The Mighty MacDonalds

The first of the musical Malcolm MacDonalds to win my attention was born in Bedford in 1916, taught at the Royal College of Music in London, specialised in wind instruments (for which he composed many works) and was the wittiest of contributos to The Gramophone magazine. The second Malcolm MacDonald, born in Nairn in 1948 and educated at Edinburgh’s Royal High School, was for much of his life a copious, greatly gifted musical biographer, with a broadcasting and journalistic equivalent called Calum MacDonald, contributor to the BBC’s Music Magazine and other programmes. 

The second Malcolm MacDonald died at the age of 66 this week in Gloucestershire, where he had lived after studying at Downing College, Cambridge, and working in London.   Death came on the same day to Calum MacDonald, for they were one and the same person. The nom de plume had been adopted to spread his huge load of musical activities and, it is said, to help to avoid confusion with the first Malcolm MacDonald, also a frequent broadcaster.

I never met either of the Malcolms, though both wrote programme notes for the Edinburgh Festival and overlapped in other ways. But the second felt like a friend because of his outstanding, grippingly written, 500-page biography of Brahms, one of the best in the long-established Master Musician series, which I consulted frequently and relied upon for much of my Btahmsian information. 

He wrote other books as well, of course, including a fine biography of Schoenberg, sadly shorter than his biography of Brahms, and a study of the Scottish composer Ronald Stevenson - someone else upon whom the word copious could be bestowed - as well as scrpulously assembled catalogues of the works of Shostakovich and Dallapiccola. On the other hand, the Ian MacDonald who wrote the admirable 1990 biography of Shostakovich was, so far as I know, someone else (though both of them were born in the same year) and the same can certainly be said for the existence pf my old friend Hugh Macdonald, who was professor of music at Glasgow University in the 1980s, specialised in French composers and edited Berlioz’s letters and the invaluable New Berlioz Edition.

 

Not all the second Malcom MacDonald’s books were up my street.  His mighty three-volume study of Havergal Brian’s 32 symphonies (21 of which were written after the composer reached the age of 80 and occupied him until he was 92). Though Brian’s vast, and vastly orchestrated, Gothic Symphony (No 1) - a sort of English Mahler  8 - achieved notoriety, I must confess that it was not for me, any more than is the music of the Scottish composer and microtonalist John Foulds (1880-1939), the subject of another MacDonald biography and the composer of a World Requiem performed annually under the auspices of the British Legion at the Royal Albert Hall during the aftermath of the First World War.  

MacDonald’s musical energy - amid much else he edited Tempo, the famous modern-music magazine  - was nevertheless amazing. I am sorry our paths never crossed.

31 May 2014

  

Maazel beats a retreat

At the age of 83, the irrepressible Lorin Maazel, the maestro who once in London conducted all nine Beethoven symphonies in a single sweep,  has had to withdraw from a major concert series with the Berlin Philharmonic next week. Famed for his willingness - indeed eagerness - to replace other star conductors when they cancel an engagement, it’s Maazel himself, reputedly as the result of an accident, who has had to drop out this time.

A familiar figure at the Edinbugh Festival, he was once in the middle of  conducting Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra at the Usher Hall when a viola player collapsed, but the performance proceeded without pause. While neighbouring players eased their ailing colleague out of his seat and carried him from the platform, Maazel went on conducting as if nothing had happened, thereby enthralling the music critic of the Scottish Daily Express who, at the time, was also its Edinburgh editor, Gilbert Cole. Gilbert took a close personal interest in the story, reporting, I remember, on its outcome (which turned out to be happy) rather than on the quality of the performance.

Among world-class conductors, Maazel has never been a critics’ favourite, especially when he has laid down his baton, which at one time he sometimes did,  in order to play a violin concerto as an interlude in the middle of a concert. Yet, for all his flash, he is someone for whom I have always had a soft spot. His recording of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, the hardest of the cycle to bring off, remains a triumph, exemplary in its sustaining power, precision, and structural control.  

One of the first times I heard him, at the Berlin Festival half a century ago, his concert with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra was a memorable coupling of Berg’s Violin Concerto and Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortileges.  Yehudi Menuhin was soloist in the Berg, a work he had never tackled before, and which he played, I thought, with more beauty of tone than he often brought to Beethoven or Brahms. 

As for the Ravel, with Jane Berbie (the sort of mezzo-soprano whom today’s critics seem inclined to dismiss as dumpy) in exquisite voice as the naughty  child, it had one of the most ravishing performances it has ever been my good fortune to hear.

30 May 2014

Bird in the Apple Tree

If, like me, you love Berg’s Violin Concerto, and if, like me, you recently happened to hear Isabelle Faust’s performance of it in Lucerne in memory of the conductor Claudio Abbado, you will be increasingly aware that every performance it receives is a memory of someone special. 

For Berg himself, the work was a requiem for Manon Gropius, the daughter of the architect Walter Gropius and his wife Alma, who had once been Alma Mahler -  Gustav’s wife - and who had already mourned one daughter, the adored young Maria who had died aged five of a combination of diphtheria and scarlet fever.  Now she was mourning another, who had died aged 18 of polio. Mahler himself, who had tempted providence by composing his heart-rending Kindertotenlieder - Songs on the Death of Children - two years before Maria died, had by then been dead for 24 years, and his place in Viennese musical society was filled by Alban Berg. 

Desiring to compose an instrumental memorial for Manon, Berg invited the American violinist Louis Krasner to play for him, so that he could absorb the sound of Krasner’s violin tone. It was at that point that the history of Berg’s Violin Concerto began, and it’s also the point where Raymond Monelle of Edinburgh University’s music department started his novel about Berg, entitled Bird in the Apple Tree. 

By the time he finished it, Raymond was a septuagenarian, not far from death, and he failed to find a publisher for his book before he died.   As a close friend, he allowed me to read the manuscipt and, as a result, to fall for his  portrayal of Carinthia in young Berg’s lifetime. I thought it a lovely book, with all the musical flair one looks for but seldom finds in a novel,  and I rejoice that it has posthumously found its publisher and can be bought (for a song, as they say) in a Kindle edition. 

Though I wish I could have had a hand in its belated success, it’s Raymond’s daughter Cathy we must thank for making it happen. I remain a devoted reader, now reading it for a second time and taking new pleasure in its picture of the young  composer - most of the action takes place, in flashback, before the concerto was composed -   and of how portions of his life (itself famously tragic) are structured into a novel. 

Raymond received a Scottish Arts Council grant to visit Vienna and research the story.  With its evocation of Austria a century ago, of dim street lights, slow old trains,  rustic jollity and the sunlit countryside, it reminds me at moments of Arthur Schnitzler and the world of La Ronde and Beatrice, which is just what I hoped it might do. 

Raymond at 72 could have developed a new career as a novelist as well as a musicologist, composer, jazz pianist, conductor, lecturer and all the other things he was good at.  It makes me all the prouder to have known him, and to have been given his last piano, his Bosendorfer grand, a Viennese make of instrument famous for its deep warmth of tone, an example of which Berg happened to possess and which is mentioned right at the star of the book.

29 May 2014

The Eighth is Back

So it’s time for Mahler’s Eighth again. When Alexander Gibson and the RSNO opened the 1965 Edinburgh Festival with the big work’s Scottish premiere, and the Edinburgh Festival Chorus was created to sing it, performances were still uncommon - though not so rare in international terms that it needed to be hailed, as it originally was, as the Symphony of a Thousand.  In fact it is a work best kept as a rarity, because it can be dulled by repetition.

Indeed Lord Harewood, in what was his final year as festival director, did his best to persuade people not to call it by its mammoth nickname.  It was, he said, a symphony like any other and not a display of musical gigantism. He was right, of course, as he was about so many musical things, though I thought he had been wrong the previous year when I asked him at a press conference why the festival was not celebrating the hundredth birthday of Richard Strauss and he replied that he didn’t see the point, especially as no other festival was celebrating it either. 

But times change and Strauss’s 150th birthday is certainly not being neglected at this year’s festival.   Even if the temptation to perform the Alpine Symphony in Princes Street Gardens has been resisted, there’s enough of his music at the Usher Hall - Don Juan, Ein Heldenleben, the exquisite Four Last Songs -  to keep Straussians reasonably happy, though it’s a pity that the operas are being cold-shouldered. Having already given us a dud Capriccio and a fine Die Frau ohne Schatten, however, Jonathan Mills perhaps felt disinclined to take further risks.   

As for Mahler’s Eighth, with which the RSNO ends its Edinburgh season on Friday and its Glasgow one on Saturday,  we should bear in mind that Mahler himself was ambivalent about the work’s nickname, pointing out that it did not require a thousand performers even if, at its Munich premiere in 1910, more than a thousand participated.

But to call it his greatest symphony, as people persist in doing, is surely a mistake, because it stands out among the other works as being not really a symphony at all but a species of oratorio, based partly on a vast opening setting of a hymn and partly on the closing scene of Goethe’s Faust, Part Two, requiring eight solo voices in addition to the chorus.  In 1965 the soloists included Heather Harper, Gwyneth Jones, Janet Baker, Vilem Pribyl and Donald Mcintyre, a line-up that will be hard to surpass, though there may be some surprises in store.   

28 May 2014

The Italian Way

In its early years, just after the war, the Edinburgh Festival tended to take its conductors and orchestras as it found them. It was Sir John Barbirolli and Eugene Goossens who first brought us the Berlin Philharmonic, before Herbert von Karajan got his hands on it. Bruno Walter found himself linked with the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra, and Andre Cluytens to the French National Radio Orchestra. 

But, before priorities began to change, the orchestra I really cared about when it came to Edinburgh was the Orchestra Nazionale dell’Accademia di Santa  Cecilia, otherwise known as the Augusteo Orchestra. I was still a schoolboy when it rounded off the 1948 festival with an array of concerts and a display of conudctors that stuck in the mind ever afterwards. It wasn’t, even then, the most famous of orchestras. But with its vast string section crammed on to the Usher Hall  platform and its sumptuously singing tone it was the very voice of Italy.

 Bernardino Molinari ended one programme with Verdi’s sensational but then little-known Sicilian Vespers overture. By the following morning the scarlet-label HMV recording of this, issued to celebrate the occasion,  was a sell out in Jenners, which at the time was Edinburgh’s principal seller of festival tickets. Wilhelm Furtwangler ended another concert with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The great Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli played Beethoven’s Triple Concerto with Gioconda de Vito and Enrico Mainardi, again with Furtwanger conducting.  Vittorio Gui tore into Respighi, and an otgan concerto by Vivaldi, Casella’s Paganiniana, titbits by Tommasini, movements from Pizzetti’s La Pisanella and Purcell’s Fairy Queen, fragments of Ghedini, Martucci and Cherubini, and Veretti’s (not Mendelssohn’s) Italian Symphony  were tossed with a handful of Brahms symphonies into this appetising pot of minestrone which, in the end, fed six whole concerts.

Although, soon afterwards, Rome’s exhilarating orchestra vanished from the festival, it has been back - though not alas in Edinburgh - this month to perform Verdi’s Requiem under its current conductor Antonio Pappano. The old Italian fire, clearly, still burns,  along with a new expertise revealed on a celebratory 100-minute  DVD released in tribute to the event.

So even if you have been unable to hear the players in person, they are passionately on screen with Pappano and other conductors including the affable Yuri Temirkanov and lovely old Georges Pretre who is seen hugging the strains of Ravel’s Bolero in his arms, while tears flow from his eyes. We also - and this is part of the film’s charm -  see the players at home, cooking, tending beehives, growing fruit, making instruments, playing ardent solos up in the Alps and down in forest glades, and being, in general, thoroughly Italian. 

This, you cannot help feeling, is what makes them the players they are. The film, directed by  Angelo Bozzolini and entitled The Italian Character, is well worth its £18 Amazon price-tag.  Buy it, watch it, hear it and you will be enchanted.

27 May 2014

Whatever Happened to James Kennaway?

I have been re-reading, with fresh admiration, James Kennaway’s Tunes of Glory, his first novel, written in 1956, twelve years before he died (reputedly of a heart attack) in a car crash, after which his reputation as one of Scotland’s most gifted writers sank - or so it is claimed - almost without trace. 

Born in Auchterarder, Kennaway was educated at Trinity College, Glenalmond, but moved south to develop his career as a novelist and screen writer.  He was not, he liked to say, a Scottish novelist but a novelist from Scotland. Tunes of Glory, filmed by Ronald Neame and still to be found on DVD as well as in print, remains his most famous book, inspired by the familiar old antagonism between Scotland, in the guise of a drunken army major who has risen through the ranks to become commanding officer of a Highland regiment, and England, personified by a chilly Oxford-educated colonel who is appointed his superior.  In today’s Scotland its plot might sound like a tired old tale, but in fact it retains all its original power and anguish. 

Tension tingles from the start. Jock, the Scotsman, is to be court-martialed for punching an enlisted bagpiper, his daughter’s secret boy-friend . Basil, the new commander, is persuaded not to press charges, but worse is to follow as the story moves towards tragedy.  Kennaway himself served in the Cameron Highlanders. Neame’s film starred Alec Guinness as the aggressively  loud-mouthed major and John  Mills as the nervy, brittle colonel. The setting, with its portrayal of pipers playing tunes by Malcolm Arnold as they paraded through ths snow,  remains strong. 

Writing for The Scotsman’s London office half a century ago, I interviewed Kennaway at his home (in Chelsea if I remember rightly) where he was working on one of Tunes of Glory’s several successors. His study was the friendliest of dens. He seemed the most relaxed of interviewees. But, as things were soon to turn out, relaxation was not what characterised him as he moved through his thirties.  

The triangular relationship that arose between him, his wife, and his fellow novelist John Le Carre seems not, by the sound of things, to have been relaxed.   But it resulted in two novels with autobiographical undertones,  Le Carre’s atypical and seriously underrated The Naive and Sentimental Lover, and Kennaway’s own Some Gorgeous Accident.   It is time we had a chance to get to know his books anew. They deserve by now to be available in an  established, collected edition. 

Their titles, after Tunes of Glory, are Household Ghosts (1961), The Mindbenders (1963), The Bells of Shoreditch (1963), Some Gorgeous Accident (1967), The Cost of Living Like This (1969), and finally the stark little novella, Silence, published four years after his death. If you happen to possess any of these, you are a lucky reader.

26 May 2014

 

Playing for Ben

Last night the strikingly asymmetrical gymnasium of Edinburgh’s Rudolf Steiner School was set aglow  by the ethnic music of Kim Tebble and two fellow members of the Bluebell Cajun Dance Band, who are in growing demand around Scotland.  

Kim, a specialist in the creole music of Louisiana, New Orleans, and the southern Mississippi, plays a small, specially crafted cajun accordion with a single row of buttons. It’s mesmerising in its effect when heard in conjunction with Simon McPherson’s bass guitar and the neat, light drum-kit employed by Jennifer Ewan who, like Kim, sings the French-American songs that are fundamental to their repertoire. 

Though dancing, as the group’s name implies, is encouraged, people on this occasion seemed content to sit and listen, and to eat the vast supper supplied by my son-in-law, Ian Wilson, who created Susie’s Wholefood Diner near the McEwanHall, and who now serves stand-up wholefood dishes from his mobile trailer which visits the George Square end of the Meadows three or more times a week. Shiny cooked aubergines, spread through a variety of dishes, were the evening’s pieces de resistance. 

For me it was a family occasion, because 250 of us were there to celebrate the success of a campaign on behalf of my sixteen-year-old grandson, Ben, who for some years has suffered frequent epileptic seizures for which treament - of a sort not yet employed in Britain - is available in a Swiss clinic in the town of Solothurn, near Basel. Because the treatment is inevitably costly, Ian and Susie, my eldest daughter, set up a website to raise funds. The money flowed in and Ben will receive his treatment in the autumn.

So Saturday was a celebration of the fact that this is to happen, and a thank-you from Ian and Susie to all those who have contributed to making the impossible possible.  I am happy to say that the ethnic strains of the Bluebell Cajun Dance Band formed a special exhilarating contribution to the event, which in addition included an auction of artwork by Quentin Blake, Nick Sharrat and Ben himself, plus a bench designed by a local German craftsman, Berndt, of Wild Wood, 43 Comiston Road.

24 May 2014

Perth and the future

Classical music dwindled at the Perth Festival this year. The reduction of English Touring Opera’s repertoire to a single performance of a single opera was not a good omen. The explanation, of course, was that the charming  little Perth Theatre is being refurbished and is closed for three years. Meanwhile the opportunity is being taken to transfer operatic performances to the fine modern Perth Concert Hall which, with the touch of a button, is convertible into a beautifully-scaled opera house complete with orchestra pit.

 A colleague who attended English Touring Opera’s solitary performance of The Magic Flute the other night tells me it was a triumph, acoustically radiant and visually impressive, with adirable balances between voices and orchestra. The fact that it attracted an audience of 1100 people -  very high by the varying standards of the new hall - spoke well for the building’s possibilities as a part-time opera house. But will Perth seize its chance to develop these once Perth Theatre has reopened? Placed in the very heart of Scotland, the city would be perfectly equipped to present opera in large-scale and small-scale formats. 

In my little book on the Perth Festival, I have already proposed - two years ago -  the idea of performing Wagner in the new concert hall. Can you imagine what a country like Germany would do with an opportunity such as this?  Think of how Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic have recently turned the spa town of Baden-Baden (population 52,000) into a place for opera.  Perth (population 44,000). with a bit of initiative, could become one of the arts centres of the new Scotland.

 As my colleague asks, why does Scottish Opera seem not to have twigged?  So much looked possible half a century ago, before the promising  relationship between the young Glasgow company and Perth hit the buffers.  But a new start could still be made. Send me an email at wilson.conrad@ymail.com and say what you think. 

24 May 2014

Rosenkavalier goes around

If you can’t afford to see it in Sussex, and can’t wait to see it on video, there’s one more way of bringing you and the new Glyndebourne Rosenkavalier together.  A  live performance conducted by the company’s new music director, Robin Ticciati,  is being streamed to cinemas in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Dundee on 8 June at 4.30, as well as to nearly 90 places in England and Wales.  Operatic streaming is becoming one of the best ways of gaining access to major new productions you would otherwise miss, and the fine detail of Richard Jones’s stagecraft here is, by most accounts, something very special. Even Sigmund Freud, complete with couch, makes an appearance. 

 In Scotland, Jones is remembered for his immature but exuberant Cosi fan tutte for Scottish Opera in which, at the end, everyone danced round a miniature Mount Vesuvius, and for his unfinished, witty strip-cartoon version of Wagner’s Ring. If you want to keep up with his progress, here is a way to do it.

23 May 2014

Sight or sound?

When Rita Hunter  sang Norma at the New York Metropolitan, you knew she was there.  Nicknamed Enorma,  in the same way as Joan Sutherland was La Stupenda,  she was a star in the grand manner (I remember her performance because I was there) and a classic example of what used to be called a fat soprano resplendently singing her way to her death scene. As she said herself, you can’t do Gotterdammerung on a slice of toast.

 It’s harder, however, to get away with such things today.   Tara Erraught is not built on Rita Hunter’s lines - far from it - but the way she looks in the role of Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier at Glyndebourne has clearly irritated some of London’s leading music critics, and their response to her has caused an uproar.

Yet it all boils down to the familiar old grumble about whether a singer should look the part or,  depending on her vocal ability, can be forgiven for not doing so. Not having seen her portrayal, I cannot comment on her qualities, good or bad, in the role of Richard Strauss’s adolescent boy who, as the curtain rises, is in love with a married woman but who, in Act Two, transfers his attention to someone younger in order to rescue her from a boorish old aristocratic who has been given permission to marry her.

Strauss’s outsize opera, with its outsize cast, provides scope for many interpretations, and an Octavian who is smaller than the Sophie with whom he has fallen protectively in love, and smaller also than his earlier beloved, is not necessarily one of Strauss’s grotesques or an example of poor casting.  She’s just a priggish boy, we need to remember, who is central to the action of an opera filled with unlikeable people, which Joseph Kerman, that most abrasive of critics, once summed up as being no more than a fifty-cent valentine.  Octavian is certainly not at all the nicest person on stage and, with his flashy silver rose and his gleaming white suit, he can be played in different ways.  So perhaps we should wait until the production is transferred to video or TV before we decide if  we find it convincing.

But the televising of major productions, or their transformation to DVD (which is the only way most of us can now afford to see them),  is surely partly responsible for what has come to create the demand for good looks.  In Wagner’s time, singers looked like battleaxes. It was their lung-power that counted. Even today a robust and stately Isolde and a heavyweight Tristan tend to win acceptance if they possess good voices. When Luisa Bosabalian sang Mimi in La Boheme for Scottish Opera in the 1960s, nobody complained in writing that she looked dumpy, which she certainly did. The point was that she sounded lovely enough to make you weep at her death scene. 

On the other hand the first Mimi I ever saw - the adorable Una Hale with the Carl Rosa company - looked so marvellous that I became an instant adolescent opera buff.  The art of video, with all its close-ups, now tries to make most performances look like that.  Opera today is expected to look as well as sound superb, as in David McVicar’s ravishing Julius Caesar at Glyndebourne, one of the glories of our time.

When the distinguished American dramatic soprano Deborah Voigt was dismissed by Covent Garden in 2004 because the director Christof Loy decided she was too stout  for the black cocktail dress he wanted her to wear in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, it marked a turning point in British operatic history.  The danger signals were by then apparent. Had a cocktail dress become more important than an outstanding singer? But once she had shed the required amount of weight she was taken back into the production, which suggested that singers sometimes accept that they may have lessons to learn. 

But since Glyndebourne has not dismissed its Octavian for being smaller or chubbier (or too “stocky,”  as one critic put it, which could actually be a plus point)  than its Sophie, Tara Erraught must be assumed to be doing something right. I look forward to seeing her Octavian before long on video, or hearing it from the BBC Proms - in which she may prove aurally sensational - on 22 July.

22 May 2014

 

Coffee time

Coffee in Edinburgh, like everywhere else in Britain, is a question of luck. Where to go for the cup that delights? The failure rate is high. Read a local cafe guide and you will find that the places it recommends can be as disappointing as those it condemns.

How to describe the perfect cup? In terms of volume, it should be of modest size, which puts most of Britain’s cafe chains, with their double espressos (which I would term quadruple) and huge cappuccinos straight into my personal jeopardy. The very sight of them is a deterrent.  Is it only the Italians who know know that an espresso, as its name implies, should be tiny? 

Other factors, before you think about the taste, are the shape and look and feel of the cup, which should be an aesthetic pleasure before you raise it to your lips. I don’t need to write about this. You should know it for yourself. 

Don’t be ashamed to add sugar.The Italians certainly do it.  The foam on your cappuccino, or more discreetly on your flat white,  should be of the finest texture. The floral patterns that are nowadays added are things I personally can live without, though they are nice to see because they tend to guarantee a quality coffee. 

But if the accompanying pastries and  cakes are up to scratch, that’s important also.  The fashionable English essayist and DH Lawrence authority, Geoff Dyer, in more than one of his books describes his constant search for the perfect coffee/pastry combination which, in a city he does not already know, keeps him trudging onwards until he finds it. Since Dyer has got the whole thing right, read him and see for yourself.

As for the actual coffee, I shall not try to describe it in detail.  You know, or should do, how it should taste, how utterly fresh it must be - which also means not thin or murky or tepid,  and never mouth-puckeringly bitter. Espresso machines are a mixed blessing in these respects because, for all their shiny good looks, they are so often abused.

 Avoid coffee in restaurants, which is only common sense because it is inevitably overpriced and seldom made with the devotion it needs (Centro Tre in George Street, Edinburgh, is an exception).  Ask for the bill before accepting coffee, and drink your own at home.  At the moment, as a constant experimenter, I employ an AeroPress, a simple but clever non-electric device which you can find on the internet and which makes, in my experience, unfailingly good coffee so long as you use it right - though the pressure aspect demands a strong arm.

Otherwise a good French press, or cafetiere as it used to be called, should serve you well - some are more intricate than others - or else the sort of espresso pot (steel or aluminium) which you put on the gas and which  produces better coffee than many a small domestic espresso nachine. But all things are relative. The kind of coffee you buy, its freshness and what you do with it, are what matter in the end.

But to return to where I began, with Edinburgh cafes. The two I currently like most are both in Bruntsfield, an arrondissement for coffee drinkers.  One is French, La Barantine at 202 Bruntsfield Place, as cramped as its tiniest Parisian equivalent, serving its own excellent soup, crunchy French bread and delectabe French cakes. The other is German, Falko at 185 Bruntsfield Place across the road. A long, narrow room and counter, it’s twee in the nicest sort of way, with deftly served lunches,  interesting soups, home-made ice-cream and splendid German cakes and bread. Project Coffee at 196 Bruntsfield Place, though in appearance more industrial, rightly buzzes with life and is likewise worth trying.  The coffee, in each case, is what it should be.

21 May 2014

Time for music?

I am reading with enthusiasm the Kindle edition of John Sutherland’s How To Be Well Read: A Guide to 500 Great Novels and a Handful of Literary Curiosities. In book form its 516 pages would be a slab best consulted on the kitchen table but the electronic version of this timely new book can be carried in the pocket, ready for browsing wherever you happen to be. 

Sutherland is a witty, stimulating, informative and interesting essayist (read him on Anna Karenina or Great Expectations) whose encyclopedia-style output already includes his invaluable Lives of the Novelists, delivered  in chronological order and published three years ago. In this latest pantheon,  the novels are treated alphabetically, which makes the constant jumps in time an arresting, surprising, even startling experience, like listening to a well-filled iPod Shuffle (where you might find Petrushka suddenly juxtaposed with Elvis Costello) or reading  David Thomson’s alphabetical study of 1000 films, entitled Have You Seen?.   In each case the author’s choices are not “the best,” or “the greatest,” or even “my favourite.” Nor are they the countless things to do “before you die.”  You don’t need to do them at all, but Sutherland certainly helps you to know whether you should or not.  His purpose is different, and guided partly, it would seem, by his moods of the moment. 

 Sutherland, a professor who is no dry academic but by no means unchallenging, puts it this way:  “literature is a library, not a curriculum or a canon.” His book is addressed to the common reader. Anything goes, or appears to.  But, though it starts with DH Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod and Anthony Burgess’s Abba Abba (just as David Thomson starts with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and Ace in the Hole), it’s no trivial pursuit.  Buddenbrooks is there, complete with its endless array of Lubeck furniture.  So is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The aim of the book, as I see it, is not only to inform but to give you a good time. 

A similar music book is overdue, though Paul Griffiths’s New Penguin Dictionary of Music, with its sharp modern assessments of established composers, and plenty of mentions of key modern works, makes a good start.

20 May 2014 

Seizing the chance

There was a time when Scottish Opera travelled deep into England. Walter Weller conducted Fidelio in Newcastle, whose Theatre Royal the company loved to visit. Gary Bertini took The Magic Flute to Manchester. Thomas Wilson’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner had its premiere at the York Festival. Liverpool was not omitted.  Tristan and Isolde and its French obverse  Prlleas and Melisande went side by side in London.

Times have changed. Opera North, originally an offshoot of English National Opera, now operates independently with Leeds as its base. There was once talk of merging it with Scottish Opera but the plan, if it really existed, fell through. And though the English company does many interesting things, and has, in Richard Farnes,  one of the best opera conductors in Britain, its 2014-15 season looks no more adventurous than Scottish Opera’s. The Marriage of Figaro, La Traviata, The Coronation of Poppea and Gianni Schicchi (in a double-bill with a revival of La Vida Breve) are the new productions, along with revivals of Carousel and The Bartered Bride and concert-hall performances of The Flying Dutchman. It’s a little - not a lot - more than what Scottish Opera is offering, but nothing to persuade us that we are less well off in Scotland, where Janacek’s Jenufa is a highlight of the Scottish Opera season.  

And what of Welsh National Opera, Scottish Opera’s other regional rival, if such a word as regional  dare be used today? Thanks to the ever-adventurous presence of David Pountney (Scottish Opera’s long-lost director of productions) as artistic director, the season is being split into three parts, each with its own title.  First to arrive is “Liberty or Death,”  constructed out of William Tell, Moses in Egypt, and Carmen. Then there is “Spellbound,” with The Magic Flute, Hansel and Gretel, and a newly devised scenic extravaganza called Chorus! created by Pountney himself. Finally comes  “A Terrible Innocence,” which sidesteps The Turn of the Screw to give us Pelleas and Melisande, The Magic Flute (again) and an  operatic version of Peter Pan by the Cornish composer Richard Ayres.

  In scale the Welsh season is similar to those of the other companies. But its ambitions look higher,  its excitements bolder, its risks greater.   Coming from a company which has always made an asset of its chorus, its event of that title certainly suggests itself to be  a comment on Scottish Opera, which a few years ago famously sacked its chorus. New productions of two of Rossini’s grandest operas also provide choral scope, and a new Pelleas is always something to look forward to, even if it happens to come off the rails. The advantages of co-productions - there are several of these - are sensationally embraced. 

Wales, in other words, is seizing its chances. It would be nice if Scotland is proved to be doing so, too.

19 May 2014 

Scottish Opera's Progress

Gradually, very gradually, Scottish Opera is getting back to speed, even if it has yet to find a new music director. But with a small, very small, increase in its full-scale productions - bringing the total next season to five - things are looking a shade brighter, as last week’s announcement confirms.  Yet look closely and you will see that only two of these new productions seem to be exclusively Scottish Opera’s. 

These are the new versions of James MacMillan’s Ines de Castro, to be conducted by the composer himself with Olivia Fuchs as director,  and Gluck’s Orfeo with Ashley Page, formerly of Scottish Ballet, as director. Since neither work is new to the company’s repertoire - in fact a stronger case could perhaps be made for a new production of Thomas Wilson’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner or one of the other Scottish works commissioned in more prosperous times -  speed is not necessarily what, on second thoughts, Scottish Opera is getting back to. Why, for instance, is it not staging MacMillan’s more recent opera, The Sacrifice? Is it because the work was composed, highly successfully, for Wales, and has already been performed there?   

Who knows exactly what the company’s ambitions, and attitudes, now really are? Long ago they were perfectly clear and admirable. The last time The Trojans was staged at the Edinburgh Festival it was automatically by Scottish Opera. That is not the case this year. Such a possibility must look far beyond the company’s currently conductorless resources. So Gergiev and his Russians promise the feat of performing it on three consecutive nights.   

The Scottish company’s forthcoming new productions, in addition to the MacMillan and the Gluck,  are of Rossini’s Cinderella, a lovable work in a version shared with Strasbourg’s Opera National du Rhin,  and a co-production of Janacek’s Jenufa with the Danish National Opera. Co-productions, of course, are a long-established way of cost-trimming, even though neither of these works could be said to be new to Scotland. A revival of Peter Watson’s production of Verdi’s Il Trovatore completes the season a year from now. 

Well, it’s not a bad tally and, by today’s international standards, quite a presentable repertoire. Are Welsh National Opera and Opera North - Scottish Opera’s equivalents south of the Tweed - faring any better? Watch this space.

18 May 2014

The Storyteller

The Tusitala restaurant, where I lunched with John McLeod the other day, keeps its Robert Louis Stevenson connections discreetly low-keyed. No dishes are named after him, so far as I can see, and nothing else supplies a link other than a few pictures in the entrance hall and a printed explanation of the restaurant’s name, meaning  “The Storyteller.”  It’s a popular  place on the edge of a new housing estate, and there have been rumours, fortunately false, that it is soon to be transformed into a supermarket. 

This does not take my mind off Swanston, the author’s nearby village on a slope of the Pentland Hills, to which a modern American writer,  Paul Theroux, has devoted a chapter of his seemingly factual novel, My Other Life. The book is full of real people, including Anthony Burgess, the Queen, and Prince Philip, along with the things they may or may bot have said to him, at one time or another. 

  Hiring a car and driving to Swanston in an escape from the Edinburgh Festival, Theroux makes contact with the current occupant of Stevenson’s childhood abode, “a majestic house of stucco and mellow granite” amid a cluster of cottages. An ill-tempered mother, surrounded by untidy children, says “Yes” when he knocks, but seems never to have heard of Stevenson. Stalking away from the fast-closing door, Theroux encounters not Stevenson himself - that would be too much to hope for, even in a novel - but his own private doppelganger, a smug and irritating old East German called Andreas Vorlaufer, a fellow author who claims already to have written all Theroux’s books and who, like Theroux, is visiting the Festival. 

 Since Theroux is easily irritated, one of his most admirable traits, this chapter of the book is made to  ring curiously  true. Vorlaufer, in Edinburgh on exacrly the same mission, points out to him the local sights with an airily knowing wave of his hand.  But is he really there?  Who is Jekyll and who Hyde? The meeting is odd enough to make you think that an alter ego is just what you need for a visit to Swanston.

17 May 2014

Puccini Lite

Puccini’s La Rondine, which the Royal Scottish Conservatoire has been staging - very nicely thank you, according to verbal reports - in its intimate  Glasgow theatre, continues to elude the international success it surely deserves. An Italian romantic comedy in the style of a Viennese operetta with a French setting, it is perhaps too much of a cocktail to fully catch on. Though Monte Carlo was the first place to see it,Vienna paid Puccini a good fee for writing it, which he did with less than perfect timing during the First World War. Perhaps inevitably, however,  the work has always perplexed opera houses and their audiences, who are prone to pronounce its name wrong (it should be La RON-di-ne, with the accent on the first syllable) and fail to identify with a heroine, the “swallow” of the title, who flies from her nest but returns to it dejectedly at the end.

Yet it’s a lovely piece, which achieves musical lift-off soon after it starts via the strains of a typically succinct Puccini aria, ravishingly sung in a 

.quite  different context  by Kiri Te Kanawa, her voice soaring sweetly out of the soundtrack of the Merchant-Ivory film of EM Forster’s Tuscan novel,  A Room with a View.  Antonio Pappano has championed the opera fairly recently in a beautifully sustained recording with Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna as its stars. So there is hope.   But the work still lags far behind Madama Butterfly, which Scottish Opera has been triumphantly reviving this month in David McVicar’s fine fourteen-year-old production. 

What a pity for La Rondine.  Puccini did not compose so many works that we can afford to let go of such a good one. Opera North’s production of it in Leeds in 1994 lured me all the way from Edinburgh but failed to please. Nevertheless, as the RSC has shown, the cause is not yet lost.

16 May 2014

 

John McLeod at 80

Today I go to the Tusitala restaurant in Fairmilehead, its name a tribute to Robert Louis Stevenson, one-time resident of the village of Swanston on the fringe of the Pentlands nearby. Tusitala, aptly, is Samoan for story-teller, and it was among these Pacific islands that the Edinburgh-born writer spent his last years, dying there on his 400-acre estate in 1894.  It is not a Scottish author, however, but a Scottish composer, John McLeod, with whom I am lunching. Now eighty, and still very spry, he has lived much longer than Stevenson, and in his latest works he has reached a new, conspicuously inspired and fecund period of creativity. 

I have been celebrating his birthday with a 3000-word article for the London magazine Musical Opinion which, with Bob Matthew-Walker as editor,  has become a hugely enhanced version of its somewhat dry old self. John was eighty in March, and in tribute to him Donald Runnicles and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra are performing his tone poem, The Sun Dances, at the BBC Proms in August. 

Though he composed it fourteen years ago for the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland, the work is one of the turning points in his output, whereby he changed from being a good composer into a masterly one. Janacek, whose music McLeod greatly admires, developed similarly in his old age. 

The Sun Dances, it seems to me,  is one of the first works in which he showed himself to be a Scottish colourist in the same way as painters such as Peploe, Cadell, Fergusson, Redpath and Gillies established themselves as Scottish colourists and are now known by that title.  McLeod was a colourist long before he composed The Sun Dances, of course, but the colours in recent years have sharpened and intensified, so that they become the foreground of his music rather than the background. 

At the same time, his style has become more pared down - think of Debussy and Sibelius in their later years - and this is another fascinating facet of his recent output. Even his titles - Chinese Whispers, Haflidi’s Pictures, Symphonies of Stone and Water, Out of the Silence - contribute to the effect. The Sun Dances are not dances. The music represents a vision of the sun through the eyes of an old Scottish woman long ago  on the top of Benmore on Easter Sunday. She has the experience only once in her life but the colours of the sunrise - “green, purple, red, blood-red, white, intense-whiie and gold-white” - stay with her for ever. This is what McLeod’s music depicts and what shows him to be now a colourist of the choicest sort.

Our lunch at Tusitala is in keeping. John’s smoked salmon, served with a separate white dressing on a square white plate, is like an abstract comment on his music (my own tub of mussels, though no more than a tub of mussels, tastes just as it should). Our glasses of chilled Chilean sauvignon bring with them a tang of Stevenson’s Pacific, reminding us why this sunny, spacious, good-tempered restaurant is so-named.

15 May 2014

Remembering Brain

  Driving overnight to London on September 1, 1957, after playing Tchaikovsky’s death-conscious Symphonie Pathetique at the Edinburgh Festival, Britain’s most gifted hornist, the 36-year-old Dennis Brain, was killed when his Triumph TR2 sports car left the road and struck a tree outside the De Havilland aircaft factory at Hatfield in Hertfordshire.  Tchaikovsky’s last masterpiece, completed just before he died in 1893, had steered him to his fate, or so it was frequently claimed at the time. 

It was the Edinburgh Festival’s first musical tragedy of its sort. Dennis Brain loved fast cars. People speculated on whether, so close to home where he was due to record Richard Strauss’s Second Horn Concerto the following day, he must have fallen asleep at the wheel. 

Memories of Brain returned this week when, driving home across Edinburgh, we suddenly heard the strains of Mozart’s Fourth Horn Concerto emerging from our car radio. Brain was unmistakably the soloist, the softly mellifluous tone of the slow movement and the rollicking verve of the finale being the combined giveaway. 

The exquisitely dovetailed orchestral playing denoted that the recording was the one he made with the youthful Herbert von Karajan (so much sprightlier then than in his maturity) with the same Philharmonia Orchestra. Finally the announcement came from Classic FM. Indeed it was Brain we had heard.    

In Edinburgh in 1957 he had been playing with the Philharmonia, of which he was by now principal horn, during that fateful week in which  Eugene Ormandy conducted the Tchaikovsky symphony  and Otto Klemperer conducted Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, that other great song of destiny.  Also at the Usher Hall, the ever-active hornist had appeared with his own wind ensemble on August 22 in performances of Mozart’s E flat Quintet, K452, and Poulenc’s Sextet, as well as at the Freemasons’ Hall in a morning programme of Beethoven,  Malipiero, Dukas and the now forgotten P. Racine Fricker. 

 He was due to come back to Edinburgh on September 6 to play Strauss’s Second Horn Concerto 

(supposedly after making his recording of it in London) with Ormandy and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.

Was he overworking? At least his perfectly poised recording of the four Mozart horn concertos with Karajan can still be bought and savoured,  and so can that of Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, the horn part of which was specially composed for him.  But he never recorded the Strauss, though an earlier recording of it remains available along with two different  recordings of the Horn Concerto No 1.