Let’s do it another time,” he proposed. “We’ll just ask Grier to review the performance  and forget about an interview for the moment.” The subject was closed.

Christopher Grier, my Edinburgh predecessor, was now operating freelance in London. He did not do interviews but was a willing reviewer. Had I still been working in London myself, there would, I felt sure, have been no problem. But now that I was  based in Edinburgh, things seemed suddenly  to have become a matter of money and geography.

Perhaps, though he did not say so, the paper was undergoing a small financial crisis I did not know about. The Edinburgh Festival, always an expensive time for The Scotsman, was only just over. Stravinsky, and a work perhaps not wholly enticingly entitled Abraham and Isaac, could wait. It was a simple sacrifice.

Nevertheless I was dumbfounded. So Dunnett, as I discovered, could be obstinate about music when he felt like it. I had learned my little lesson.  Instead of meeting Stravinsky, I was back to hearing the Eric Roberts String Orchestra playing Telemann concertos in the YMCA Hall, one of my regular Scottish chores.

This was not something I had to consider in my London days, though it was no great hardship. In London there were also chores, such as the periodic Sunday duty, when you had the office to yourself but  could be called out to deal with all manner of unwelcome events if they happened to occur.  

Even my weekly interview. though it had established itself as a rite, was something that could go wrong, as it occasionally did. But if it happened to flop, it was for a specific reason - usually because of an unexpectedly  boring or speechless interviewee whose words had to be manipulated, without departing from the truth, if they were to come alive on the page.

Such a person turned out to be the Scottish-born  actor Ian Bannen, an irksomely unforthcoming member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, who had just been appearing with Vanessa Redgrave in As You  Like It. I liked his performance and we met for a drink in a pub where it turned out that he had little to tell me. He was a quiet man. Then we had some supper, which took us no farther. Dunnett’s advice - if I had known him better at the time - would have been to be wary, and not let the experience cost me more than I needed to pay. His private view, as I was later to discover, was that most interviewees were happy to discuss themselves freely.  Finally, I dropped  Bannen off from a taxi at the end of an evening that had left my notebook ominously devoid of comments.

Yet Bannen had seemed the nicest of  men, as well as a good actor. Years later, when he appeared on TV in Dr Finlay’s Casebook, he was a great success.

Then there was the edgy  Nicol Williamson, a great, raucous actor, much encouraged by Kenneth Tynan, whom I had seen several times and greatly admired. Again we met in a pub - he was a hearty drinker - and he came home for something to eat and further conversation.

In later years, in America, he would build a big reputation. But he had spent his prentice period with the Dundee Rep and had plenty to say - and, it transpired, to sing. Spotting my grand piano, he sat down at the keyboard and spent the rest of the evening performing pop songs and music hall ditties. It was all very merry  and I got my article.

But some of my interviews, though  they got safely into print, were written at a time when there were no computers in which to store them. Newspaper cuttings and scribbled notes can all too easily vanish, as many of mine did as I moved from one abode to another.

Memories faded, even of Alec Guinness discoursing to me about his career over perfectly served  Dover sole and glasses of Chablis at Prunier’s. Ronald Mavor, the paper’s Edinburgh-based senior  drama critic, complained to Dunnett about the resultant profile of Guinness  at a time when Edinburgh seriously lacked good restaurants. What, he asked the editor, would he himself be expected to do in the same circumstances? Interview somebody over a pie and beans in a Leith Walk cafe?  Dunnett, looking into Mavor’s complaint, was pleased to learn that Guinness had paid the bill.

But if I can no longer recall precisely what Sir Adrian Boult, Albert Finney, and Keith Waterhouse actually said on the occasions I met them, I remember the experiences vividly.

Ronald Duncan, gaunt librettist of Britten’s Rape of Lucretia, chain smoked and seemed a very surly, unpleasant person. CP Snow, recovering from eye surgery with his wife Pamela Hansford Johnson seated  beside his bed, spoke of his desire to ban corporal punishment in Scottish schools.

AS Neill, benign Scottish founder of the famously liberal  Summerhill School at Leiston, near Aldeburgh, was sheer pleasure to talk to and allowed me to attend the school’s parliament, a major event at the end of each week.

Benjamin Britten,  with his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, discussed the acoustics of the hall at Haddo House in Aberdeenshire, where they were about to appear, comparing it with the Jubilee Hall in Aldeburgh, where many Britten premieres took place.

Ivor Cutler, who had once taught at Summerhill, spoke of his droll Scottish accent, and whether or not it was genuine, while stretched out on a sofa in his dressing-room  before a performance of Professor Bruce Lacey’s Evening of British Rubbish at the Royal Court Theatre.

 Albert Finney - now, what was it he said while rehearsing a scene in the film Night Must Fall where he continually had to sit up in bed and then lie down again?   Or what did Anne Bancroft  say to me while filming the role of the mother of eight children in Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater? James Mason, who stood brooding nearby, made no comment.

Maurizio Pollini, a few days later, expressed nothing but perturbation at the thought of performing a long Schubert piano sonata at the Royal Festival Hall.  William Walton puffed placidly on his pipe while being softly insulting about fellow composers.

Annie Ross, in her Shaftesbury Avenue dressing room, sleepily demonstrated  how to scat-sing Leonard Bernstein’s I Feel Pretty from West Side Story in quadruple (instead of triple) time.
Stanley Baxter, at his home in north London, showed me how to walk downstairs like Fred Astaire.  Rosalyn Tureck, tensed up for a forthcoming Bach recital, was painfully rude to her secretary while encouraging me to scoff a solitary lunch off a trolley in her suite at Claridge’s.

Carlo Maria Giulini shed gentle tears while discussing the beauty of Monteverdi’s madrigals  with me over breakfast a the Connaught Hotel (1 Carlos Place) where he always stayed.  Herbert von Karajan caricatured Otto Klemperer embarrassingly badly at the Royal Festival Hall.

Hans Keller, the BBC’s fearsome musical authority nicknamed Hans Killer by Private Eye, told me  in his sombre German voice that he had found one of my recent articles “rather  sinister.”  Norbert Brainin, leader of the Amadeus Quartet, confessed without evident concern that he had left his priceless violin on the floor of a corridor before meeting me for our interview (he got it back).

Thus did I pass my time in London. Perhaps  I gave it up  too soon. But Edinburgh was calling me, and big changes lay ahead.
12 October 2014                                                                                                                          

The editors in my life (15)

The word reached the London office of The Scotsman a month before the start of the1963 Edinburgh Festival. Alastair Dunnett, the editor, would like me to write a profile of someone appearing at the festival that year. The choice was mine, he said, but I was to let him know whom I had chosen.

It was not a difficult task. The 1960s were the time in festival history of Lord Harewood’s specially featured composers. He had already had Shostakovich and now Michael Tippett was to be represented by a selection of works, along with something specially written for the occasion.

Tippett, enthusiastically responding, said he would supply a Concerto for Orchestra. It was agreed that Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra would perform it, and I decided to find out if the composer might be willing to discuss the new score with me.

Though I had never met him before, I knew him to be amiable and a good talker.  I eagerly contacted him. He said he would be happy to see me. The only snag was that he lived rather inaccessibly in the Cotswolds. Could I find my way there? He would meet me at the station and cook us some lunch.

All went well. He was living at the time in a roomy country cottage on the edge of an estate designed in the eighteenth century by the great Capability Brown. While he prepared salad in the kitchen, he spoke in detail  of his new concerto. He had never, he said,  composed anything quite like it before. It would be a somewhat dotty work, employing clusters of instruments and highlighting them in sharp colours. He made it sound fun but it would also quite clearly have its serious side.

Tall and willowy, and already short-sighted, he led me through to the piano and played a number of key passages for my benefit. I soon discovered that “dotty” and “sharp” were key words in his vocabulary at the time, though they seemed no longer to be a number of years later when I interviewed him at the Sheraton Hotel in Edinburgh, where he was staying before conducting a programme of his music with the Scottish National Orchestra at the Usher Hall.

Meanwhile lunch was about to be served and we continued our conversation eating the rustic salad he had prepared and sipping a cool white wine.

Tippett was a sociable host. He had been to Edinburgh in the past but had bad memories of it because he had spent some of his unhappiest schooldays there.

Unaware of this, I asked him about it and he said it was not something he  ever discussed. But in the end, since I, too, had been schooled -  no more happily - in Edinburgh, he spoke out, though only on condition that I did not name his school in my article. I kept his secret, though in the end, some years later, he decided that the time had come to disclose its name. It was Fettes College.

Strolling after lunch across Capability Brown’s lovely landscape, he told me more - of how he had been beaten, abused, made  constantly miserable, and in the end had fled home to his parents in the south of England. Thereafter  he was sent to a more congenial school where he was immediately happier.

More famous, of course, was the fact that he was a pacifist during the Second World War and suffered imprisonment. About this, and about his early musical experiences, he spoke freely. An investigative  book comparing him with Benjamin Britten, also an unhappy schoolboy and wartime pacifist, would make enthralling reading, but that is something that has yet to come.

The afternoon progressed. After tea, he spoke  of A Child of Our Time, his pacifist oratorio employing Black soul music in place of Bachian choruses, a performance of which, by Alexander Gibson and the Scottish National Orchestra, would open the 1966 Edinburgh Festival. Gibson was soon to become one of Tippett’s champions. Meanwhile, with Alastair Dunnett’s approval, it was agreed that I would mention Tippett’s schooldays in my profile of him, without saying where they took place.

The afternoon was almost over but one subject remained. Had I ever been to Bath, the historic town closest to where he lived? No I hadn’t, I confessed. Then I must see it, he said, hopping into his car and driving me round its sights before putting me on the London train with my scribbled notes about my day with a great composer.
10 October 2014