Le bon Muscadet

As a long-term devotee of cool French Beaujolais, I feel similarly at ease with a glass of what for me has always been its white counterpart, Muscadet. Both wines have had their highs and lows in terms of quality and public appreciation in recent years. But in my days of bracing summer holidays with my two eldest children in Normandy and Brittany, of sojourns in Dieppe (which used to boast the best cheese shop in northern France) and Honfleur,  Muscadet seemed the acme of wines to quaff with a pint of prawns or a rich seafood stew on one or another of the harbour fronts I frequented. 

A simple Muscadet was then the most appetising of wines, before it degenerated into something more often harsh and sharp and the once enticing name on the label was somerhing you passed with a shudder if you spotted it in a wine shop. 

The only safeguard lay in the tag “sur lie” amid  the label information alongside the words “Muscadet Sevre-et-Maine.”  This served as a guarantee  that the wine had rested ”on its lees” for a period and had  thereby gained the tang and petillance which made a good Muscadet the experience it was.  Since 1994, stricter rules have been applied to how long the wine needs to be rested beneficially in this way. 

 I still recall  once trudging through Dieppe carrying a visibly identifiable case of wine with this guarantee,  thus prompting the odd passer-by to exclaim “Ah, le bon Muscadet” as I approached. It always seemed one of the nice things about France that the sight of a simple but admirable wine could arouse such an exclamaition of appreciation from people out shopping. The simplicity, of course, was the thing. Muscadet was not a posh wine, a Pouilly Fume or a Sancerre from the higher reaches of the Loire. It was something cheeringly domestic, very cheap even in its “sur lie” version and well worth drinking.

Today, having regained its popularity in Britain, it is not quite so cheap, yet still enough of a bargain  to buy without feeling that you have been overspending. And a truly good Muscadet - such as the 2013 Fief Guerin, which Waitrose is currently selling for £7.99 - has a firmness of structure along with the slight floral prickle that makes it a fine accompaniment for fish dishes as well as a good aperitif. The cheaper 2013 Champteloup sur lie is certainly a Waitrose bargain at £5.99, and good Muscadets can also be found at present  in other British supermarkets.  

30 June 2014              

Pizza with Miss Brodie

Pizza Expresses inspire strong feelings. They are liked because they are smart, detested because they place style before content, portion control before generosity, meticulousness before spontaneity, small pizzas before large. They provoke familiar complaints, such as the one about anchovies being an almost invisible presence in pizzas that purport to make a feature of them. Their trendiness irritates, like the emphasis on gluten-free dishes, currently high-lighted on the menu - there’s even a gluten-free beer as an alternative to the established ice-cold  Peroni - a development  greatly favoured  by my wife, who is on a gluten-free  diet, but an annoyance to those who are not. 

Personally I have rejoiced in the existence of Pizza Express ever since the first one opened, all  those years ago, off Leicester Square in London, and when a new one opens in Scotland  I feel disposed to try it even if I know what I am going to eat. The way they convert old properties into something new and interesing is invariably resourceful and Edinburgh’s recently opened Morningside Pizza Express  is a case in point. Originally a church on the corner of Nile Grove, it welcomes you through its pillared  portal into a circular interior where the organ pipes have been retained as a visual  element instead of being slung out, as another buyer would instantly have done.

Set back behind trees from the bottom of Morningside Road, it has been fashioned into a pleasant eating space, with honeycomb tiles on the floor and  on the side of the central serving counter, with lofty modern murals inspired by the idiosyncratic Miss Jean Brodie in her prime  (her rcreator, Muriel Spark, was born  and educated just up the hill). On Fridays at lunchtime there is a regular influx of school-children, some of them probably from Spark’s old school, along with parents and grandparents.

The menu is much as usual, which means that it’s a mixture of recent additions and old faithfuls.  The pizzas are of course famously small which I infinitely prefer to gross pizzas with piled-up toppings of  a sort you seldom see in Italy. But there are also good salads  and a few pastas, including a classic lasagna, which is refreshingly not multi-layered but comes piping hot from the oven with a good mix of meat and tomato. Coffee, not particularly good, is served with the option  of a bijou dessert - figs and ricotta being a current novelty - but there is panna cotta or good ice cream, including sorbets, for those who desire something a bit more substantial. Trendy yes, but it works. 

29 June 2014

Trojan triumphs

Trojan triumphs

Opera, it is said, frowns on Scotland in the same way as Scotland frowns on opera. As fine new opera houses are opened on prime sites in Scandinavia, and the Scottish government continues to shrug its shoulders at such  achievements elsewhere, it’s easy to believe that there is truth in this local history of operatic  incompatibility. 

Yet Scotland’s operatic tradition is in fact an impressive one. It was here, a century ago, that the Denhof Opera Company mounted pioneering performances of Wagner’s Ring. and it was here in the nineteen-thirties that Mozart’s Idomeneo and Berlioz’s The Trojans received their British premieres from the Glasgow Grand Opera Society.  

Glasgow’s operatic history has been long and fascoinating, ranging from Jenny Lind’s famous appearance in Bellini’s  La Sonnambula and Donizetti’s Daughter of the Regiment in 1848 to the arrival of Sir Thomas Beecham and his opera company with such exotic splendours as Rimsky-Korsakov’s Golden Cockerel in the early twentieth century. 

All this made it easy for Scottish Opera to plant its roots in Glasgow with Debussy’s Pelleas and Melisande in 1962 and develop quickly into a great national asset, staging a sensational Berlioz centenary production of The Trojans in 1969. This year, at the Edinburgh Festival, The Trojans will be back, though it won’t be Scottish Opera - whose idea of progress nowadays seems to be the touring  of small-scale piano-accompanied productions round Scottish villages and being patted on the back for doing so - that is performing it. 

But the Mariinsky Theatre’s production, like Scottish Opera’s in 1969, will rightly present the work complete  in all its grandeur on a single evening, unlike the later Scottish Opera production which made the mistake of  spreading the work across  two nights. Berlioz’s opera demands no-holds-barred presentation, and Scottish Opera in 1969 even included the dances, as the Mariinsmky will surely also do. 

Conducted three nights running by Valery Gergiev as the climax of this year’s Festival is just what it deserves, making up for the parsimonious treatment - with the music cut to shreds - which Berlioz’s masterpiece  has so often received in its native France.

28 June 2014 

Something we all know about

The joy of making lists - of the ten greatest cities to live in, the fifty finest films, the hundred best novels, the thousand works of art to see before you die  - continues unabated. It’s best savoured, however, without the competitive element that almost invariably creeps into the final choices.  If you are listing the finest films, why does one film - traditionally Citizen Kane, though more  recently this seems to have been displaced by Hitchcock’s Vertigo - have to be superior to all the others? It’s just like calling Beethoven the best composer, or Van Gogh the greatest artist, and it gets you nowhere except for showing how narrow your mind is. 

Just recently, and purely for personal entertainment value, I have been sharing a spot of list-making with my eldest daughter’s father-in-law. We’ve concentrated on films because we are both film buffs, and films are something we all like to think we know about.  But we have avoided placing any film at the head of the list, other than alphabetically. To start with we thought big, compiling rather rambling lists of a hundred films, which extended with ease to 150.  We tended to use words such as “favourite” rather than “finest,” though even favourite, of course, carries implications of quality. 

Nevertheless a favourite film can be a bad film which you happen to love - one of my own favourite bad films being Beat the Devil, John Huston’s gloriously self-indulgent 1954 comedy featuring Humphrey Bogart, Gina Lollobrigida, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre, Jennifer Jones, Edward Underdown, Ivor Barnard and others. It’s certainly not a great film. Why, then, do I adore almost every moment of it and have been able to quote for more than half a century some of the niceties of Truman Capote’s dialogue?

The answer is that the film has stuck ineradicably in my memory and when I recently came upon a DVD of it, I bought it instantly and - because for me it has not faded - have been revelling in it all over again. So perhaps a list of remembered films, or perhaps what EM Forster might have called good bad films, saying why they are memorable, could be more revealing than one more list of the finest.

Whittling down and sub-dividng a list can be another way of beating it into shape. At the  risk of being defeated by our lists of 150 films, Hamish - Susie’s father-in-law - and I have been toying with lists of as few as ten, divided into comedies, thrillers, dramas, westerns worth seeing. The overlaps, where they occur, have interested us, though the divergences are perhaps no less arresting .

 At any rate,  the comedies common to both our lists include M. Hulot’s Holiday, The Ladykillers, Whisky Galore, Sons of the Desert, The Cat and the Canary, Arsenic and Old Lace, Kind Hearts and Coronets, and A Night at the Opera, in no particular order and most of them now (like ourselves) pretty old.   Next will come thrillers, though we have yet to decide what films would count as eligible. Watch this space.

27 June 2014

Acoustic designs

Last year, in return for running the Edinburgh Festival since 2006, Jonathan Mills received a knighthood. This year, in return for his knighthood, he is giving Edinburgh the opportunity to hear his tragic  oratorio, the Sandakan Threnody, in a performance by the Festival Chorus and BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by the zealous Ilan Volkov.

It’s the first time  an Edinburgh Festival director has appeared at the festival as a composer. But then, according to Wikipedia, that is what Mills primarily is -  as a pupil of his fellow Australian, Peter Sculthorpe, he has two operas (he’s working on a third) and a ballet to his credit, as well as his oratorio and his artfully entitled Four First Songs.  No doubt he has also composed other things - a concerto and chamber music have been mentioned -  along with running other festivals. What's more, he successfully studied architecture, specialising in acoustic design and “the role of sound in the built environment.” 

Yet although his second opera  was performed and filmed for television in London, Mills the composer has remained an unknown quantity in Edinburgh. His oratorio, dating from 2001, received its premiere at the Sydney Opera House and is a valediction for the 2345 Australian and Britsh  prisoners of war who were sent by the Japanese on a death march from Sandakan in Borneo, where Sir Jonathan’s father, later to become a distinguished heart surgeon, had been a prisoner.

In a festival which this year is commemorating some of the horrors of war with performances of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, Berlioz’s The Trojans, Britten’s Owen Wingrave, War Requiem  and Sinfonia da Requiem,  Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony and Beethoven's Eroica, the work will be in imposing company. And although we might feel meanly inclined to pontificate on why a festival  should serve  as showcase for its director’s own music, we should perhaps respond on this occasion with the question, “Why not?”  It was something Britten did as a matter of course at Aldeburgh. and with the highest artistic success.  

26 June 2014

Another great book by Geoff Dyer

Coming from Geoff Dyer, the title of his latest book could be sardonic. Indeed, coming from Geoff Dyer,  Another Great Day at Sea could be exactly the opposite of what its title implies,  and what it is about could be just what it is not about. It’s certainly not about the catching of Moby Dick. Its subject is bigger than that. Nor is it a modern author’s  search for Conrad’s Lord Jim.  Yet like the most famous of all Dyer’s books  - Out of Sheer Rage, which was intended to be about DH Lawrence - it is certainly about something that won’t leave him alone.  His Lawrence book, it’s true, was about being unable to write a book about Lawrence, and the first impression you get of his new book is that it might be about the sea, or it might not.  Those who read everything Dyer writes, as I do, must guess what he is likely or unlikely to give them.

Another Great Day at Sea is in fact about the spell Dyer spent as a writer in residence on board the biggest ship in the world, the aircraft carrier USS George Bush, half a mile long, a vast floating pantechnicon on constant patrol of the Gulf, more crowded than a cruise ship, amd where most of its 5000 crew have to squeeze themselves at night  into “six-pack” bunks, separated from each other by curtains, as in the sleeping car containing Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot.

Once on board, Dyer thinks he is within his rights to demand  his own cabin where he can sleep and write in peace. His request is granted, though the only available room is right below the flight deck where the constant howl of jets  landing and taking off throughout the night is the price he must pay for it.   It’s the sort of situation in which he was bound to find himself, and he survives it by wearing a cranium protector, or by visiting the carrier’s chapel, despite his atheistic tendencies,  to hear hauntingly soaring hymns, or by crouching on deck in the expectation that a plane might chop off his head, as happened to someone in Catch 22. He describes the food (inedible) and discovers that there is  a token Starbucks on board, though he knows that this is not the vessel in which he might track down the perfect doughnut and perfect cup of coffee - a topic to which he devotes a wonderfully obsessed essay in a previous book. 

It turns out that the words “Another great day at sea” are a pronouncement by the captain, with modest but fascinating variations, in a daily broadcast to the crew. Dyer found it deeply moving, as I myself did when, during my RAF  days,  General Grunther similarly greeted everybody at SHAPE in Paris. What is it about the Americans, even when they are manning the most formidable man o’ war? 

The question could be the title of another book, but this one is beautifully written and unimprovable, especially in its pristine big-size format, wonderfully illustrated and edited, which puts the much cheaper, if handier, kindle version inevitably in the shade. Yet the book is not dependent on its large-scale design.  The writing is what matters, and the story is as intimate in its way as Alain de Botton’s study of Heathrow,  A Week at the Airport, which in some respects it delightfully resembles.

25 June 2014 

  

The editors in my life (4)

During my spell at SHAPE in Paris, the only regular news letter to be published on site was American, smartly printed but confined largely to social events.  Something else, something more Parisian, seemed needed and, with a fellow British journalist. who was also in the RAF, I started planning Rond-Point - named after the carrefour halfway down the Champs-Elysees - which was to become, albeit briefly, a guide to what was happening in town.

Dick Burmingham (from Stroud in Gloucestershire) and I were to be co-editors, typing out reviews and previews within a sixteen-page format for production once a month. Squadron Leader Goldie, in charge of the SHAPE RAF unit, gave us his blessing with the proviso that we stood on nobody’s toes and did not shirk our normal duties. 

Major Dauphin, my American boss, agreed to let himself be called editor-in-chief so long as his appointment was merely nominal. He already had a Boy Scout publication to deal with, and he did not want to involve himself editorially with something as irrelevant to SHAPE as Rond-Point, which would probably turn out to be a piece of British artifartiness. His deputy, the rotund cigar-chewing Warrant Officer Parznik, agreed to lend a hand if wanted, 

But we were left essentially on our own, which was what we really wanted, and got down to writing the first issue, gaining permission to use SHAPE paper and equipment, and using roneo for an estimated circulation of five hundred. The publication, we were assured by the Americans, would be regarded as a SHAPE asset and we were encouraged to go ahead.

So, side by side smoking Gauloises in an empty office, Dick and I spent several nights assembling it, talking friends into becoming unpaid contributors. Though it was all, I suppose, a bit rough and ready, with no pictures to relieve the columns of typescript, it looked lively and a pre-publication copy, with contributions from film critics, drama critics, art critics, ballet critics and music critics (some of them simply noms de plume for me and Dick) won immediate admiration. 

The five hundred copies were duly run off, and we awaited response. It did not take long to come. The Americans liked it, the French (all of them English-speakers) smiled and said nothing, but officers of the British Army exploded.  That was our mistake. We had not consulted them, let alone sought their permission to publish, which was now instantly refused. A British major said he had himself been planning just such a publication for years, and ours would get in its way. 

Squadron Leader Goldie, ordered to stop us in our tracks. commiserated with us but had no choice. Dick and I duly destroyed the first edition, then went into town and had a good meal.  Whether we wrote about it or not, Paris was still there. As for Major Dauphin, he continued with his Boy Scout activities, relieved, no doubt, never to have become involved. Years later I received a letter from him in America, merrily describing himself as a silly old coot who was now learning to fly. It was nice of him to remember me. 

24 June 2014

The editors in my life (3)

Recruited into the RAF at the age of 22, after four years of deferment, I struck lucky.  Square-bashing in Staffordshire came close to being a pleasure, partly because it was interrupted by the chance to play the piano in a local Gilbert and Sullivan society’s production of The Mikado, in which several senior officers were singing important roles.  This, without being too taxing for a pianist who fumbled more than he accompanied,  enabled me to escape some unpleasant duties, including the dreaded assault course, which formed the climax of two months of basic training.

Then, before the passing out parade, came the offer I felt unable to refuse. Would I like to go to Paris? As a trained journalist, with a virtuoso typing speed, I needed no additional RAF training and lived in the hope of a plum posting.  The offer, when it came,  was for just under two years at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, otherwise known as SHAPE, up the hill from Versailles and a free bus ride from Paris via a route that included St Cloud, the Bois de Boulogne and the Avenue Foche, where the Gestapo had until recently had its headquarters.

If I was interested in the assignment  I was to report to Biggin Hill, where I would be interviewed by an aged wing commander.  “I know nothing much about you,” he said, “but as I’m a Dunfermline man myself I’m willing to take a risk.”   So off I went, kitbag on shoulder, from Victoria to the Gare du Nord, where I was met by an American driver who said he didn’t think much of Paris  but that life was otherwise good. 

SHAPE was controlled by General Grunther, supreme commander in Europe, who strolled along the lengthy central corridor in the morning, wishing us all a good day. His deputy was Field Marshal Montgomery, whom we seldom saw because he had his own private entrance leading straight to his office.  Most of the personnel were American, French or British, with small gatherings of Greeks, Italians,  Dutch and Danes, as well as eventually, during my time, a solitary German in the new German uniform. 

The RAF had its own small faction, commanded by Squadron Leader Goldie, a quietly civilised  man who caused nobody any trouble. But most of the RAF staff were dispersed to other departmnets and I found myself working initally for a naval petty officer in top secret files called Wallace Crummy and then for an American major, Lester R Dauphin, who among other things  ran a small private cottage industry as editor of a Boy Scout news letter. He was soon to be my editor, too, but I’ll come to that later. 

Meals were free in the British mess (mostly army, with cooks from Britain) or, if you were happy to pay the very low price, in the much superior  French mess. I sometimes went to one, sometimes the other, though I know which I preferred. The French mess also had the advantage of possessing an excellent small upright piano in the kitchen staff’s chnging room, on which I found myself allowed to accompany the singing of old French songs and to give piano lessons for a few francs a go.

There was also an American mess, where we were not allowed to eat but could sit reading if we wished, and  there was a big international cafeteria, where you had to pay for meals but could buy a drink (as also in the French mess, which served wine;   the British mess served  water). But much of the time, at least in the evening, I ate in Paris, which in those days was stunningly cheap and which I was determined to get to know better than anywhere else I’d ever been to.  Sadly, a lot of my fellow recruits never bothered to go into town and preferred to hang  around SHAPE instead. Well, since it was all so free and easy, who could blame them? 

 I was not the only journalist on the premises. There was also the dapper Private Coote from the Daily Telegraph. There was Senior Aircraftsman Michael Harvey, whose girl-friend was the daughter of the Daily Mail’s Paris editor. Michael operated one of these smart, electrical, high-speed  reporting machines, which at one time you saw being employed in courtroom dramas in the cinema.  He was in great demand at SHAPE. 

Apart from office work there were few duties, no parades, and only the French were put on a charge if they failed to salute the flag. There was a good American library, from which I borrowed the recently published Catcher in the Rye. Using my magnificent Adler typewriter, built like a battleship, I wrote freelance articles about Paris for the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch and The Scotsman, both of which by then had new editors. My RAF pay was low, but enough for meals in Paris two or three times a week, for operas and  concerts, galleries and the occasional play. And - gloriously- there were classic films, enough of them to make me think of becoming a film critic. But I was not writing anything for SHAPE itself. That was something that still lay in the future. 

23 June 2014 

Tales of the Tales

My first encounter with The Tales of Hoffmann was the gloriously flashy film directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, with Sir Thomas Beecham as conductor.  I had left school and was on my first trip to London. The film had just opened in Leicester Square and I was among the first to see it. The reviews had dismissed it as ridiculously ostentatious but I loved every moment of it. It ran for a while in its original version  before box-ofice failure prompted savage cuts. When it finally reached Edinburgh I saw it again and still loved it, despite the mutilations, paticularly as it retained the closing shot of Sir Thomas conducting in the pit, which was the moment I had been waiting for. 

The next time I saw the film was in Paris, a few years later. For local audiences the singing  had been dubbed into French, with different, less impressive singers. The closing shot of Beecham was missing, because it had another conductor, the routinely efficient Andre Cluytens, who was not seen on screen. This time round,  I enjoyed it much less. Then, quite recently, the old Beecham version was reissued on DVD.  It was not uncut, but Beecham, at least, remained in view. 

I found that I still loved it for its glitter, for Moira Shearer dancing the role of the doll that sprang to life, and for Robert Helpmann and Leonid Massine for appearing in other dancing roles.  Singers’ voices had been dubbed from the start of the film’s history. Today, people are still buying it and, thanks to Beecham, it  remains the best version of Offenbach’s romantic opera you are likely to come upon.

But this weekend I saw another, filmed at the great Liceu Theatre in Barcelona, which in some respects was almost as good. It was conducted, extremely well, by Stephane Deneve, formerly of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra - surely the most exceptional conductor it has had in years. Natalie Dessai (whom Deneve had conducted in Pelleas and Melisande in a concert performance of Debussy’s opera when he first came to Scotland) was the touching Antonia. Kathleen Kim was superb as the doll. Laurent Naouri sang all four of the sinister villains, as Offenbach intended. 

The Hoffmann, Michael Spyres, seemed nondescript in comparison with Beecham’s polished Robert Rounseville. The decor and lighting were grey and dull, making Laurent Pelly’s production look as if it was set in a factory. But like a few other recent versions of Hoffmann - one of them at  the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland -  it restored quite a lot of little-known music, particularly for Nicklause and for Hoffmann’s Muse, which is traditionally omitted. 

The Venetian scene, placed at the end, was substantially rejigged, not entirely to its advantage. For all its good features, then, this was not a Hoffmann to surpass the Beecham/Powell/Pressburger version, which I shall be watching again this week. But it raised an interesting question. Why was Stephane Deneve, clearly an opera conductor of great ability, never invited to conduct Scottish Opera while he was in Scotland?  Was it for contractual reasons? If so, what a pity.

22 June 2014

Simply so French

Beaujolais was my first red wine, a true beginner’s wine because it was simply so  French,  so drinkable, so  available, and so inexpensive. I bought it for domestic wine and cheese parties, which were popular at that time, though British connoisseurs say today that wine and cheese don’t mix- tell that to the French! 

The shop where I bought it was Alastair Campbell’s in Bruntsfield, long defunct, but  very welcome in its day, with prices ranging from 25p (five shillings) for a bottle of red Algerian to around 50p for Chateauneuf du Pape, with Beaujolais notching in at 30p or so. Almost all their wine was French. though there were also Italian bottles, some Spanish Rioja and some Mosel, which we pronounced Moselle in those days  with the accent on the second syllable.

 Australian wine was not known to exist. When eventually it did, the wine of choice was called Kanga Rouge. Bull’s Blood from Hungary was something special to take to friends, or else Lutomer Riesling from Yugoslavia, because it was cheaper. But mostly it was Beaujolais which, even at its most basic, seemed a bit classier. Beaujolais-Villages, we knew, was better still, and the best Beaujolais of all had its own individual name, such as Fleurie, or Morgon, or Moulin a Vent, which was our favourite when we could afford it. 

Today the Beaujolais roll of honour remains more or less unchanged, though there came a point when nobody drank it because it had suddenly lost its credibility. That was the time of the great Beaujolais Nouveau race, when wine shops competed to be first to get the new wine. Some of this was rather good - Oddbins, when they first got going, were considered particularly  reliable - but most of it was bad, though people drank it all the same, often without noticing the difference. But in the end the word went round that it was undrinkable, which for a time  spelt the demise of Beaujolais including a lot of good Beaujolais also. 

Coming from the borders of Burgundy, though using a different grape, it should almost always have been good or goodish, of course.  It was a wine that certainly went well with steak and frites, with veal, liver and most French dishes other than fish. But lightly chilled, as was recommended, it could be tried with fish, too. In other words, it was a very useful wine which at its best could be considered even more than that. 

To disparage it, as some of us still do, is a serious blunder.  It’s a wine of which I continue drink quite a lot, and it’s a safe buy from most supermarkets (Waitrose’s house Beaujolais, with a railway engine on the label, is recommended).  The most famous producer is Georges Duboeuf, an apt  name for  Beaujolais. It is quite easy to find and comes bottled with lovely floral labels, particularly suitable for Fleurie.   But other names, such as Louis Jadot and Joseph Drouhin, are also good, and most of the recent Beaujolais vintages have been up to standard.

21 June 2014

The editors in my life (2)

It was Jack Miller, with whom the Thomson Organisation replaced the poetic Albert Mackie as editor of the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, who brought a touch of Fleet Strret into my life. He had worked, it was said, for the Daily Sketch and other tabloids, nobody quite knew which, and since the Dispatch itself was a tabloid - albeit a discreetly intellectual one - he was deemed for reasons unspecified  to be a suitable man for the job. 

Roy Thomson had already done his reconnaissance of the paper, arriving by tram from the house he had bought in Murrayfield and padding quietly through the corridors of the lofty North Bridge building with his henchman, the menacingly-named Ben Floyd,  and had decided that the Dispatch needed to change into something more aggressive if it was to defeat its sedate local rival, the Evening News. Miller, it was said, had been selected after being sent on a Mediterranean freebie by one of the papers he worked for.  Failing to return to his office, he received a telegram telling him not to bother going back. That, we understood, was how Fleet Street operated.  Whether it was true or false, Miller was evidently available and the Thomson Organisation agreed to employ him.

The day he arrived, the Dispatch newsroom awaited him, if not with open arms, at least with a newsroom redesigned along London lines, with a large central table at which Miller would work, shunning a chair and standing upright in polished shoes to preside over his staff. He was an imposing figure, tall, jowly, unsmiling, sharp-nosed, short-sighted (he wore big glasses with black rims),  invariably dressed in a black pin-striped suit, the jacket of which he peeled off when matters became stringent.

When he first walked in I don’t recall him being introduced to anybody, but we knew who he was.  He suddenly appeared in our midst, dropping his black overcoat and homburg on the floor for a secretary to pick up. Strolling over to his table, he was ready for action. A blank copy of the day’s front page lay awaiting his attention, with samples of new and sensational type faces. He sketched a few quick squiggles and diagrams. The Dispatch was certainly going to bear his imprint.. 

A muttered editorial dialogue took place around the table but Miller already knew what he wanted. The paper had been planned ahead, Local news had to look important, even when  it wasn’t. Big headings were placed above very small stories. Miller’s assistant, the amiable Gregory Clayton, also from Fleet Street, worked from a smaller adjoining table. He also operated standing up and his job was to keep things flowing while his boss barked orders. 

Miller, once he got to know us,  gave us all nicknames. Mine was, simply, “Music Man.”  Every so often I would hear the words “Hey, Music Man” being yelled from across the room, so I always knew when he wanted me, which was surprisingly often. Even Miller, it seemed, saw the point in those days of a classical music critic, even if it was only as a sort of necessary evil. 

But it was with the news reporters and sub-editors, and with the dashing young Irish racing correspondent Cornelius Curran, that he had his most productive dialogues. Time passed.  He petrified us, but we got used to him. Circulation fell. Edinburgh did not fancy a London-style tabloid and detested the new typography.   

After a few months I was recruited  for national service in the RAF.  Miller, it seems, had not been informed of this. The day I left, it is said, he looked across the room and shouted “Where’s Music Man?”  When given the answer, he blustered that he was going to get me released. But he never did. When I returned two years later, Miller was gone. 

20 June 2014  

The trials of Pinot Grigio

Pinot Grigio used to be considered quite a good Italian white wine, and by many people it still is.  You drank it as an aperitif, and took a second glass.  It went well with shellfish or chicken, with olives, artichokes and, of course, pizza.  It was the perfect accompaniment for spaghetti alle vongole, and for mussels.  Then something happened.  Wine critics began to dismiss it as boring. It grew cheaper. a convenient bottle-party wine so long as you did not ask what it was you were drinking, or add that you really liked it.  In supermarkets it was always being marked down from £10.99 to £5.99, or briefly being marked up from £5.99 to £10.99, at which price people were sometimes careless enough to buy it. Today, at £5.99, it has established its price level and has won plenty of friends.  Sold by the glass it’s a safe-ish pub wine, so long as the bottle has been newly opened, but don’t expect it to be more than that.

The same sort of thing  once happened to Beaujolais which, when it was freshly bottled, people used to dash across France to buy. But Beaujolais is recovering, however slowly, and a good Beaujolais is properly recognised as a delicious drink. So, for that matter, is a good Pinot Grigio. But what is a good one? You’ll find out if you lunch in Edinburgh at Valvona & Crolla, where there are always a few such bottles - obtainable by the glass - on the wine list.  

Valvona & Crolla know about Pinot Grigio, which - since they are Edinburgh’s best-established sellers of Italian wine - they should do. So does Centro Tre, the excellent  Valvona & Crolla breakaway at 103 George Street. Once you have sipped a Pinot Grigio in one or other of these places, you will inevitably find most supermarket Pinot Grigio disappointing. But don’t expect Valvona & Crolla’s to be cheap. This is Pinot Grigio in the upper price bracket, where it rightly belongs, but at least you’ll remember drinking it. The shop price for Valvona & Crolla’s house Pinot Grigio, from the Veneto region, is currently £8.99.

The basic rule  about this wine is that most of it - and usually the most nondescript of it - comes from the vast Veneto region outside Venice. If you notice the word Veneto on the label, you have to be be careful. It won’t necessarily be drab.  Indeed it can be extremely nice, as Valvona & Crolla’s is,  so long as you know what you are buying. But a very much  safer bet is if the wine comes from the Alto Adige/Trentino region, above Lake Garda, which - while also north Italian -  is not the same as the Veneto and is, in my view, often more reliable. 

Nor should supermarket Pinot Grigio be automatically shunned. There are good ones as well as dull ones and Waitrose at present are selling a couple of good ones, first a minerally 2013 LaVis Vigneti Montagna Pinot Grigio from Trentino/Alto Adige  in the foothills of the Dolomites,  costing £9.99, the other a lushly fruity 2013 St Michael-Eppan Pinot Grigio from the same area, also known as Sudtirol. This at present costs £11.99.  

19 June 2014

Reading Atkinson

For a few years I lived on the same street as the novelist Kate Atkinson on Edinburgh’s south side, without actually reading anything she had written.  It was only after moving a mile or two away that I discovered what I had been missing.  Partly it’s her private eye Jackson Brodie who has brought this about,  though even he, I must confess, is someone I’ve approached obliquely by way of the TV series based on his exploits.

These, with their Edinburgh settings,  struck me as impressively action-packed, though at times excessively busy and intricate. Moreover, as I have discovered, what is quite often Atkinson’s originsl English setting for a book is brusquely swept aside in the TV version.  This, presumably, is meant to make the novels more attractive to a Scottish audience, but is it necessarily so?  Too often I have found my eyes ditracted by some familiar piece of local scenery which I can’t quite identify, and for a crucial moment I have lost track of the often quite complex story line.

In the books themselves this does not happen. I am able to concentrate on the text, and to savour Atkinson’s often idiosyncratic humour as well, which comes across more effectively in book form. So I’m happy now to be able to call myself an Atkinson reader rather than viewer, despite the fact that Jason Isaacs, who plays the role of Brodie, seems so conspicuously well cast. But the books themselves ring truer, I think, even if the plot of one of them, about a missing mother, does seem to run away with the author towards the end. 

But the book entitled Case Histories, which broods about bereavement - in this case the unconnected deaths of a young girl, a young woman, a man axed by his young wife (and we need to remember that Brodie’s own older sister has been strangled before the story starts) - strikes me as not only superbly stuctured but very moving.  

The Jackson Brodie series, however, is by no means all that Kate Atkinson has written. Her range is wider than  that, and I, for one, still have some catching up to do.  Now that the incentive is there, I look forward to doing it. Case Histories can be bought in peperback from Amazon for £5.51, or in its Kindle version for £3.99.

18 June 2014

The novel as guidebook

As someone who spent twenty years as a semi-resident of Italy, I am sometimes given a book with an Italian setting in the hope that I will find it interesting.  Though that is not necessarily so, my most recent acquisiton of this kind - Jonathan Buckley’s Nostalgia - was clearly chosen with the knowledge that I no longer have my apartment there and must grieve over the loss of it.  Irrespective of this, it’s a novel I have liked very much, particularly for its structure, which embeds the story - that of an English painter who lives in a small Tuscan town, partly for inspiration but also to escape from relatives back home with whom he has fallen out - in a scrupulously assembled selection of Italian anecdotage inserted in the course of the 434 pages of the book. 

These serve as intermezzi dealing with the history of the place where the painter lives, the people (going back centuries) who have lived there, the local buildings, the animal or insect life (bees, bats, porcupines, wild boars) that might be encountered. As author of the Rough Guide to Tuscany and Umbria, Buckley knows all about the area between Siena and Volterra where his fictional, or semi-fictional, town is positioned. Whether you find these chapter-length interludes gripping, or simply a tease that tends to hold up the action (obviously a risk in a novel such as this), they add their own special flavour to what could come to be described as a novel as guidebook.

Yet the tale of Gideon Westfall and his young assistant Robert Bancourt, one of whose duties is to deter visitors, is perfectly strong in its own right. When Gideon’s stubborn, somewhat querulous niece Claire comes calling from London one summer, complications ensue. If you are lucky, or sufficiently patient, you will enjoy the book both for the story and the interludes (the one on Italian bees, added after the niece has suffered a dangerous sting, struck me as particularly arresting). In any case you can always skip, as I occasionally did, even if it made me feel a bit guilty to do so. 

In Buckley’s hands, a novel such as this becomes a new experience and he has made it work, even though he has needed a sympathetic publisher, aptly called Sort of Books, to encourage him.  It comes with an introductory  quotation from Arnold Schoenberg:  “There is still plenty of good music to be written in C major,” which also strikes me as apt, One of the characters is a vanguard Danish composer to whose works, described with a perception not always supplied by other novelists whose books touch on the subject of music, a local concert is hilariously devoted.

The shop price of Buckley’s Nostalgia is £12.99, though Amazon sell it for £8.96 and the easy-to-handle Kindle version costs £3.90.

17 June 2014

Death in Venice

In theory, Deborah Warner’s production of Britten’s Death in Venice for English National Opera, now issued on DVD, should be the best the opera has yet received. It possesses all, or most of, the qualities the work requires. By Edward Gardner it is vividly conducted. But by John Graham-Hall as Aschenbach it is not quite the best sung, for all the intensity he brings to his portrayal. It’s a shortcoimng from which the dapper Andrew Shore in the multiple baritone role - the closest the opera gets to having a villain - also suffers. 

Nor does the predominantly sepia-tinted lighting, often showing the characters in silhouette, quite live up to the colours of the orchestral part, even if it does  convey something of the opera’s special armosphere.  Warner, as her Peter Grimes for Opera North made clear, is a Britten exponent of the most perceptive sort. But Death in Venice, Britten’s last and perhaps most articulate opera, needs more than perception. It needs, in every way,  to be one hundred per cent right, which is something you sense but know that nobody has yet achieved it.

The very first production of it, Colin Graham’s at Aldeburgh, was often wrong.  First seen in 1973 it emphasised the sometimes irritating mannerisms of the piece at the expense of the reality. Though Peter Pears, as Aschenbach, voiced the words to perfection, his style was so English that the character failed to ring true. Robert Tear, at Glyndebourne came close to getting it right - something Ian Bostridge has also done -  but the production seemed somewhat cramped. 

Scottish Opera’s 1982 co-production with the Geneva Opera, superbly conducted by Roderick Brydon with Anthony Rolfe Johnson as  Aschenbach  and with  a seascape that looked like an oil painting, was highly regarded, quite rightly, but in recent years has never been revived. Tony Palmer’s film of the opera, photographed in Venice itself, was too self-indulgent.  Luchino Visconti’s more famous film with Dirk Bogarde, which had nothing to do with the opera, was marvellously photographed with the adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony as its haunting background music,  but it belonged to an entirely different medium.

So, though certainly not unflawed, the Deborah Warner version, with its expressive close-ups, looks like being first choice. But I still await a production that makes me exclaim, ”This is it.”  It has been a long time coming.

16 June 2014 

The Dove and the Smoking Dog

Two of my favourite nightspots in Paris, when I was sent there for two years by the RAF, were called La Colombe (The Dove) and Au Chien Qui Fume (At the Smoking Dog). La Colombe was a restaurant in an ancient alley on the Ile de la Cite, near Notre Dame. Le Chien Qui Fume was just across the Seine on the edge of Les Halles, the great Paris central market which in 1971 moved to the suburb of Rungis.  Both of them, after sixty years, still thrive, even if they now lack the special ambience they possessed in the past. For me they were great places to pause in if I missed my last bus from Etoile back to camp at one o’clock in the morning and had to wait for the next bus  at 6.30am. As a senior aircraftsman (the RAF equivalent of a lance-corporal) I could seldom afford a cab.

The attraction  of La Colombe was not so much the food, which was good but on the dear side, as the fact that its bar allowed you to sit down for a drink from midnight onwards. The attraction of the bar was that Guy Beart, in his early days, sang there, with a guitar on his knee. Though he later became internationally famous, with many fine recordings to his name, there was no charge to listen to him at La Colombe  with a cognac in your hand. The restaurant’s bearded proprietor, whose name I forget, also sang. I listened for hours, unaware of how well known Beart was going to become.

Eventually, with cash running low, I would walk over to Chatelet and from there to Les Halles, for onion soup at the Smoking Dog. By then the market was in full swing, and the soup, very cheap, always seemed to summarise the night’s experience. It was, of course, the real thing, full of onions, with a thick slab of toasted baguette, sprinkled with grated emmenthal, on top. This substantial dish lasted me until it was time for the long walk to Etoile and the bus on which I would slumber my way back to base.

Today, La Colombe still stands on the corner of the Rue de la Colombe. You can visit it for yourself, though Guy Beart won’t be there. Dating back to the year 1297, it claims to be one of the oldest restaurants in Paris. As for the Chien qui Fume, it’s still there, too, at 33 Rue du Pont Neuf, though whether it still stays open all night, or whether it still serves onion soup, I cannot say. Since Les Halles has departed, and the restaurant appears to have gone somewhat up in the world, I would think not.  But since there is now more than one restaurant of this name in Paris, make sure you choose the right one.

If Paris is not on your itinerary, make do with a Waitrose carton of onion soup, which you can improve with a baguette and grated cheese, and is a lot better than you might expect. 

15 June 2014

Cormoran Strikes Again

Robert Galbraith, otherwise known as JK Rowling, will be back on track next week with a substantial new novel featuring the private investigator  Cormoran Strike, the immense, hairy, one-legged, ex-army  hero of The Cuckoo’s Calling.  Fearing - though surely not - that readers perhaps need to be reminded who Galbraith is,  Kindle have released two chapters, without charge, ahead of the official publication date. 

As a Kindle (and Rowling) reader I find this not only appetite-whetting - as it is bound to be -   but also surprising. One of Kindle’s calculated little generosities has long been to let us see the opening section of all its publications before committing ourselves to buying them. But since the opening section may be an introduction, or part of an introduction, written by someone other than the author of the book, this is not always quite as generous as it may seem. What is sent to us, indeed, may sometimes consist of little more than a list of contents or of illustrations.  

But access to two chapters of the latest Rowling, albeit written once again under a now not very concealing nom de plume, seems a good way to generate enthusiasm, and unless you are one of those twitterers who are currently clamouring furiously about Rowling’s defence of everybody’s right to say no to the prospect of an independent Scotland,  it’s an opportunity worth grabbing.   I’ve read them and, as someone who greatly enjoyed the previous Cormoran Strike adventure, I shall certainly be buying the new book, entitled The Silkworm. 

14 June 2014 

Someone special

With the death this week of the conductor Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos, the Edirburgh Festival has lost the services of a superbly skilled but sadly infrequent visitor. The last time I heard him was during Frank Dunlop’s reign as director, when he took charge, rather late in the day, of what  had threatened to be a controversial closing concert  for which no conductor had been chosen and the orchestra had been changed. Since the concert was a Berlioz night featuring the Festival Chorus,  it was an important event.  Someone special to conduct it needed to be found.

Fruhbeck - as he was always known - was the man. A renowned exponent of nineteenth-century choral works, who in the1960s had brought Mendelssohn’s Elijah back into circulation with a sensational London performance and recording featuring the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus, he was a noted champion of Berlioz who could be relied upon to bring the festival to an impressive end, as he certainly did.

Previously he had brought the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, of which he had just been appointed music director, to Edinburgh for another concert of expert musicianship, though the omens had not been good.  Invited to hear the orchestra in Canada beforehand, I interviewed him in a snowstorm when he disclosed that his choice of a US instrumentalist for a key position in the orchestra  had been opposed by the rest of the players, who wanted to increase the number of French-Canadian personnel. 

Are we likely to encounter similar disputes here in Scotland if the yes vote succeeds in the autumn?  At any rate a Canadian  press conference, attended by the local critics along with the orchestra’s Scottish guest,  grew extremely heated. Questions steeped in ambiguity were asked, which the Spanish-German conductor, unused to such tactics, found hard to handle.

The relationsip remained prickly. Fruhbeck resigned within a year to continue his career quite successfully elsewhere. When he died at the age of 80 he was conductor emeritus of the Spanish National Orchestra and music director of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra. But when illness suddenly struck him while conducting recently in Washington, he felt it was only fair, he said, to vacate both these posts before finding himself forced to start cancelling concerts.

13 June 2014

Coffee sour

Complaining here recently about the deterring bitterness of the coffee in so many Edinburgh restaurants and cafes, I found myself trying to pin down its cause.  It wasn’t that it was too strong.  I expect an espresso to be strong. Nor was it a matter of weakness. If you ask for a latte, you should know by now that you will be served something that is more milk than coffee. It’s the modern British  espresso, or double espresso, that seems to be the root of the trouble, principally because of its sheer nastiness. Big bright modern  espresso machines, I suspected, are possibly hard to operate, no matter how expert the barista, and small domestic ones are clearly no safer. It’s all a question of quality control. 

But the people in charge of the machines, it now seems, are not to be blamed any more than are the machines themselves. According to Jay Rayner, restaurant critic of the Observer, the problem lies in the actual coffee. It’s a thought, of course, that had occurred to me, too.  I still remember the time an Edinburgh headwaiter dragged a sack of coffee beans to my table to prove how fresh and flavoursome he considered the house coffee to be.   

True enough, perhaps. But in an article last Sunday, Rayner pointed an accusing finger at a different aspect of coffee beans.  He started by saying how he had been sitting in a restaurant at King’sCross, looking glumly at his espresso. What was wrong  with it? The colour was right. The crema, as they call  the copper-coloured froth on the coffee’s surface, was right. But the taste, which he describd as fiercely, lip-puckeringly acidic, was utterly wrong, It was more reminiscent of lemon juice than coffee. He repeated the experience again and again across London. . “I order coffee. I am served a cup of something sharp and unpleasant.”

It all began, he says, two years ago. Fast forwarding to today, he says that he is sitting in different premises which are bang on trend. With him is Salvatore Malatesta, a name I would associate with an opera buffa baritone but who is in fact a coffee guru from Melbourne. They sip their sour espresso, which Rayner’s companion declares to be “serious” coffee, going on to explain that it’s all  to do with shorter roasting times providing access to all the “fruitier, fresher flavours.”  Rayner stares at him. “You mean,” he asks, “it’s actually meant to taste like this?”  The answer seems to be that yes it’s deliberate. Sour espresso, it appears, is a symptom of a British - and presumably Australian - coffee business which is booming.

So now we know. Meanwhile I’ll stick to the Edinburgh cafes that continue to serve the sort of coffee I can rely upon amd not the sort, as a friend told me yesterday, had just ruined an excellent meal.  To the short  list I included in a previous blog, I’ll now add Marie Delices on the slopes of Comiston Road.   Its cappuccino comes in what is perhaps too large a cup, but it’s a beautifully decorated Breton cup and what it contains tastes exactly how it should.

12 June 2014

Time to reappraise

“Find a good song and then build an opera around it.”  Umberto Giordano’s prescription for operatic success paid off more than once. Even Britten, who professed to despise the Puccini school of compositon,  realised that it had its uses.  He found a good song - a haunting ballad -  for his television opera  Owen Wingrave and placed it, with Peter Pears as singer, at the start of Act Two, from where it seemed to radiate in all directions over the entire opera. 

It’s what I remember best about the original BBC performance in 1971, and it’s what helped to persuade me at the time that the work was a masterpiece. Yet. though it won immediate friends, Owen Wingrave proved a failure in the long run. People showed no desire to see it again. What went wrong? Its subject - the fate of a young pacifist who is a member of a brazenly militaristic family - was thoroughly Brittenish. Its ghostly atmosphere harked nack to The Turn of the Screw, based on a novella by he same author, Henry James.  

Coming from a composer whose favourite game was Happy Families, a card-game that, when played by Britten, could end on what seemed like the brink of violence, its portrait of a family in ferocious disarray suited him to pefection. Yet Owen’s exquisite Peace aria, one of its highlights,  was not enough to save it. Its ending was pronounced weak. Scottish Opera, when the possibility came to add it to the Britten cycle that was one of its early glories, declined the opportunity.  

Yet, like other admirers, I continued to believe that there was something there. Not for nothing, it seemed to me, did those who had praised it decided to do so.  Gloriana, Britten’s royal opera, is no longer the dud it was once deemed to be. Is Owen Wingrave not similarly retrievable? When Britten’s hundredth birthday was celebrated last year, his reputation was on an international roll. Owen Wingrace was ready and waiting for the reappraisal which will come  later this month when it is staged at the Aldeburgh Festival before coming north to Edinburgh.

Neil Bartlett, who has been invited to direct it, asserts that the time is right to give it another chance. But it’s the music I am longing to hear again in a production that fully understands what the work is about. So let’s hope that Bartlett gets it right.

11 June 2014

Cosi fan Haneke

The rise and rise of Cosi fan tutte, from a work despised for its triviality by Beethoven and Wagner to its present position as the Mozart masterpiece of masterpieces, has been one of the operatic achievements of the past fifty years. When Glyndebourne staged it at the 1948 Edinburgh Festival, with a marvellous international cast, it still seemed the most frivolous of comedies, Mozart at his slightest. A production I saw at the 1965 Aix-n-Provence Festival, even with Teresa Berganza in the cast, was just a send-up. . A Sadler’s Wells production around the same time omitted the work’s greatest and most eloquent aria, Fiordiligi’s Per Pieta in Act 2, presumably because it was thought not  to “fit in.” 

Yet by 1967  the tide was turning and, in Britain, Scottish Opera led the way. With Elizabeth Harwood and Janet Baker to star in it,  the new young company decided that the opera was not just a joke but emotionally serious. Since then, most other companies have followed suit, to the extent that Cosi is now often regarded as not a comedy at all.   True, there have been lapses, as English National Opera’s current prouction - lamentably staged, it would seem, as a sort of seaside entertainment - has demonstrated. 

But when the great Austrian film director Michael Haneke - whose films have been growing increasingly sombre to the point of morbidity - was invited by Gerard Mortier, the opera world’s most progressive impresario, to stage it in Madrid we could guess what was coming. For Haneke, whose most recent films have included Amour (about love, old age, and death) and The White Ribbon (about the bleakness and cruelty of German village life just before the First World War), frivolity was not an option. And though Madrid is not the handiest of places for opera, a DVD of his production, available from Amazon, shows in vivid cinematic close-up just how unfrivolous Cosi fan tutte can be made to look. 

It’s not, however, that it’s utterly cheerless.  There are token  trickles of merriment to offset the high seriousness of the rest of the production. Since the singers possess not only exqusite voices but film-star good looks, their portrayals carry exceptional credibility. We see them grovelling on the floor and clinging to each other’s legs in misery as the story of love gone wrong inexorably unfolds. The maidservant Despina at the start of the performance is wan, bewildered, and emerging, though only just, from what appears to have been - perhaps  still is - an unhappy relationship with the grimly manipulative Don Alfonso. It’s only when he brings her into his satanic plot against the lovers that she cheers up. 

Alfonso himself, no rascally contriver, is unsmiling, lip-curling, solemnly watchful. The young men, prodded by him into trying to swap partners, grow more and more furious the more they succeed. The crucial closing scene is frantic in its torment and hatred. Despina slaps Don Alfonso. Don Alfonso viciously slaps her back. It is evident that, in Haneke’s hands, the young men have more to lose than their sweethearts. Does it ring true?  Though Mozart, as a product of the enlightenment, clearly intended a moral to be pointed, he equally clearly visualised a happy ending, complete with bright music in the work’s home key of C major.

True or false to Mozart’s intentions, Haneke’s production could hardly fail to work strongly. And when you see him, greeted by cheers, taking his somewhat whimsical, quizzical bow at the end, you can tell that he is not displeased with how it has turned out.  Sylvain Cambreling conducts unobtrusively and unhurriedly. The singers, none of them  (apart from William Shimell as Alfonso) yet a famous star, do well. Though the DVDs are not conspicuously cheap, they are a lot cheaper than an unsatisfactory international night at the opera. 

10 June 2014