The trouble with Harry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

30 October 2014 

Triumph of time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

28 October 2014 

Back down the Reichenbach Falls

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

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

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

27 October 2014

Jolly omelettes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

25 October 2014 

This week's wine: White Burgundy

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

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

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

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

Runnicles is to depart

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transplanted tributes

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

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

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

This week's wine: Pinot Grigio

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Carmen caper

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

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

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

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

So it's a sponsorship deal

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

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

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

The editors in my life (16)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The editors in my life (15)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tricks or treats

Though this is no longer the best moment to be sipping Cotes de Provence - Southern France’s  pink wine at its palest and most delicious -  it is  a tipple dry enough and delicate enough to savour even when summer has gone.

Indeed, even in October, I am happy to get my hands on as much of it as I can afford. The trouble is that it has largely gone from the shelves by this time, and even if you find the odd bottle it is not likely to be going  cheap. In summer, £10 a bottle seems a fair price, but by chance Lidl’s in Edinburgh has received a consignment which  it is selling at £5.99.

Like Aldi’s, as we know, Lidl is a house of bargains, some of them better than others, but this one is good enough to warrant sampling. Last weekend we bought a few bottles and have not been disappointed.

Of all France’s rose wines, the Provencal ones have long struck me as the tastiest, and even at what may seem too high a price the quality of the wine rings true (Rhones also tend to be good).

So many roses, bought on offer,  quickly pall that I hesitate to try them. Spain’s deep-hued roses, in my experience, are seldom as good as you hope, and California’s pallid sweet Zinfandels are no match for its reds.

How much of the rose wine we drink is merely a red-and-white blend  I would not like to guess, but the quantity is surely increasing. Provence, however,  insists on purity, and it shows.
9 October 2014

Bizet banned

The news that a forthcoming production of Bizet’s Carmen has been dropped by the State Opera of Western Australia because the story is set in a cigarette factory, and therefore conflicts with local anti-smoking rulings, seems to denote the start of a new phase in the world’s smoking restrictions.

Would it not be enough simply to ban smoking on the stage of the theatre during the performance? Seemingly not. The opera company has issued a statement to the effect that it cares about the health and well-being of its staff, performers, and audiences, “which means promoting health messages and not portraying any activities that  could be seen to promote unhealthy behaviour.”

But can it really be said that Carmen does that? I would be inclined to think not. Carmen, after all, is one of the operatic world’s long-established anti-heroines. The question that surely does arise is what next? Will Wolf-Ferrari’s delightful comedy Susanna’s Secret be banned because its heroine is a private smoker?

And will all those famous black-and-white movies of the nineteen-thirties and nineteen-forties vanish from the screen because they portray smoking as something seductive and sophisticated?

Will it mean the loss of all those memorable films of Humphrey Bogart (who admittedly died of cancer of the oesophagus), Dick Powell, Lauren Bacall, William Powell, Myrna Loy, Bette Davis, and Jack Nicholson, to name just a few?  Buy your DVDs now, even if, like me, you have not smoked for forty years and no not intend to restart.
8 October 2014  

My lunch with Pierre Monteux

It should have been the highlight of my years in the London office of The Scotsman, and in a way it was - though not the way I hoped or expected it to be.

Pierre Monteux, the doyen of French musicians, had just been appointed conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra at the age of 86. The year was 1962, and he had agreed to have lunch with me and talk about his plans.

We would meet, he said, at the Knightsbridge hotel where he stayed whenever he was in Britain.  But when I turned up at 1pm on the agreed day to meet the man who had first sensationally conducted The Rite in Paris in 1913, he was not there. He had been seen sitting in the foyer, I was told, but had gone shopping with his  wife.  By the time they returned, it was too late for lunch. He was tired, so  we arranged to meet at the same time on the same day the following week. But the  following week the same thing happened.

Yet  who could feel impatient with the oldest and finest French conductor in the world? A third date was set and this time it happened. Sitting  in the foyer, complete with walrus moustache and smiling benignly,  was the man who had first drawn Stravinsky’s high, eerie bassoon notes from page one of the mighty score. Small and plump, he could have been mistaken for Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot.  But it was unquestionably Monteux in person - he who had brought  Petrushka and Daphnis et Chloe into the world, as well as The Rite, and whom I had last heard in the Theatre des Champs-Elysees (scene of his early triumph) in  a mammoth programme with Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique as prelude, followed by Debussy’s  Gigues, Iberia, and Rondes de Printemps, with Respighi’s Pines of Rome as finale.

Initial formalities completed - “Shall we proceed to the restaurant” - Monteux decided that he would like some meat while we discussed his future ideas. But persuading him to turn his attention to Stravinsky proved surprisingly difficult. No doubt he had said it all before, hundreds of times. At any rate it soon became apparent that he wanted to talk about Brahms and only about Brahms, a composer now closer to his heart and about whom his views  were growing somewhat  heated.

Suddenly, in the middle of a mouthful of food, he choked and collapsed. Waiters rushed to the table, Mrs Monteux took command and asked for him to be carried upstairs. Fearing that I had killed him, I remained, as requested, at the table.

Eventually Mrs Monteux returned. “All is well,” she said. “It was only the milk he  had been  drinking before lunch. I should    have locked it away, but he had got his hands on it.”

Severe indigestion was the result. He had been put to bed, she said, but was recovering. Thus ended my lunch with Pierre Monteux. Though we never met again, I felt truly glad that he lived to conduct the LSO.
6 October 2014

A night at the opera

The Marx Brothers got it right. If any opera is worth relishing it is Il Trovatore.  For some people, it’s true, it remains “Verdi’s Potboiler.” For others, however, it is the opera of operas, a tremendous work that transcends the supposed inanities of its melodramatic plot, and gets better all the time, so long as it receives the superb performances it deserves.

The Berlin State Opera’s recent production conducted by Daniel Barenboim is one that captures its greatness to the hilt. Now that it is out on DVD you can see it for yourself. The performance searingly reveals all the music’s glories with the help of a thrilling cast, a great orchestra, and a compelling chorus (how has Scottish Opera hoodwinked itself into believing that it can flourish without a chorus  when at one time it hired the services of its own excellent chorus to the Edinburgh Festival for Jean Pierre Ponnelle’s racy production of Rossini’s Cenerentola? This season the company  is solving its self-created problem by importing a foreign production of Rossini comic masterpiece).

The Berlin State Opera’s chorus, choreographed to perfection inside the panelled wooden box in which the entire production takes place, is one of th glories of the performance. Never, to my eyes and ears, has the Anvil Chotus taken fire more fiercely.

But to say that the cast lives up to the chorus is an understatement. As Leonora, Anna Netrebko makes us hang on her every note. Placido Domingo, his voice coaxed by Barenboim down into its new baritone regions, is a grizzled but passionate Count di Luna, bringing a desolation to his villainy that only a great artist can supply. As Manrico, Gaston Rivero rises to the lyrical beauty of the role as well as to its high noes, and the flame-haired Marina Prudenskaya, her feet seeming scarcely able to hold her up,  shows herself to be the Azucena of our time.

Philipp Stolzl’s production, a mingling of Velasquez with circus, top hats with suits of armour, swords with pistols, shadows with trapdoors, is a miracle of surrealism. Even what looks like Salvador Dali, complete with twirled moustache,  puts in an appearance.

So buy the disc  swiftly. At £10 from Amazon, it is a snip, searing in impact, fascinating in design, costing infinitely less than a theatre ticket. What was once dismissed as operatic tosh now speaks for itself as a Verdi masterpiece of the choicest sort.
5 October 2014

Restaurant of the month: Osteria del Tempo Perso, Edinburgh

In Italy an osteria is an inn, or hostelry, selling drink and perhaps also (though not necessarily)  a certain amount of food, with the result that the atmosphere can be  more like that of the sort of austere Edinburgh pub that Hugh MacDiarmid used to  favour than something more convivially Italian.

It’s not a name Italians tend to bestow on the places they  open  in Britain, where trattoria, ristorante, caffe, and - nowadays especially - pizzeria are the words they prefer. But since the beginning of 2014 Edinburgh has had its own osteria, the Osteria del Tempo Perso, on the site of a previous, more routine Italian restaurant at 208 Bruntsfield Place, just opposite Falko’s excellent and justly  popular German cafe, which makes its own pastries, bread, and ice cream as well as good coffee and tea.

The Proustian theme of the Osteria del Tempo Perso  (Inn of Lost Time) speaks for itself. The place is obsessed with clocks, not strictly matched to chronological perfection,  but the decor is simple and smart - a black and white  tiled floor, interesting chairs, deftly subdued lighting, and luminously shelved bottles of wine - contributing to  the slightly dotty air of a production of Ravel’s L’Heure Espagnole.

Its opening hours are generous. Lunch extends all afternoon and dinner well into the night, which makes it a good place to pass your Proustian time.

The wines, all Italian, are knowingly chosen. The pastas, using recipes originating in the  parent restaurant (of which this one is the sole experimental offshoot) in Lazio,  are creative. Only the coffee, on this week’s evidence not up to true Italian standards, can be said to disappoint.

The set lunch ranges from a single course for just under £7 to three courses for £14. If you are sampling the single course, ensure that you eat a home-made pasta such as mezze maniche, which looks like short-cut rigatoni or chunky penne served in a gleaming cacio e pepe sauce, cacio being an old Italian word for cheese.

This is really quite special, and sufficiently plentiful to be a meal in itself. The cheese that supplies the main taste is sheep’s pecorino Romano, emulsified with black pepper and olive oil. The result has all the flavour of authenticy. But the pappardelle in meat sauce seem equally enticing and so is  the seafood risotto with ample clams in their shells, fat little prawns and squid.

The service is friendly and informative.  Dinner menu extends the range and the personal touch and the chocolate cake dessert, despite rude comments in The Scotsman, is dry because that is what it is meant to be.

Osteria del Tempo Perso, telepjone 0131 221 1777

5 October 2014

Thursday's wine: Something Sardinian, or preferably Sicilian

If you like visiting Sardinia, you will know about  Vermentino. This, they say, is the wine to drink there. It is a bright and peachy white and in the south of France they also drink a popular version of it under the same name.

Yes, but from either source  is it a wine that travels well? Successfully enough, I would say, so long as you do hope too highly of it.   The great wine authority Hugh Johnson mentions neither sort - nor, for that matter, Sardinia - in his enjoyably substantial book, Wine: A Life Uncorked, so you have been warned.

In fact, it is a thoroughly quaffable wine, though perhaps it is now getting a bit late in the year to be quaffing it. Nevertheless Waitrose’s Italian version “Le Stelle” at £8.99 is invitingly described as deliciously zippy. It may conceivably be slightly superior to its French version  from the Languedoc, romantically described as “nighttime harvested.”

Both go with seafood and pasta, and are a match for the usual sauces,  though I suspect I would get tired of these wines  rather quickly. Both strike me as somewhat overpriced for what they are, and the white Sicilian Insolia I drank today in one of Edinburgh’s best and newest Italian restaurants, the Osteria del Tempo Perso in Bruntsfield, seemed to me in every way more interesting.

I’ll be writing soon about this admirable osteria. The crispness of its Insolia, served by the glass for just under £6, is more to my taste than the sunniness of Vermentino, and it is good news that M&S have announced it as something innovatory on their wine  list.
2 October 2014

The Berlioz sound

Hannah Nepil, in the Financial Times, is a new name among concert reviewers. But on the evidence of her review of the recent London performance of the Grande Messe des Morts given by the Philharmonia Orchestra, she really must stop calling Berlioz a noisy composer.

“There’s nothing quite like a deafening requiem,” she asserted, “and few are quite as deafening as Berlioz’s.”  Such accusations were made about him so often in the past that I am surprised to see them suddenly reappearing.

The Philharmonia performance,  she said, “felt like a siege, with the hapless audience waiting to see where the next attack would come from amid the crossfire.”

Berlioz, she added, once declared that if he were threatened with the destruction of all his works save one,  he would crave mercy for the Messe des Morts. “This piece,” she remarked, “needs no mercy; it would sooner destroy than be destroyed.”

Yet the point about Berlioz’s Requiem is not how loud it is, but how ravishingly quiet so much of it turns out to be.  It is a characteristic of all his greatest music.

Does Hannah Nepil, with her fingers in her ears, fail to notice this? Does the soft swish of  six pairs of cymbals in the Sanctus not strike her as one of the most riveting effects in all music? Is the sound of widely spaced flutes and trombones not worthier of mention  than the work’s brassy brilliance?  If the Philharmonia’s performance of the Requiem was too loud, she should have blamed the conductor, Esa Pekka Salonen, rather than the composer.

Not until he wrote L’Enfance du Christ in his later years did Berlioz’s audiences recognise the restraint and purity of his music and the shock was so great that his listeners thought he had mended his ways and changed his style - to which he sadly replied that it was only his subject he had changed, not his style.

In recent years, Robin Ticciati and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra have shown what soft subtlety of tone they can bring to the Symphonie Fantastique as much as to Nuits d’Ete. That’s the Berlioz sound, and Ticciati knows how to produce it.
1 October 2014