Wines of the week: big Italian reds

Tuscan reds, along with those of Piemonte from further north, include some of Italy’s greatest wines. But should you buy them in supermarkets, where some of them, such as Barolo, are increasingly available?

Only if you have to, and only if the  label information means something to you, would be the sensible answer, high-falutin’ though it may sound. Barolo does not come cheaply, and a reduction in price should not necessarily be treated as good news. The best place to buy it is from a reliable wine merchant, and if he is asking what you would regard as too much, buy something else he recommends.

Many Barolos, even at high prices, can seem chewy and unyielding. You need to develop a taste for them. The same can be said for Barbera and Barbaresco, to name two other Piemontese wines, and, turning to Tuscany, even a big muscular Chianti can seem too hard and bitter. Which is my way of saying play safe and buy a lighter Dolcetto d’Alba, which can be one of Piemonte’s glories, even though less famous.

Valvona and Crolla 2010 Prunotto Dolcetto is  a good plummy  example, which can be recommended.  This is a subject to which I shall return in a later blog.
30 September 2014

Nights of war

Reading Kate Atkinson’s latest novel, Life After Life, I am seduced by its picture of English family life during and between the wars as well as, recurringly, just before the start of the first of them.

 It is an enthralling and intricate book, proceeding in overlapping episodes, backwards and forwards in time, stalling and restarting as it brings seemingly dead and departed characters  back to life.   It has the ability to startle and keep you guessing about who is actually who, and why, and how.

Since Ursula, the main and most motivated character, whom we see growing up in the course of the story (after she has seemingly been stillborn, drowned in the sea, and fallen to her death from a roof - Atkinson does not deal in half measures) appears particularly prone to doom and disruption, it should not perhaps be wholly surprising to find her in the thick of the London blitz in one episode and simultaneously -  like a sort of Mitford sister - living in Germany in the next with a Prussian husband and a friendship with Eva Braun in Hitler’s Berghof retreat. Then, after enduring the bombing of Berlin and swallowing a cyanide capsule, she is bewilderingly  back in London as a member of a valiant wartime rescue squad.

Inevitably you find yourself thinking of the distinguished Edinburgh-born literary critic Karl Miller, who died last week, and of his obsession with doubles  and split personalities. Atkinson’s book is both dizzying and dazzling in its ability to juggle fact and chronology, view the same person from different angles, repeat and revise, confuse and clarify, charm and shock. I cannot imagine how it ends, though I am not far from its denouement.

It has even evoked for me an episode in my own wartime experience. Brought up in Edinburgh, I saw nothing of the violence of the Second World War. Occasionally the sirens went and German aircraft passed overhead en route to Clydebank while we sat in a neighbour’s shelter.   Then, having done their bombing, they passed back. Local  artillery unsuccessfully opened fire. The all clear sounded  and we returned to bed.

But once, at the age of ten, I was taken on holiday by my parents to Aberdeen. Having supper with friends near Rubislaw Quarry, we heard the sirens go and we ignored them. After supper we took a tram back through the quiet city to our hotel.  Walking down Bon-Accord Crescent, we found ourselves suddenly amid a violent air raid, with planes swooping overhead along the line of the street - “that’s a Dornier,” I cried - with tracer bullets streaming and the rattle of gunfire.

My parents quickly pushed me into a doorway and held me close until danger had passed. Then we raced to our hotel, which was, ominously, No 13 with a green door. Unlucky though that seemed, it was on an adjoining house that all the shrapnel had fallen, with splinters of glass everywhere.

 Next day we explored the damaged city, and read the details  - Night of Fire and Destruction in Aberdeen - in the Press and Journal. Amid the debris, a church opposite the hotel where we had stayed the previous year lay flattened.

It was my only real incident of the war. But Kate Atkinson, writing of what befell her mysterious Ursula almost every night of the London blitz, has conveyed its onslaught to admiration.
29 September 2014

The great Karl Miller

It was as a schoolboy at Daniel Stewart’s College, concentrating on Music and English, that I first heard mention of Karl Miller. A little older than me, he was the boy genius, and eventually dux, of the Royal High School  when it still occupied its classical premises at Calton Hill, before it moved to Barnton and the old building became an art gallery and concert hall and, as was hoped, the future seat of a Scottish government (this never happened), a sensational Spanish fantasy of a parliament building being created down at Holyrood instead.

 But the old school still stands, holding its memories, and people still speak of them.  Sir Walter Scott was educated there, and one of my teachers spoke of  how the future novelist reputedly had a habit of twirling his fingers round a button on his jacket while narrating something in class. One day a rival pupil, having spotted this tendency, craftily cut off the button, which left Scott  struck dumb at the start of what he had intended to be an eloquent oration.

Karl Miller, who died on Wednesday at the age of 83, was not a novelist but he was certainly a writer and one of the school’s most important modern literary products. Sadly, somehow or other, I never met him, though I could easily have done so, and though I read him assiduously, not least because one of his favourite topics was “doubles” or “dual personalities,” as represented by Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, as well as by Schubert’s greatest song, Der Doppelganger, horrifically declaimed by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in a famous recording.

Although Miller ws never my editor, his activities in that often dangerous field were prodigious, fulfilling all the predictions made about him when he was an Edinburgh schoolboy and my English teachers advised me to look out for his name, for who in Edinburgh would call his son Karl without expecting him to do well?  Well, someone did it (he was born in Straiton in the shadow of the Pentlands). At Downing College, Cambridge, he came under the influence of the fierce FR Leavis, and before long was literary editor of both The Spectator (under Ian Gilmour) andThe New Statesman, where he fell foul of Paul Johnson, who paid him £3000 to go away (Miller tore up the cheque and flung it over his irksome boss).

But Miller was a great resigner, just as he was a great editor. He worked for, and resigned from, the BBC. He edited, and resigned from, The Listener. He held, and abandoned, the Lord Northcliffe chair of English at UCL. He founded, and left, what many regarded as his greatest and final creation, the London Review of Books.

His own final book, a collection of sixteen essays entitled (not very catchily) Tretower to Clyro, came out in 2011 with a lengthy, warm and witty preface written by Andrew O’Hagan about a sort of Highland Jaunt he had taken with Miller and Seamus Heeney.

What seems to be the essence of Miller’s quirkily Scottish personality is here caught to perfection. I do wish I’d met him. Even as a boy, as my English teachers recognised, he was someone clearly destined to be “going places.”
27 September 2014

Historically informed

The concept of historically informed performances, as they were once delivered in Britain,  began for many  of us in the nineteen-seventies with what could more accurately be described as historically inept performances.

Everybody seemed to be at it, scraping away as though their lives depended on it.  These performances were given, in the first place, by ensembles which had previously played normally before deciding that they really did not want to. They now desired but failed failing to make the sort of sounds originally produced by players in performances directed by Bach or Mozart. Mostly  it sounded like music played rather fast but very feebly.   Then Christopher Hogwood came along and formed theAcademy ofAncient Music  - a whimsical name rather too reminiscent of the world of Gerard Hoffnung - and incompetence was transformed into brilliance.

But on Wednesday, at his home in Cambridge, Hogwood died. We shall miss him. He was a familiar figure in Edinburgh, one of a growing number of authenticists who included David Munrow, Roger Norrington, and John Eliot Gardiner, conducting or directing performances from the harpsichord or some other instrument or simply with their hands.

Being interviewed in public by music critics (including me on one occasion at the Festival Theatre) was something Hogwood appeared to welcome. Though deeply academic, he was an affable man who did not behave too academically in public. He was brisk and alert, the very model of of an elegant, dapper musician who knew his Mozart from his Haydn,and his Handel from his Bach.

By today’s musical standards, 73 was  too young to die. He was due to visit  Scotland again  next year to conduct the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in what would have been an exhilarating account of Haydn’s Creation. No doubt he will be replaced by Richard Egarr, who succeeded him a few years ago as conductor of  the Academy of Ancient Music. He works frequently with the SCO, but it will not be quite the same as having the spruce master himself.
26 September 2014 

Wednesday's wine: Orvieto

Of Italy's white wines, Orvieto can be the dullest.  Calling it flabby can seem a kindness. Calling it lifeless, on the other hand,  can seem a bit hard. It is not always as bad as that. It is just wine, something perhaps  safer to avoid than to buy, but if you do decide to buy it - it has, after all,  an inviting  enough name, with all the allure of the part of Umbria from which it comes -  make sure that you do not spend too little on it. The supermarket average is around £6. It is not enough.

That is one way, usually my way, of looking at it. But  as with other Italian white wines, especially the omnipresent  Pinot Grigio, there is another side to Orvieto, which establishes that it can be quite a good, occasionally a very good,  wine, with enough oomph to cut through a spaghetti carbonara without damaging your tongue.

This sort of Orvieto  inevitably costs more than the other one, and you will be lucky to find it in a supermarket.  But at the moment my favourite supermarket, Waitrose, has the  2013 vintage of one of my favourites  in stock.

 Its name is Cardeto, and it comes from near the Umbrian hill town of Orvieto itself. Its taste is refreshingly clean, nice enough for an elegant   aperitif, but more than adequate to partner veal dishes, vegetable antipasti, and pasta.

 It costs £8.49 a bottle and is more interesting, I would say, than Waitrose’s current alternative, an Orvieto named La Piuma Italia, which is brisker and  more assertive, has a flashier label and costs £7.49, but has less lasting appeal.

An Orvieto that speaks for itself is also supplied by Valvona  & Crolla, Edinburgh’s famous Italian wine shop and delicatessen in Elm Row. This Rocca delle Macie classic Orvieto, from grapes harvested in selected estates, costs more than £10 but is special enough to make you realise that not all Orvieto is drearily ordinary.
24 September 2014

Restaurant of the month

The Gardener’s Cottage, Royal Terrace Gardens, Edinburgh, tel 0131 558 1221

The Gardener’s Cottage is what its name says. What it does not say is that it is a restaurant, one of the most interesting in Edinburgh, which, though not vegetarian, grows its own vegetables and can serve expert vegetarian meals to people who pre-order them. To the rest of us last week it was serving mutton, grouse, and seafood as part of a seven-course dinner compiled from small, delicious dishes of this and that, explained to you one by one by deftly articulate, but by no means pretentious, waitresses before they place it in front of you.

It is a variation on the now rather overworked taster menus you encounter in many an overpriced and sometimes merely irritating restaurant. But, though not cheap, The Gardener’s Cottage is not overpriced. Nor is it irritating, even although it consists of only two long tables, seating a total of twenty-or-so people where we were expected to eat communally without eavesdropping on adjoining conversations.

In every respect, the system works. Placed between two sets of fellow diners last week, we agreed that we had no idea what they were talking about, nor any special curiosity about it, which is more than can be said for many a Pizza Express. Conversation was sustained, without Scottish guffawing, at a moderate level, while LP recordings of Ella Fitzgerald vintage were unobtrusively played in the background.

With only two small rooms, built in 1836 after a design by William Playfair, the cottage forms a tiny part of his master plan for Royal Terrace and its sloping gardens above London Road.  It is a classical product of the Edinburgh enlightenment, so bijou that if people were to eat at separate tables there would be scant space for customers, especially as one of the rooms contains the open-plan kitchen and its two expert chefs, who cook with great subtlety.

Nothing tastes quite how it looks, or looks quite how it tastes. There are tiny, exquisite salad leaves, the odd greengage, superb bread, small slabs of goat’s cheese dressed in something different, slices of fish that could be scallops or scallops that could be fish.

Even after your server’s analytical explanations there is much to discuss or dispute or puzzle over. Though quite rigidly assembled - or so you might like to think - the menu does seem to change, which is all the more remarkable.

The wines, served in good glasses, include an admirable Alsace Riesling, which, being neither decisively sweet nor dry, seemed thoroughly appropriate, indeed just right for such a place. The Gardener's cottage  has been hailed as  a fun restaurant, which also seems about right, though the fun, at least on this occasion, did not get out of hand.
22 September 2014
     

The editors in my life (14)

Of all the editors I worked for,   Alastair Dunnett was by far the most endearing as well as the most   important. Although the first staff job he gave me was in the The Scotsman’s London office, and he himself was based in Edinburgh, I was always aware of his background  presence and of his guiding hand. He was an inspiration whose support always mattered to me, and with whom I never once fell out.

Yet there was one occasion in London when he briefly challenged my devotion to him. It was the first night of his play, Fit To Print, in the West End in the nineteen-sixties.  Its subject was journalism, and its star Sir Donald Wolfit. Who would be asked to review it? Ronald Mavor, The Scotsman’s senior drama critic, seemed the obvious choice, though it would have been more considerate perhaps to assign the task to an outsider - say, someone such as Harold Hobson, though the London critics of the period were an intimidating pack, led by Kenneth Tynan, Bernard Levin, and TC Worsley.

Dunnett pondered the matter and, I assume, discussed it with Mavor - though maybe not. In the end he said that since I was the paper’s London drama critic - at that time John Amis was the London music critic, with drama pleasingly though surprisingly  allotted to me - the review of the play should therefore be my responsibility.

It was an alarming prospect. Was the invitation - presumably one I could not refuse -  a compliment to me, as I naturally hoped, or a poisoned chalice, or simply an escape route.  Clearly, as an inexperienced young critic, only just turned thirty, I was bound to feel honoured.  I was given a press seat placed  so distant from the section of the theatre reserved for Dunnett and his dignitaries that my integrity was not in doubt and I never had a chance to speak to him.

Though by no means a bad play, it seemed not a greatly penetrating one, even coming from a professional editor. But coming from a staff critic,would such a judgment be even remotely permissible? I thought not.   Dunnett was not a natural playwright, and even  though Harold Hobson wrote in the Sunday Times that he liked it very much, the rest of the reviews seemed on the cool side, with Wolfit, as the protagonist, the subject of criticism.  Writing my own review straight after the performance,  as most of us did in those days, I found myself in a state of agitation.

 Nerves, no doubt, were the reason for an initial blunder. Forgetting that Wolfit had recently been knighted, I described him as Mr Wolfit. Whether Dunnett noticed I do not know, for he never referred to the matter. Whoever sub-edited my copy failed to spot the error, but  I myself  certainly did when I saw it in print the next day.

Things could, I suppose, have been worse. My assessment of the play was impeccably innocuous.  Unlike Joseph Cotten in Citizen Kane, I was not - or turned out not to be - a critic whose future depended on my boss’s reaction. But the memorably named Fergus Cashin in the Daily Sketch (once described by Keith Waterhouse as “the original legend in his own lunchtime”)  wrote what he believed I should have written. His opening paragraph ran:   “I would not like to be the drama critic  of The Scotsman today because I fear that I would have to pan my editor’s play.” This was followed by a list of what he deemed to be its faults. Perhaps Dunnett silently forgave me for my politeness, as well as for my own faults, just as I forgave him for asking me to review the play in the first place. The subject, at any rate, was closed.

Never again, as a reviewer, would I experience such an overpowering need to sit on the fence, and as an older, shrewder critic I like to think that I would have found a better way of handling the whole thing better than I did.
21 September 2014

Copy cats

It has taken a long time for someone to gain permission to write a new Hercule Poirot novel. But the gifted Sophie Hannah has suceeded, and her book, The Monogram Murders,  is available at prices ranging between £15 and £18, though of course kindle undercuts that with its £6.99 edition.

I’ve bought it, but not yet started it. The reviews so far have been unsurprisingly mixed, principally because the Christie style is apparently harder to emulate than the Ian Fleming. But as an old Christie fan I’m game to give it a go.

 Not that James Bond is really that easy to imitate either, and only William Boyd, it seems to me, has sensationally succeeded in doing so. Nevertheless I’m looking forward to Hannah’s book - though at well over 300 pages it looks a bit long for a Christie. 

 On the whole I tend to prefer writers sticking to their own styles, and would certainly argue that PG Wodehouse is impossible to copy satisfactorily.  Who will come next, I wonder?  JK Rowling, at least, has succeeded in copying herself, even if the novel she has written about English country life slightly runs out of steam.

19 September 2014

Remembering Tertia

Hailing the fiftieth anniversary of Edinburgh’s New Town Concerts the other day, I wrote of their precursor, the Freemasons’  Hall concerts organised by Ruth d’Arcy Thompson in the years after the Second World War.

These, too, were notable events - especially at a time when good chamber music in Edinburgh was sparse and the Festival, founded in 1947 was said to represent three weeks of life in a sea of inactivity.

But Ruth, at the time, was not Edinburgh’s only indomitable woman of music. There was another, even more vigilant, who from her home at 34  Regent Terrace organised the weekly National Gallery Lunch-hour Concerts which featured performers of the quality of John Ogdon, Thea Musgrave and Wolfgang Sawallisch (a pianist before he became an international conductor) in Edinburgh for the first time. This was the great, and memorably named, Tertia Liebenthal, daughter of a nautical German, who grew up here and became leader of the university’s Reid Orchestra under Sir Donald Tovey.

As a schoolboy, and junior critic, I was one of her ardent admirers. Her concerts ran year after year through the winter season, bringing good pianists, string players, singers and others to the relaxing surroundings of the National Gallery, where she was permitted to store  her beloved Steinway grand for the use of her performers, whom she would treat to afternoon tea at Crawford’s on Princes Street after the concert.

In a   sense, though not a pianist herself, she was Edinburgh’s Myra Hess, the pianist whose National Gallery concerts in London won massive support during the Second World War.

She imposed a strict regime on her performers. The centrepiece of her concerts, she ruled, should  as far as possible be something modern, and the closing work should be something  familiar, so that audiences could leave with music they knew ringing in their ears.

The system worked. The audience grew. Performers who failed to comply to her satisfaction were not invited back. As a cub critic, I learnt a lot of my business going to her concerts and writing about them. They were a weekly beacon in a by no means well lit  musical environment.

Gradually we got to know each other and to consult each other. If I was critical of one of her events - such as the time she invited John Ogdon’s wife Brenda Lucas to give a piano recital in his place - she telephoned me in an attempt to reason with me. Sometimes this involved lunch, either at her home, with its view of Arthur’s Seat, or else at her favourite Cafe Royal, where she ate mussels bercy (i.e. with  a wine, shallot and marrow sauce) washed down with a bottle of soothing Barsac (if she wanted a red it would be Valpolicella).

 Before long we began to lunch together regularly, whether or not I had enjoyed the concert. She liked hearing my views, as I did hers. Occasionally, at home, she would invite me to join her in a private performance of a Mozart or Schubert violin sonata on her other piano, because she liked to keep up her violin playing.

She was devoted to the Edinburgh Festival, went often  to Aldeburgh, spent Christmas at the Braid Hills Hotel and summered at Aviemore.  Her vintage Festival  was 1965, because Boulez was there, followed by 1968, which was built around Britten. During the latter festival, she chided me for disliking his Piano Concerto. She had reached a point in her life, she said, when she had “had” Beethoven and was contemplating dropping his music from her concerts.

Then suddenly, in the middle of her 699th concert, this tall, striking, impressive  impresario dropped dead. She had just announced her 700th programme, which was to be given by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. Eventually they gave it in her memory, and it included the premiere of a new Britten song cycle, Who Are These Children?, to  words by William Soutar. An era was over. Though there was talk of continuing the concerts, it never happened.

Her piano was sold. Ronald Mavor, by then director of the Scottish Arts Council, said that it was characteristic that Tertia died at her 699th concert, because she would never have done anything to mar her 700th.
18 September 2014

This week's wine: Sancerre

I once had a friend, a distinguished Scottish musician, whose only wine was Sancerre. He served it at lunch and dinner. He bought it by the case. He knew its nuances.

Much as I enjoy a good glass of Sancerre, my friend’s was an enthusiasm I could not share. If I have an obsessiveness, it leans more towards the steeliness of a good Chablis, a white French wine  that can be considerably dearer (and sometimes slightly cheaper) than the average Sancerre. But why do the nuances of this undoubtedly sophisticated Loire interest me less than those of the white burgundy from what is really not a huge distance away? Is it that I find it too soft and silky compared with the grand structure and integrity  of a great white burgundy?

To accuse it of being a soft sell - the wine, after all, is not particularly cheap and in a restaurant, indeed, tends to seem quite expensive - would obviously be unfair. But to call it overpriced perhaps comes nearer the mark. Its nuances are not in themselves quite fascinating enough to send you out on a great Sancerre quest - something I would certainly be prepared to do for a Chablis. The sight of the leather-bound wine list in a restaurant in the Chablis area, containing page after page of possible choices, is nothing if not imposing.

Looking at the range of Sancerres  in a British supermarket, you know that you are likely to get something nice for around a tenner - Tesco’s  house Sancerre is as good an example as any. Sancerre is a very pretty wine, very pretty indeed, and much to be preferred to some of the more aggressive sauvignons of New Zealand. But if I am spending £10 or  a bit more in a supermarket, I am not sure that Sancerre - or its  sister Pouilly Fume - is what I would buy.
17 September 2014

Fifty years on

Edinburgh’s New Town Concerts are celebrating their fiftieth anniversary this season with a survey of the  art of the string quartet.

Starting with America’s superb Emerson Quartet - hailed over here as the voice of Manhattan -  in November, followed by Britain’s youthful Belcea Quartet, all four events will feature a leading international ensemble playing key works from the repertoire. Though Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Shostakovich will have pride of place, there will also be dashes of Bach and Purcell and some touches of exotica, including music by that colourful South American, Alberto Ginastera.

The New Town Concerts were launched at a time when, apart from the Festival’s memorable morning concerts at the Freemasons’ Hall, chamber music had a scanty, vulnerable presence in Edinburgh.

Once the great visiting quartets had been and gone in August and September, Ruth D’Arcy Thompson’s winter chamber concerts in the Freemasons’ Hall struggled to keep things going  with the help of the Amadeus and similar quartets, but in the end collapsed through lack of funds.

 It was then that, in recognition of the aching gap in Edinburgh’s concert life, the New Town Concerts were founded and have thrived ever since. Although, like the Festival, these concerts  employed the Freemasons’ Hall as their setting, they switched to the Queen’s Hall when these surroundings became available in the nineteen-seventies and have found their home there ever since. Long may they triumph.
16 September 2014

Endangered orchestras

With down-sized orchestras here, locked-out orchestras there, and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under threat from  the day after Scotland votes yes, Norman Lebrecht’s Slipped Disc blog   has plenty to moan about at the moment.

But the BBC SSO has been in serious danger before - and survived.  Will it survive again?   The last time it happened, however, it was not the outstanding orchestra it now is. Its achievements were far, far less than those it now customarily supplies  under Donald Runnicles and Ilan Volkov, who are as desirable a pair of maestros as any orchestra has the luck to work with.  With a semi-staging of Berg’s Wozzeck, conducted by Runnicles, as a highlight of the forthcoming season, there is much to look forward to.

Apart from the danger to the orchestra itself, the fate of the Glasgow City Halls, the BBC SSO’s superb Scottish home, may also hang  in the balance. So yes, if there is trouble in the air - either from the referendum vote or from the BBC itself - we should maybe  listen to what Lebrecht and others are saying. He is not always wrong. And a point to keep in mind is this:   if the yes vote happens to lose the referendum, will the BBC SSO still be in danger? Unlikely perhaps, but not impossible.
15 September 2014

The future of symphony concerts

As staid as ever in their musical hopes, Edinburgh’s concert goers are presumably happy with what the coming season is offering them. I can’t say that it really looks fresh enough to me, even if the RSNO’s programmes are unlikely to be a deterrent.

But a glance on line at what the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra is performing in Germany shows deeper thought, and some arresting ideas. As John Duffus, however, suggests in his posting to this blog (see his response to Time for some swagger), it is not necessarily programmes that matter but method and approach. Could he be right? Your response woud be welcome.

14 September 2014

The allure of Verdicchio

If you want a change from Pinot Grigio, without paying too much for the privilege, Verdicchio remains a good choice. It has always been one of my favourite Italian whites, dry without being drab, and frequently priced around the £6 mark. 

It has things against it. People have trouble pronouncing its name, insisting that it is verdeetchio and getting cross when told it isn’t. But in fact the soft double “c” - as in Puccini - becomes hard when followed in Italian by an “h.” which means that verdickio is what  you should call it.

Nor is its provenance a strong selling point. The Marche region on Italy’s east coast, from which it comes, is not a top holiday place, at least for the British, though Pesaro, birthplace of Rossini, is a lovely resort. a cyclist’s paradise where seaside and academic life mix to perfecton, and where the beauiful inland city of Urbano is within easy reach. On the seafront stands an eye-catching villa in what the Italians call the Liberty style, but which we identify as Art Nouveau. The local wines, including Verdicchio, are delicious.

But another factor against Verdicchio seems to be  that it often comes in what is deemed to be an uninviting amphora-shaped bottle, which people treat with suspicion. But it’s a trend - the bottle, that is - which, in my experience, is gradually receding, and good Verdicchio is increasingly sold in standard bottles.

Both the examples currently stocked by Waitrose come this way. The first, a prize-winning 2013 Moncato Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi Classico (the classico reference is important) at £5.99, is a tasty bargain wine with a hint of almonds, admirable with seafood or something vegetarian. The other, at almost double that price, is more special, a top Monacesca Verdicchio, fragrant and sumptuous, a fine companion for a good-sized sea bass, rather than the puny fish usually sold in Britain under that name. 

M&S’s rival pairing of Verdicchios, both good, consists of a classico (in an amphora-shaped bottle) at  7.99 and a dearer one at £9.49, while Sainsbury offers its Taste the Difference Verdicchio for £6.99.

13 September 2014

Time for some swagger

No matter how cleverly it is concealed, or how artfully it is varied, the old concert structure of an overture, a concerto, and a symphony still keeps its grip on Scotland. The overture may not be called an overture but is simply a short introductory work which, if it happens to be new and potentially  unpalatable, can be got out of the way before it causes active offence.

This is one way of attempting to solve the “modern music”  problem in concert programmes. If there is a soloist, the chances are that he or she will perform a concerto, which leaves the final slot in the concert to be filled by a symphony or some other large-scale work. The formula is simple and, however often it seems to be going into abeyance, it always returns.

Pierre Boulez, in his New York days, devised concerts with two intervals, which looked like a characteristically radical change but usually turned  out to be a way of filling the time-lag required by the arduous reseating of the players necessitated by the kind of works Boulez liked to conduct.

Herbert von Karajan favoured the double-feature programme with one work before the interval and another, preferably louder, after it. Audiences were not fooled by such devices and the tripartite formula has continued to reassert itself, though I always admired Sir Thomas Beecham’s way of ringing the changes by secretly altering the running order and then announcing - as he once memorably did during the Edinburgh Festival - “I shall now conduct the work you imagine you have just heard.”

But Beecham was Beecham, a maverick who sometimes liked to end with an overture, or with Berlioz’s Trojan March (as he did in a marvellous concert I heard him give at the Paris Opera) or Chabrier’s sizzling Marche Joyeuse, or Massenet’s Last Sleep of the Virgin - things he was prone to call lollipops amd which always provided an element of glee or mischief. These days are long gone, and more’s the pity, though Robin Ticciati - admittedly more seriously - can still provide a touch of it in his concerts with the SCO, and so could Stephane Deneve  when he was in charge of the RSNO. It seems to go with a flair for French music, which Deneve automatically possessed and which Ticciati likewise has.

It could also be called the Haydn touch, which Beecham certainly commanded and which we used to refer to as swagger. In Ticciati lies our hope, though he’ll soon be off to Glyndebourne. Meanwhile I suspect we’ll find it in his concert with the SCO at the Usher Hall on  February 5, which opens  with the tingle of Boulez’s Memoriale, continues with  Mitsuko Uchida playing Ravel’s G Major Piano Concerto, throws in some Faure as an interlude, and ends with Haydn’s Clock Symphony. An event not to be missed, I’d say.
12 September 2014

A bit of this, a bit of that

As a large, modern, efficient symphony orchestra, the RSNO can fire its big guns - in other words perform such works as Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben as a repertory piece in a way it was once unable to.

Rightly, audiences now expect such showpieces, or blockbusters, to form a normal part of the winter season, and though  Strauss is almost absent this time, except for the desolate Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings, we can be sure that Ein Heldenleben  will not be missing for long  - though it would be good to think that the Domestic Symphony might be in the offing.

What we are getting instead are things such as Ravel’s La Valse, which are not  showpieces at all but, in this case, a powerful, deeply disturbing, masterly statement about the time in which it was written. We’re also getting Respighi’s Pines of Rome and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, old-fashioned colour pieces I now tend to regard as inessentials, and the radiant  splendour of Nielsen’s Inextinguishable Symphony.  A bit of this and a bit of that - including, from Sir Roger Norrington, a welcome dash of Haydn.

Not quite enough to suggest a  scrupulously structured season, but at least enough to please.The little touches of France, here and there, are things I look forward to. Are they  sufficient? In the absence of Stephane Denever, perhaps not. But they will do.
11 September 2-14

An omelette and a glass of wine

It is time that someone in Edinburgh had the courage - and the flair - to open a good  omelette bar. The menu would be simple and obvious. A handful of omelettes and a choice of a few nice French wines by the glass. Though wine experts say that eggs and wine do not mix - they say the same about wine and cheese -  such assertions can be safely ignored. As Elizabeth David said, they mix perfectly well if you are happy (as I usually am)  with the idea of combining them.

Apart from that, the premises would have to be right. Somewhere small, accessible, and intimate, somewhat French in feeling - omelettes being a French dish par excellence -  expert but unpretentious. The expertise could be the problem, but not necessarily. Elizabeth David once wrote a famous essay in which she commemorated a hotel on the Ile-St-Michel, just off the coast of Normandy, which reputedly made the best omelettes in the world.  The chef, Annette Poulard, worked unbelievable wonders, requiring her own special breed of hens, the best possible  French butter, a splash of top-quality cream, considerable sleight of hand, a perfect frying pan that was never to be washed, and even, some said claimed, a dash of foi e gras.

In fact her omelettes were not rich at all. In the end, after retirement, she disclosed that all she did was break some good eggs into a bowl, beat them well, put a good piece of butter in the pan, throw the eggs into it, and shake it constantly. “I am happy,” she added, “if this recipe pleases you.”

So there was no mystique, no secret ingredient,  nothing more than Frenchness and deftness. As a clumsy cook, who happens to love good omelettes, I know I could never compete. But is there not someone in Edinburgh who could show how,  serving  simple plain omelettes, herb omelettes, cheese omelettes, mushroom omelettes.The scope -  and, on my part,  the suggestion - is there. In Comiston Road, young Marie of the Marie Delices cafe restaurant, has scored a hit with her brilliant buckwheat crepes. Who is going to do likewise by opening  An Omelette and a Glass of Wine? The name is Elizabeth David’s of course.  But the same name, or something of the sort, could also be yours.
9 September 3014

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The two seasons

So which of the Edinburgh concert season grips you and to which, if either,  are you subscribing?   The Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s at the Usher Hall, with its emphasis, whenever possible, on what will sound good in these surroundings, or the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s, divided between the Usher Hall and Queen’s Hall, with programmes appropriate to each?

At one time the seasons were more clearly differentiated than they are now, with the SCO focusing on the territory - Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart -  to which it was better scaled than the RSNO. Gradually the RSNO, which was once by no means averse to performing Bach’s Brandenburg concertos or the St John Passion, retracted from the baroque and Haydn-Mozart repertoire.  Mahler, by then, was becoming the domain of big symphony orchestras,  and Schumann remained more their field of operation than that of the SCO. But now even this is changing. The SCO’s concerts are full of Schumann, and in the forthcoming season both orchestras are prominently featuring Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. It is a fascinating development, of a sort that shows how a small or smallish orchestra can be as  convincing in its playing of big symphonies as a “full” symphony orchestra.

Certainly the inroads an orchestra such as the SCO made an Brahms  have been startling - and a force, I would say, for the good, especially when the conductor has been of the calibre of Sir Charles Mackerras. Robin Ticciati’s Berlioz has been similarly revelatory. By reducing the old groundswell of cellos and double basses, such conductors have turned such composers into a different experience.

But what about Mahler? Will Robin Ticciati’s conducting of the SCO in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony in the Usher Hall on October 9 prove more rewarding than Sir Andrew Davis’s with the RSNO in the same surroundings on May 8, or sound disappointingly underweight?

Will the sudden great celestial   explosion in the slow movement  sound bigger and better when delivered by the RSNO than by the lighter-toned SCO? Theoretically it is bound to, but who can say?

And what, in that case, will happen to the finale? Will it sound like fine chamber music - as we can expect to happen in Ticciati’s performance with the SCO -  or will it sound merely listless, as sometimes happens even in weightier performances?

Far from treading on each other’s toes, the two performances could be just what we need in a single season, and there are good reasons for attending both of them.  They will certainly teach you more about the music, about how it can - or indeed should - sound. So which concert season is the one to book for? Ideally, I would dip. But it is a subject to which I shall be returning.
8 September  2010

The pizza path

Britain’s pizza chains are generally as bad as anywhere else’s outside Italy, but in Edinburgh, at least, there is good news. The justly-named La Favorita, an Italian-owned pizzeria in Leith Walk, has recently opened its own takeaway in Morningside Road. Delivery is not the quickest in town, which means that you need to place your order with foresight, but your pizzas arrive very cheerily in a bright yellow Fiat cinquecento.

La Favorita is not not just another pizzeria, nor is it the cheapest, though it has good offers, especially on Tuesdays - offerta Tuesday, as they call it. And it is really quite special, with log-fired ovens, excellent mozzarella, high-quality vegetables, and beautifully thin bases  as well as the choicest toppings among its assets - a real Italian job, in fact.

The pepperone pizza is fiercely fiery.  Starters include the indigenous riceballs of southern Italy.  There are polenta sticks, and even a well-priced selection of  interesting wines by the bottle. 

 And they are experimenting, not yet wholly successfully, with gluten-free pizza dough. Is gluten-free pizza a contradiction in terms? Not if La Favorita can prove otherwise. A more detailed report will follow. The Morningside takeway (let's  hope it develops into a restaurant) is at 350 Morningside Road, telephone 0131 447 4000.

6 September 2014

 

Obscuring the dates

If you think that chronological lucidity is vital to an orchestra’s concert brochure for the coming season, neither the Royal Scottish National Orchestra nor the Scottish Chamber Orchestra will win prizes this season for clarity of presentation.

Both brochures, in their different ways, are smart and snappy, though the RSNO’s is perhaps over-illustrated, and both contain the facts we want to find in them, even if these are not necessarily in the right order.  The SCO’s brochure, for instance, takes nine pages to reach the opening concert, though other concerts are listed in detail before that. In contrast the RSNO does rather better, coming to the point by announcing its opening programme on page five, and not confusing the issue beforehand with details of events coming later in the season. Yet  the RSNO’s opening concert, on its first  appearance in the brochure, does not stand out. You scarcely notice that the season has begun

Am I merely being pernickety? Perhaps, but a concert brochure should be a precise, sharp-edged, unconfusing statement of intent. The SCO’s opening concert, which is announced belatedly on page nine, is an attractive, eye-catching, not unserious full-page spread about the concert’s contents, linking the two works being performed, and explaining why.

As planned by Jonathan Mills, the Edinburgh Festival’s annual brochure has tended to be rather more strikingly presented, and this year it was refreshingly clear, though details of when the Festival began and ended were not perhaps as prominent as they should have been, with the closing concert in particular almost apologetically listed.

But the RSNO and SCO brochures, at least, contain plenty of good things, even if the RSNO seems excessively fixated by glossy pictures of how athletically the players spend their spare time - do we really want to know? - and by their conductor’s similar fondness for sport.

To details of the programmes themselves, and what’s worth hearing, I shall return in a later blog.
4 September 2014

The syllabus

After the Edinburgh Festival was over, there was a time when we used to wait with  something less than bated breath  for the unveiling of the Scottish National Orchestra’s winter season. If Karl Rankl or his successor Hans Swaorowsky was in charge, with one routine programme following another, this was not exciting news.

The syllabus, as it was sternly called, looked drab. Not until these plodding Viennese routiniers were succeeded in the1960s by Alexander Gibson did the concerts waken up and Sibelius - whose works had been banned by the churlish  Karl Rankl - began to form part of the programme planning, with Gibson doing all seven symphonies in his opening season.

Th Edinburgh Festival, which itself had seemed to be losing impetus  around this time, likewise suddenly galvanised itself by the appointment of Lord Harewood  as director, with his invention of themed festivals - like one-man shows as   Christopher Grier put it in The Scotsman.

Starting with Schoenberg, he proceeded to  Shostakovich, Tippett, Berlioz, and Boulez. Such things had never been done before in Edinburgh but they were now happening with a vengeance and transforming the Festival into a more bracingly adult event.

The knock-on effect was that the winter seasons similarly grew more exciting and Scottish Opera was founded.This was Scotland’s glorious moment, and it was seized by everybody who cared. Today the RSNO’s brochure is infinitely more colourful, but can the same be said of the actual programmes?  It’s a moot point.
3  September 2014 

How to survive the Festival

In the old days, if I may call them that, the week before  the start of the Edinburgh Festival was a time of anticipation. Princes Street, as you walked along it, seemed to have new atmosphere. Our batteries were about to be recharged. Exhilaration was in the air.

But the Festival was a much more clear-cut event at that time than it is now. The Fringe had not begun to sweep like a great tidal wave over everything in its path. Proceeding down the Royal Mile, you did not want to turn and flee.Though there were new faces everywhere, they did not overcrowd the city as we knew it.

Today the “official” festival has to be called the EIF to differentiate it from the rest. Too much has become not enough. The closing concert, with Giulini to conduct it, used to be an event. Now it tends to seem like just another concert.

Again, in the old days, I used to be asked what I planned toto do after the Festival. Keep my spirits up  was an immediate way to face the problem. Go to another festival was the way I solved it every year. It was one of the good things about being a music critic.  I was paid to go elsewhere and write about it. So, more often than not, I went straight to the Berlin Festival for operatic treats to match Edinburgh’s. The best year of all was when I spent a week in Berlin, then flew to Vienna to join the Scottish National Orchestra on its first major foreign tour, writing every night for three weeks, phoning my reviews to Edinburgh (a greatly time-consuming process in the days before computers) and chronicling the orchestra’s adventures  everywhere.

Peter Diamand once told me that he was baffled that that was how I wanted to lead my life after the Edinburgh Festival. He himself went to Peebles Hydro to recover. But then, as festival director, he had tensions and  obligations very different from mine.
2 September 2014

It is sad that the BBC SSO's future may again be in some doubt, but it has been in this situation before. In the early 1970s as one of its efforts to reduce costs, the mandarins at the BBC in London produced a document on the future of its music output which proposed, I seem to recall, the disbanding of 3 of the orchestras, the SSO being one. There was a huge public outcry as a result of which little if anything changed.

One solution discussed at that time was a formal association with Scottish Opera whose continued growth meant the SNO was no longer able to provide most of its orchestral requirements. The BBC SSO was an obvious solution and the orchestra did find itself playing for a series of performances of La Traviata conducted by its then Principal Conductor James Loughran. Unfortunately for the orchestra management in Queen Margaret Drive, its somewhat archaic Musicians' Union regulations meant that considerable additional payments had to be made to musicians for work outside the studio. Scottish Opera simply could not afford to continue down that route and tripartite negotiations failed to find a satisfactory solution.

So a freelance ensemble was formed from a nucleus of Leonard Friedman's Scottish Baroque Ensemble, the Sottish Philharmonia. From their ranks would soon emerge the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.



Posted by John Duffus to Conrad Wilson on Classical Music and Food at 31 August 2014 20:40