This week's wine: Montagny

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

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

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

The editors in my life (20)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week's wine: More Macon

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

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

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

Memories: The Milano, Edinburgh

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

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

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

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

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

Programme planning

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

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

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

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

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

The editors in my life (19)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Runnicles does it again

Runnicles does it again

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week's wine: A few good whites

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

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

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

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

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

Usage or misusage

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

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

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

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

This week's wine: Gruner Veltliner

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

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

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

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

Wagner Nights

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

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

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

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

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

This week's wine: Gewürztraminer

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

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

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

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

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

The editors in my life (18)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The editors in my life (17)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week's wine: Klein Riesling

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

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

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

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