This week's wine: Cloudy Bay

Served by my son at lunch between Christmas and New Year, this for many people is the wine of wines, hard to get, delicious to taste, living up to the mystique of its name, and making other New Zealand whites seem hard and aggressive in comparison.

Some of my friends went for no special reason to New Zealand for Christmas this year.  If it was to drink Cloudy Bay, I can see why. Is it all it is made out to be? On this evidence yes, even if at times you may suspect it is over-hyped and deliberately kept in short supply. Light and silky, yet sumptuous, it matched to admiration the prawns, Parma ham, potato salad, cheese and the home-made chocolate truffle cake brought along for the lunch by my youngest daughter.

Amazon, I discovered the other day, was down to its last bottle, by no means overpriced at £21 and thus a great temptation to buy. But since a second bottle does not always seem quite so good as a first, we moved on the following day to a ridiculously cheap Tavel I had bought at Lidl’s. Pink wines are traditionally summer wines, but Tavel - once considered the best of all French pinks, though now somewhat neglected - has a bit of body and seemed to go fine with Christmas odds and ends.

A product of the Rhone, it is deeper in colour and richer in flavour than my favourite pale, astringent Provencal pink. It made a nice change, and I shall be going back for more.
30 December 2014

Face to face

With the death of John Freeman at the age of 99, memories of Face to Face, the benchmark television interview series of half a century ago, come flooding back. These were real interviews - direct, probing, lucid, revealing, properly serious - with real celebrities. 

Everything fitted in, from the superb Felix Topolski sketches to the introductory music from Berlioz’s Francs Juges overture - “ what’s this?”, people continually asked as  the memorable strains kept unwinding. Then the first glimpse of the interviewee and the back of Freeman’s head - you never saw his face. Useless to say now  that he will be missed. He has been missed for fifty or sixty years,  after he went on to become a diplomat. 

But the interviews with Otto Klemperer, Evelyn Waugh, Bertrand Russell, Lord Reith, Tony Hancock, and Gilbert Harding linger on, and some of them, including the gloriously laconic ones with Klemperer and Waugh, can still be viewed on You Tube. Watch them and admire.

22 December 2014

Christmas wines

Belatedly,  I am about to start buying my Christmas wines - a fizz, a white, a red, a pudding white, the things that traditionally keep us going throughout the day. Usually I do it sooner than this, which is why, for the sake of simplicity, I am confining myself to Waitrose. Along with M&S it is my favourite supermarket for wine and, though its best bottles are not cheap, it is by no means  so expensive as it is made out to be.

So my choice is going to be:-

 Prosecco. Waitrose sells a good selection of this popular Italian fizz. The one I like best is a Valdobiandene Oro Puro, a benchmark Prosecco Superiore, light, delicate, and appetising, currently reduced from £13.49 to £8.99.

Chablis. My favourite white burgundy, superb with good smoked salmon or other fish. With the right mixture of mineral and steel, and with a sensation of butter, this one, a 2013 from the established house of Louis Moreau ,is reduced from £13.99 to £9.99.

 Not quite a claret, but outstanding of its kind, this First Press Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon fr0m California is something special to match your main dish. An outstanding, complex tipple reduced from £17.99 to £14.39.

Not yet decided, but if we can rise to it a half-bottle of Waitrose’s special luscious Sauternes, Chateau Suduiraut at £16.99, might do the trick.  Otherwise it is likely to be Muscat de Beaumes de Venise at £7.99 a half bottle as usual.  21 December 2014

Celebrating Carl Nielsen

John McLeod’s latest work, commissioned from the 80-year-old Scottish composer by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra for performance  in January, is both timely and apt. A tribute to the volatile Dane, Carl Nielsen, whose 150th anniversary falls in 2015 along with that of Sibelius, it is piquantly entitled Out of the Silence and takes the form of an imagined conversation - unpredictable and disputatious - between Nielsen and McLeod himself,  thereby anticipating a request in the latest issue of Standpoint magazine for Nielsen, rather than Sibelius, to be the focus of attention in the coming year.

Given the choice between the two Nordic composers for his tribute, McLeod, a third Nordic composer, had no difficulty making his decision. The quirky, maverick Nielsen was his man.  Sibelius, in comparison, seemed too stern and awe-inspiring, and what McLeod has produced is in many ways a merry, as well as sympathetic,  portrait filled with the warmth and diversity of Nielsen himself.

Significantly it is not a theme and variations - the traditional tribute from one composer to another - but a response to two of Nielsen’s works, the Inextinguishable Symphony and the Clarinet Concerto, which hover and tumble and explode around McLeod’s score like aspects of the Northern Lights - apart from the fact that McLeod’s music, like Nielsen’s, is full of humanity.

I first heard a Nielsen  symphony during my adolescence, when Walter Susskind and what is now the RSNO performed the Sinfonia Espansiva in the early 1950s. When Leonard Bernstein recorded the same work, along with the other symphonies, a decade later, it sounded much tamer. Bernstein was a conductor you had to see in order to savour. But Nielsen still stands in need of the devotion Susskind and Bernstein gave him. Which,  of course, is one reason for McLeod’s forthcoming tribute - which will be played, with Joseph Swensen as conductor, alongside Nielsen’s Clarinet Concerto and Sibelius’s very different Symphony No 4 - as well as for the article in Standpoint.
18 December 2014

The editors in my life (22) - Lunches

The Scotsman’s Edinburgh Festival lunches continued throughout my entire career on the paper, but the best of them were the formal ones presided over by Alastair Dunnett, the originator of the idea and the editor best equipped to make it blossom.

 Though formal, they were not stiff. Guests, interwoven with critics, were astutely positioned along both sides of the board room table. Dunnett sat at the top and his assistant editor Eric Mackay, who was less enthusiastic about these events, opposite him at the other end. Dunnett, rightly, got the principal guest to sit beside him, but discussions were impressively democratic, with everyone joining in.

Only once do I remember someone grabbing the limelight and that was the violinist Isaac Stern, who addressed us all non-stop. Dunnet liked him a lot, for his ability to sustain conversation but I thought him a bit of a loudmouth. The people I liked best were the quieter ones, such as the conductors  Sir John Barbirolli and Carlo Maria Giulini, whose tears flowed as we discussed the beauty of Monteverdi’s madrigals and whose first music teacher looked “just like Brahms”. I had the good luck to be seated next to each of them.

On another occasion, sitting opposite the Festival director Lord Harewood, I discovered that we had a mutual interest in the  Peebles-born music critic Cecil Gray, long since dead. Gray, a composer of lofty Berliozian operas on Virgilian subjects, was a vituperative critic of most other composers, with the exception of Bartok and the mysterious sinister Bernard van Dieren, and who wrote  a destructive book called Contingencies - worth tracking down - in which he demolished Tchaikovsky as  a composer of mincing waltzes.

I never met him - he was slightly before my time - but Harewood had once gone on a river trip with him and recalled him as a rather fat, perpetually sweating man - “wonderfully outspoken but basically sad.”

Perhaps the best moment of all came when I found myself sitting opposite Leila Gencer, the Turkish soprano whom Peter Diamand, Harewood’s successor, had invited to sing Mary Queen of Scots, and whose threadbare performance I had  reviewed in the paper that morning. She chatted politely to me, but Diamand, who was also at the lunch, came up to me afterwards with his Cheshire cat smile saying he had been greatly entertained by the fact that Gencer and I each pretended that we did not know who the other person was.
17 December 2014

This week's wine: Brouilly

Brouilly, like Chenas and Morgon, is one of the best reds of the Beaujolais region, but rather hard to find. Yet it was in an Edinburgh supermarket, Lidl, that  I came upon a particularly nice Brouilly the other day, part of a substantial offer of good French wines attractively priced.

This one was from those admirable Beaujolais producers Collin-Bourisset. At £6.99 a bottle for the 2013 vintage, it seemed startlingly good value.

Lidl, though not famed for its wine department, has clearly been trying to catch up on its great  rival Aldi, whose wine is highly rated, and with a master of wine as consultant it is making  notable strides. In  flavour its Brouilly is a true Beaujolais, very quaffable, though my personal favourite remained Beaujolais-Villages.
 To buy a few bottles of Brouilly  for Christmas drinking would be a good idea. No doubt a good Chateau de Brouilly from the same producers would be even better, so let  us hope that  Lidl get a consignment of that also.

Meanwhile another Lidl red is worth a try.  It is a 2013 Gigondas, flower of the Rhone. Though a little on the young side, it is a big juicy wine with overtones of Chateauneuf-du-Pape, but better than many supermarket specimens of that much bragged about wine.
11  December 2014

The debate continues

It now seems that the coughing child whose parents Kyung Wha Chung rebuked in the middle of a Mozart violin sonata at the Royal Festival Hall was not only coughing but giggling and distracting  people sitting close to her in the front row of the stalls.  So what could reasonably have been done about it other than in some way take action?

To intervene oneself could have been counter productive. Not all members of an audience would respond amicably if nudged and asked to control their offspring.  If a similar offence was committed by someone texting on a mobile phone, the situation could indeed quite easily have turned nasty.

Sir Georg Solti knew what he was doing when he got attendants to move the member of the audience who was sitting coughing directly behind him while he was conducting at Covent Garden. How he did it in the midst of a Wagner performance is hard to say, but it certainly worked.

For a performer to intervene publicly, however, tends to be tricky. When Kyung Wha Chung did so  the other day, she clearly irritated the critic of The Times, who evidently did not seen to be enjoying the concert very much  in any case.

The occasion a few years ago when the Hungarian pianist Andras Schiff stopped his performance at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, announced lucidly to the audience “A little pause for coughing” and walked off the platform for a few minutes, seemed to cause more shock than useful effect.  The atmosphere did not grow toxic, as The Times claimed it did at Kyung Wha Chung’s recital, but it did grow uncomfortable - though Schiff was right, I thought, to make his point without singling out an individual member of the audience for attack.

Whenever James Loughran,  in his days as conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, came on to the platform before the audience was fully settled, he stood staring balefully into the auditorium until silence reigned and everyone was sitting down . Only then did  the performance begin.

But the irascible Finnish conductor Paavo Berglund went further than that while conducting the RSNO one night  in Aberdeen in the 1980s. Distracted by unrest in the auditorium, he stopped the orchestra and did not restart until order was restored.
9 December 2014

The Kyung Wha Chung incident

Even if I had been present at Kyung Wha Chung’s recital in London - which I admit I was not -  I would perhaps have been wrong to take on trust the statement made by the critic of The Times about what the violinist said to the parents of the coughing child between movements of a Mozart sonata.  John Duffus, though he was not there either, presents the picture somewhat differently in his reply to my earlier blog on the subject.  The Royal Festival Hall is a big, acoustically imperfect auditorium. The Korean violinist was unlikely to have spoken very loudly. How many people in a packed house actually heard what she said? Enough to turn the atmosphere, as The Times put it,  instantly “toxic “?

Some people who say that they did hear what Chung said have suggested that the violinist asked the parents to take the child out for a glass of water, and not that they should wait until she was older before bringing her to a concert.  It sounds possible. But, on a night of generalised concert-hall coughing, was the perhaps  highly-strung player right to single out the child in any way at all?  Was Kyung Wha Chung not simply giving an intimate sonata recital in the wrong surroundings? Does a performer have any right to draw attention publicly to one innocuous member of the audience?

As a long-established critic, I am aware that audiences often behave badly. For a performer to answer back when irritated  is nothing new. I can recall an occasion when Sir Georg Solti had a  cougher ejected from a seat immediately behind the conductor’s podium at Covent Garden.    And I can remember an occasion during a Ring cycle at Bayreuth being personally chided by a fellow member of the audience for persistently being the last in row H to return  to his seat after the interval. But at least I could reply with a smile, since the orchestra had not yet started playing - though you cannot at Bayreuth see whether the conductor is present or not.
6 December 2014

Curbing your cough

Though Kyung Wha Chung’s recital in Perth the other day passed without incident, the same was not the case in London where, between movements of a Mozart sonata at the Royal Festival Hall, she drew attention to a coughing child - many other members of the audience were also  coughing - by telling the girl’s parents that it would have been better to wait until she was older before bringing her to a concert.

After such a put-down, reported the critic of The Times, the atmosphere in the hall turned toxic. No doubt, after a ten year absence from the concert platform caused by a damaged finger, the famous Korean violinist was in a high state of tension. Audiences can be irritating, as the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas recently  made plain when a similar incident involving a child occurred during one of his concerts in America.

But coughers will always be with us, and singling out an inoffensive child for remonstrance sounds like over-reaction to me. And to The Times, which reduced its estimate of her recital to a two-star rating.
5 December 2014

The editors in my life (21)

My first Edinburgh Festival as The Scotsman’s music critic showed me how much had changed in my absence. With Lord Harewood as director, programmes had become more focused  and padding had been swept away. Janacek, previously little more than a name, was composer of the year.  A flop in London, he was transformed by the Prague National Theatre into one of the poets of the operatic stage, his Katya Kabanova hauntingly performed by singers wholly inside their roles, the action - one scene beneath a beautiful big tree stays rooted in the memory - perfectly matched to the haunting and touching  realism  of  the plot.  When Chekhov first gained his foothold in Britain in the 1920s, with John Gielgud among his exponents, the effect  must have been a bit like that.

As Katya’s obverse, in a fiercer, more abstract production, there was From the House of the Dead, again masterfully sung. Having the chance to write about these performances was one of my first great operatic moments as a serious newspaper critic. And Alastair Dunnett, one of the most dedicated of festival-goers, gave me full editorial support, with lots of space,  attentively reading what I had written and never interfering.

As a total believer in the Festival, Dunnett backed Lord Harewood in various ways, delighting in John Calder’s literary conferences and proposing to me  that I write a full-scale profile of Harewood,  giving me all the time I wanted - he did the same when Harewood was succeeded by Peter Diamand - to produce it. I needed no second bidding.  And in the background Dunnett also did the things an enlightened editor should have done, initiating the board room lunches when, six times each festival, he introduced his staff critics to major festival performers, enabling us all  to converse while he, sitting at one end of the long table with his deputy Eric MacKay at the other, presided over the flow of talk.

Sometimes he sought help, and I recall one occasion being asked if I could collect the guitarist Julian Bream, whose morning recital I had been reviewing at Leith Town Hall, in a taxi and whisk him to The Scotsman. Though this clearly went beyond a critic’s normal duties, Dunnett was such an ingratiating person I did not mind, and neither, for that matter, did Bream.

That was the time when, arriving late in the board room, I slipped on the polished floor and fell flat on my back at the feet of the aloof Bernard Levin who, doubtless assuming me to be some  drunken Scottish mediocrity, stared disdainfully down at me and immediately turned his back. Not all Dunnett’s guests were gracious - though the conductor Sir John Barbirolli, asking quietly  if I could sneak him another glass of whisky, certainly was.
3 December 2014

Memories: La Cenerentola

Scottish Opera’s new production of Rossini’s Cenerentola, which is being shared with Strasbourg, received such glum reviews, especially from The Times, that it brought memories flooding back of the famous old Edinburgh Festival production staged at the King’s Theatre during Peter Diamand’s reign as Festival director. With Teresa Berganza, the brightest star in the Diamand firmament, as Cinderella, it marked one of the first appearances of Diamand’s own Festival opera company, in a  striking black-and-white production by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle that was eventually taken to La Scala,  Milan.

Those were the days, my friends, which we thought would never end. It was not that the production was the greatest imaginable - it had its characteristic Ponnelle flaws - but  it was staged with such style, wit, polish, and irresistible zest that it stuck in the memory. The cast was classy, and not just dependent on a single singer. Claudio Abbado, on his way to becoming the most masterly Rossinian of his period, conducted. The Scottish Opera Chorus, which then still existed and knew how to show its paces, provided dapper support.

By the time the show reached La Scala, it had been slightly modified, but not to its detriment. The chorus’s monochrome  costumes had changed to red. Berganza was succeed by the similarly gifted Frederika von Stade. But  the gloriously spindly Paolo Montarsolo was still the tetchy Don Magnifico and Francisco Araiza and Claudio Desderi were the brilliant Ramiro and Dandini.

Happily the Scala version  dated fron a time when internationally celebrated performances could go straight on to DVD, which was why I found myself watching it, with renewed pleasure, a week or two ago. Abaddo’s conducting was seductively spruce, though it was sad that there was not a glimpse of him on screen.  The Italian articulation was as zippy  as could be. Though Von Stade struck me as not quite so haunting as Berganza, she sang exquisitely. And Montarsolo was a wonderful old rascal, even better than Ian Wallace in Glyndebourne days under Vittorio Gui’s conductorship. The way that DVD keeps fine productions of yesteryear alive is one of the miracles of opera.

A pity this did not happen when Scottish Opera staged Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers at the Edinburgh Festival in  the 1970’s or when Janet Baker sang in the Trojans.
1 December 2014