Rejoice rejoice!

Intimate performances of Handel’s Messiah, at one time impossible to find in Britain, are nowadays the norm, and life has become better because of it.

Yet, despite their welcomely smaller scale, not all intimate performances are good ones, and few are quite as good as the Dunedin Consort’s in the close acoustics of the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh, where this year’s showed exactly what a good performance should sound like.

Though not always of quite the most impeccable polish, its three-hour span - even when taken fast, as it now usually is, Messiah remains a long work, with plenty of scope for minor mishaps - it was preceded on this occasion by an afternoon Messiah for Children from the same forces and was due to be followed the next night by a further performance at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery.

Despite this pressure on the tiny group of singers and instrumentalists - and the  smaller the group the more  exposed the detail -  the results  possessed an authority, vitality, and responsiveness that went far beyond the mere notes of the music.

With the orchestra mostly on the conductor’s left and the choristers -  twelve in all, four of them the soloists - on his right, detail was needle-sharp, light, alert, never limp, even in the flare-up of the Hallelujah Chorus.

Words were crystal clear, rhythms bouncing, cadences keenly pushed into the textures without old-fashioned plink-plonks, and orchestral descriptiveness - Handel’s flair for onomatopoeia - was jabbingly vivid.

The endearingly wandering sheep moved with a due sense of comedy. The soloists were Mhairi Lawson, Rowan Hellier, Matthew Long, and Matthew Brook. The little band of altos had a counter-tenor planted in their midst, an audible and striking effect. John Butt, one hand on the harpsichord, the other shooting aloft, was the irresistibly unflagging conductor.
29 December 2015

Messiah Days

Times have changed for Handel’s Messiah since I first reviewed a performance of it in The Scotsman in the 1960s.

On that occasion the Edinburgh Royal Choral Union’s annual performance, given at noon on New Year’s Day in the Usher Hall, was a heavyweight event, a penitential antidote in notoriously alcohol-free surroundings  to the previous day’s jollifications.

I dreaded it, and wrote a preview, maligned by stuffy readers, asking why it always had to be Messiah, portentously performed by a big choir and dreary orchestra, featuring star soloists who perhaps did not even know each other and a Hallelujah Chorus for which everybody, audience included, stood up. The conductor in those days was Herrick Bunney, much more of a Bachian (an admirable one) than an exuberant Handelian. He took the annual ritual as it had been handed down to him, and any changes he made were seldom for the better. In response the audience brought flasks of tea and sandwich lunches for the long interval.

“Crumbs in the corridors,” my predecessor Christopher Grier once sighed. It was hardly an event for real Handelians, who loved his other oratorios also, to look forward to.

Today such performances still exist in Britain, but circumstances have  generally changed for the better. Modern slimline performances, sung at cracking speeds by small choruses and accompanied by stylish orchestras, are the order of the day.  Colin Davis and Charles Mackerras,while still employing quite large forces, were the first to make the move towards lighter, springier rhythms, with soloists who knew how to achieve recognisable musical unity of purpose.  Today, even better, we are able to hear the work in smaller, more intimate halls, sung by choristers who are themselves quite often the soloists.

In Scotland, the John Currie Singers were the first to set the ball rolling at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh. Now it is the Dunedin Consort, directed by the effervescent John Butt, whose performance could be said to tick all the Handelian boxes. Even if you hear no other Christmas performances, make sure you hear this one at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh on December 20 or The Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow on the 21st. You will not even have to rise to your feet for the Hallelujah Chorus and the bar will doubtless be open at the interval.
19 December 2015  

This Week's Wine: Pinot Grigio

Pinot Grigio, the white Venetian wine which in recent years has spread throughout the rest of Italy with the ease - or so its detractors  would claim -  of cholera, now has other European versions as well as plenty in the New World.

But the Veneto remains its authentic home, producing bottles as good and as bad as ever, though the Pinot Grigio listed by Marks and Spencer as one of its wines of the month in fact comes from Pavia, south of Milan.

Pavia, too, routinely produces plenty of junk wine, as well as a foaming red which people love or loathe. But M&S’s Pavese Pinot, reduced umpromisingly from £11 t0 £5, is really rather good, clean, sparky, and not at all drab - in other words a genuine bargain which, drunk very cold, would brighten anyone’s Christmas party.

At a different extreme, M&S’s Macon-Villages Uchizy has not been reduced from £11, which is admittedly not particularly high for a decent white burgundy, though there are others just as good available for less.

Waitrose’s Champteloup Muscadet Sevre-et-Maine is not a white burgundy at all but is certainly a good Loire, worth every penny of its £7.99 price tag, possessing all the frisky petillance you would hope for from a wine bottled on its lees. Drink it with a bowl of mussels and be happy.
18 December 2015

Triumphant in Scotland

With the death of Luc Bondy at the age of 67, Scottish Opera lost one of the most gifted stage directors in its history.

He only worked once for the company, on a production of Verdi’s Macbeth in 1999, and its cost was crippling - Scottish Opera, at the time when Richard Armstrong was musical director, took years to recover from it.

But it was worth all the effort on the part of the company and the festival, and it was also seen in Vienna and Bordeaux.  Ever since Glyndebourne had launched the very first Edinburgh Festival with Macbeth in 1947, starring the great Margherita Grandi as Lady Macbeth, Verdi’s early drama, very difficult to bring off, had held a special place in Edinburgh’s annals.  In the 1970s, Scottish Opera staged it for the first time, in a gory David Pountney production starring Galina Vichnevskaya in a vivid scarlet dress for the supper scene, described by one critic as “a bad night at the Macbeths.”

But Luc Bondy, with Brian McMaster’s support, did it differently, as a pure ensemble piece, as good as they come, in a production in which every movement of every member of the chorus meant something. It was a riveting evening. (Bondy was also a specialist in the Shakespeare play).

Born in Zurich and once described as “Swiss with a twist of French,”  Bondy was a man of impeccable cultural pedigree. His grandfather was an impresario in Prague, his father the editor of a French literary magazine, his mother a dancer daunted by the Nazis. In Paris he studied drama and mime under the famous Jacques Lecoq. McMaster, as director of the Edinburgh Festival, had already recognised his brilliance and had presented, to high acclaim, Covent Garden’s full-length five-act version of Verdi’s Don Carlos at the Festival Theatre.  His Turn of the Screw, imported later from Aix-en-Provence, was peculiar but undoubtedly haunting, with a Peter Quint who lurched around  the stage like Frankenstein’s monster.

But with McMaster’s departure, Bondy’s opera productions in Edinburgh came to a halt.  By then his career was expanding internationally, in Vienna, Paris, New York - though his Tosca at the Met was loathed by the conservative audience, accustomed to the ornate lavishness of Franco Zefirrelli.  Facing a torrent of booing on the opening night, he tersely informed the audience that he was scandalised by the fact that they were scandalised. The production survives around the world. Bondy died last month, having suffered from cancer for most of his professional life.
13 December 2015

This Week's Wine: Montagny

Mountainy, like Saint Veran, is one of the good white burgundies, and Waitrose’s current version of it, a 2013 premier cru les coeres, is very good indeed.

True, at £14.99 a bottle, it is not particularly cheap, but its vibrancy speaks for itself. We had it with salmon en croute and with seared scallops a la Fred the Shred, and it was a great success, shared last week with a close musical friend.

As prelude, a 2013 low yield Marsanne from the young wine-producing Simpsons of Sainte Rose, with an alcohol content of 14 and a half per cent, seemed overwhelming, even when thoroughly chilled.

Costing £9.99 from Naked Wines of Norfolk, also available from Majestic, it needed a different occasion for its huge fruitiness to blossom and would have been much too powerful for what we were eating that night.

At £8.99, Waitrose’s Macon-Villages Cave de Lugny is pleasing but more ordinary. Reduced  by 25 per cent to the same price until December 12,  Louis Jadot’s reliable Macon-Villages Chapelle aux Loups from the same supermarket is more interesting, and can be more enthusiastically recommended as an aperitif.
3 December 2015

Edinburgh's Royal Occasion

For a soprano first seen standing in the shower at the start of Glyndebourne’s new production of Der Rosenkavalier in Sussex last year, Kate Royal attracted a surprisingly small and elderly audience to her New Town Concert at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, last night.

Admittedly the weather was wintry, but during the Edinburgh  Festival she would have packed the place for a programme so skilfully constructed and so exquisitely sung.

True, her choice of music may have seemed somewhat specialised, even with Mahler’s five Ruckert settings as a heart-rending centrepiece. These were beautifully delivered, at the risk of making the rest of the programme, similarly chosen as an expression of aloneness, seem merely doleful.  But it was never as dull as that, even if Samuel Barber’s ten Hermit Songs, in the second half, could have been considered caviar to the general.

Composed in the 1950s for the famous American soprano Leontyne Price, they did perhaps depend too much on the brightness of their piano accompaniments to make their effect. They were certainly vividly brought to life by Roger Vignoles, but Royal used ample artifice to rejuvenate each song, even if her articulation was not always as clear as it could have been.

It  was Schumann’s haunting Hermit Song, standing alone at the end of the evening, which brought things back to the raptness of the Mahler. Once a Fischer-Dieskau favourite, it regained all  the slow beauty of expression he used to give it, deftly counterbalanced by the lighter Schumann songs, and the lovely Clara Schumann ones, heard earlier in the recital.

Not that Schumann’s Bachian song about a pious girl could be called particularly light. But its romanticised baroquerie was touchingly caught, the Schumann equivalent of some of the Bachian strains to be heard in the first scene of Wagner’s Meistersinger.

Though Kate Royal’s voice is not enormous - as Roger Vignoles’s accompaniment sometimes underlined - she floats it to admiration. This was a recital to remember, enhanced by the limiting of applause to the end of each half.
1 December 2015

As Royal as They Come

Good song recitals gave become rarities in Edinburgh outside of the Festival, but Kate Royal’s New Town Concert at the Queen’s Hall tomorrow looks like being something special.

As Glyndebourne’s lissom Feldmarschallin in Der Rosenkavalier last year, she became one of the stars of British opera and the programme of songs with which she has been making a short tour looks wonderfully enticing. It is a themed programme, planned to a nicety - the sort of thing that shows the most scrupulous preparation on the part of the performer.

Aloneness - rather than loneliness - forms its subject, starting with Schumann songs, and passing through Clara Schumann, Mahler, and Samuel Barber before returning to Schumann his long, greatly moving Song of the Hermit as a stand-alone finale.

A mixture of familiar and less familiar items, with Roger Vignoles as pianist, it has been artfully constructed, with Mahler’s I Am Lost to the World as its central highpoint. Since Kate Royal, who has been heard in Edinburgh before, has become a soprano of the utmost poise and delicacy of utterance, seize your opportunity to hear her. Her programme is one to stick in the memory.
30 November 15

this Week's Wine: Cuvée de Luberon

Luberon is a wine you tend to forget about. It’s not that it is insignificant. In fact it is really rather good. But its name does not hang on the tongue and it never stands out on the supermarket shelves, inviting you to grab a bottle of it.

As a white Rhone, indeed, it has a bit of body, and this example of it, costing £8 from Marks and Spencer, speaks admirably for itself and is robust enough, without lacking finesse, to go with sea bass, sea bream, or some similar fish, but is also fine as an aperitif.

It is certainly smooth enough to stand alone, and to stay in the memory as something more than vin ordinaire - and to remind you that Luberon wines are worth drinking. So don’t forget about it this time. If you do, the loss is yours.

The same can be said for Morrison’s Muscadet at £6. Any fears that this, too, could be something rather drab should be quickly dispelled by this northern French bottle whose “sur lie” (on its lees) tag confirms that it will bring a nice prickle to to your palate.

Again it is a good wine for seafood, in this something nordic, but it can similarly stand alone as an excellent aperitif.
17 November 2015

Cinema Days

Even before I found a music critic in whose footsteps I wanted to follow - he was Christopher Grier, my predecessor on The Scotsman - I had found a film critic who would have been my model, if ever my inclinations went in that direction, which for a while they seemed in danger of doing.

She was not a newspaper writer - in other words, she was neither CA Lejeune of The Observer nor Dylis Powell of the Sunday Times, much as I admired them both - but someone whose reviews appeared much less frequently, in the British Film Institute’s quarterly magazine, Sight and Sound. Her name was Penelope Houston and, though I never met her, she was for years my heroine.

Her essays were substantial reflections on the great films of the day - I first encountered her in the 1950s and never lost track of what she was writing - and I liked her because she treated a film such as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, John Ford’s 1949 western that opened with the words “Custer is dead,” with all the seriousness and perceptive detail she brought to everything else she watched.

And now, at the age of 88, Houston herself is dead, and her era of film reviewing has come to an end. She was always deemed somewhat intimidating, though that was not how she seemed to me, and I still cherish the memory of the first and only picture of her I ever saw, sitting on the edge of a  chair, looking sophisticated with a cigarette in a long black holder between her fingers.

I was not long out of school when I first saw it, and I thought I had gone one better when I started smoking, also with a long black holder, Sobranie Black Russian cigarettes with gold tips, which for a time were the only (dauntingly expensive) cigarettes I bought, before abandoning their exquisite aroma, along with that of Gitanes, Greek Papastratos, and my other favourite smokes, in the1970s.  Though I never inhaled - the art of simply puffing them was enough for me - they were, like Houston herself, part of my life.

In Houston’s day, Sight and Sound was a great magazine, and she presided over it with an eagle eye. It was there that Lindsay Anderson wrote his famous diatribe, “Stand Up! Stand Up!”, and there that everything else worthwhile on the subject of cinema found its place.
The Times said farewell to Houston the other day, complete with the picture of her I remember so well. Although for a while, during my journalistic apprenticeship, I doubled as music and film critic of the old Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, it was music that won me, even if my memories of writing about films during the early days of the Edinburgh Film Festival were to remain vivid in my mind.
13 November 2015

This Week's Wine: Macon Villages

Macon is a dicey wine partly because there is so much of it, which, by French chardonnay standards, is conspicuously manuscript. But here, from Waitrose, is one that is better than most.

As supermarkets go, Waitrose is strong on white burgundy, and its Macon Villages - the Villages identification always a sign  of quality, in burgundy as in Beaujolais - at £8.99 can be recommended for its zestiness, bite, and personality.

Not only is it a Macon Villages but it is from the Cave de Lugny, which is another guarantee of crispness  and we have bought several bottles to keep us going, drinking it with  scallops and with Hester Blumenthal’s prawn cocktail, with its good prawns and subtle dressing, also available from Waitrose.

Meanwhile, down in Norfolk, Naked Wines - in conjunction these days with Majestic - has extended its range of New Zealand Pinot Gris to include  a good  German wine employing the same grape but bringing it closer to Alsace, where the best Pinot Gris comes from. Produced by Gerd Stepp, it is honeyed yet by no means oversweet. It is Reduced from £16.99 to £11.49 -  not cheap but well worth sampling.
10 November 2015

This Week's Wine: Sauvignon Blanc

Sauvignon Blanc, white wine of the Loire, Bordeaux and other parts of France, has also become, with increasing fame, the white wine of New Zealand.

There, its rise and rise is one of the success stories of modern times, and its tang of gooseberries more pronounced than that of sauvignons from other countries.

The tang, indeed, is in danger of becoming too overpowering - to the extent that there are many Kiwi Sauvignons, some of them quite expensive, which are becoming positively deterring.  The initials once insultingly applied to Australian Chardonnay - ABC, standing for “anything but Chardonnay” - seem in danger of finding a New Zealand Sauvignon equivalent, especially if the wine comes from the productive Marlborough region, primary source of some of the most aggressive Sauvignons.

But in the supermarkets at present there is a refreshingly non-assertive Kiwi Sauvignon, whose source is admittedly Marlborough and liable to be dismissed as ordinary.

In fact the 2014 Mud House Sauvignon, in its rather plain bottle, which Waitrose has reduced from £9.99 to £6.64, is a very  pleasant specimen of its kind. To some palates it may seem uninteresting but it is muscular enough to be appetising and as an aperitif it will not undermine a more  voluptuous New Zealand Pinot Noir to follow.

Majestic Wines are selling it for £6.99 and, since Tesco's price is likewise higher, the Waitrose offer is the one to go for.
2 November 2015

Canadian Capers

Having flown frequently to Canada between 1976 and 2001, a period when I was invited to visit Montreal, Ottawa, Quebec, Toronto and other places, mainly to hear music, see the modern arts centres, talk to Canadian critics, give lectures and meet friends,  I gained in the process a taste for Canadian food and wine.

Canada in the 1970s was on a cultural high. The National Arts Centre in Ottawa, a splendid culture complex near the lovely Rideau canal, set the standard.  There you could see opera and ballet (The Rite of Spring in my case), watch a play, eat in the excellent restaurant, browse in the well-stocked bookshop and sample all the things Ottawa, a pleasant city fringed by the picturesque Gatineau mountains, had to offer.

It was there that I had my first taste of Canadian wine, which some local connoisseurs spoke of somewhat dismissively, but which I thought rather good.  In Montreal I heard the Montreal Symphony Orchestra in its fine modern hall just before it visited Edinburgh with its controversial new conductor, Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos. In Quebec’s new arts centre, somewhat smaller than Ottawa’s, I heard Sunday lunchtime chamber music and ate French-Canadian supper in the beautiful old town.

In  Guelph, town of many churches, I was invited by Nicky Goldschmidt, head of music, to lecture on Smetana and see productions of Britten’s Curlew River and and Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse.  In Toronto the shabby old Massey Hall had not yet been succeeded by the svelte new Roy Thomson Hall, financed by the Thomson Organisation, proprietors of The Scotsman, but it housed an impressive coupling of Beethoven’s Ninth and Stravinsky’s Agon conducted by Andrew Davis, former assistant conductor of the BBC SSO in Glasgow but by then in charge of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Canada, it struck me, was a stimulating place to be.

By the turn of the century, when Ottawa had launched a tremendous annual international festival of string quartets entitled Strings of the Future, it still seemed a good place. This event, now defunct, took place in the city’s fine new art gallery near the Ottawa River and contained, like the National Arts Centre, a good restaurant and bookshop.

Armed with my copy of Where to Eat Well in Canada, the equivalent of Britain’s now less interesting Good Food Guide, I was eating well everywhere I went.  And Canadian wine was steadily improving. Here in Britain the wine critic Jancis Robinson recently extolled a Top Fifty Canadian Wines and reported how much she had enjoyed sampling them. The only trouble was that few if any of them were available in Britain.

During the past week, however, my wife has been visited by a pair of convivial Canadian cousins, mother and daughter, from Ottawa, who stayed with us and brought two outstanding bottles as a gift. On this evidence, things had grown even better. The first, an Ontario Pinot Noir from the Henry of Pelham family estate, had a velvety depth of flavour of the sort we have come to associate with  leading New Zealand reds. The other, a fascinatingly reddish bitter-sweet Ice Wine, in an elegant bottle from the same estate, was the brightest, most intense of pudding wines, made from grapes frozen in the Canadian winter.

Neither of them is yet available here, but the producer it seems would be happy to export them.  At present his only outlet beyond North America is wine-conscious China.

To read Jancis Robinson’s survey of Canadian wine - entitled Canadian Wines Mature -  consult her own wonderfully comprehensive  website.  
30 October 2015

A true Theodora

Though Handel’s oratorio Theodora - as two recent productions, at Glyndebourne and the Salzburg Festival, have advantageously demonstrated - can be transformed successfully into an opera,  it still works best in its original non-theatrical guise.  One of his last and greatest masterpieces, it has long been neglected in comparison with Messiah, but this week in Edinburgh and Glasgow the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, with Harry Bicket as its alert and stylish conductor, brought sharp focus to its musical beauty and steadily developing tragic dimension.

In Edinburgh the Queen’s Hall, a converted eighteenth-century church, was its atmospherically intimate  setting. With the orchestra and soloists at floor level, and only the SCO Chorus on the reduced platform, its effect was direct and greatly moving. Its story, that of a Christian martyr, cared for and protected  by a sympathetic Roman soldier in occupied Syria, rang startlingly true even when presented, without action, in oratorio format. By ridding the music of the plink-plonk cadences which traditionally terminate  so many sections of the score, Bicket proceeded straight into  the action - though the decision to bring the soloists forward and back from side positions, their footsteps often loudly audible on the stone floor, was less of a blessing.

The performance was nevertheless a quietly searing experience, eloquently voiced by Stefanie True and Iestyn Davies as heroine and counter-tenor hero, and Neal Davies as the hectoring Roman commander who torments them. Rosana Pokupic began somewhat plummily as Theodora’s mezzo-soprano ally, but her voice cleared, and Samuel Boden was a nimble, graceful tenor.  The SCO Chorus, a model of total stillness and expressiveness, was an asset to the long evening.

The  Glyndebourne and Salzburg Festival productions, resourceful, artful operatic updatings of the story, are both available on DVD. The Glyndebourne version, with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment conducted by the erudite William Christie, has Dawn Upshaw and the late lamented Loraine Hunt Lieberson  in the women’s roles and the robust David Daniels as the heroic counter-tenor, though Peter Sellars’s otherwise fascinating production, with a presidential Roman villain, is marred by his constant reliance on semaphoric hand signals.

Christof Loy's more recent Salzburg production, which is my personal preference, transforms the Festspielhaus into a vast reception room, with an array of organ pipes in the background, is admirably conducted by Ivor Bolton, a former music director of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, with the pure-toned Christine Schafer in the title role, the striking counter-tenor Behun Mehta and Bernard Fink as her allies, and Johannes Martin Kranzle as a lascivious villain.
24 October 2015

More Editors in My Life (1)

The twilight of my career as staff music critic of The Scotsman began in the nineteen-eighties with the retirement of Eric Mackay, second of the two great editors for whom I had worked, and the appointment of Chris Baur as his successor. Baur, a journalist of established seriousness, was Mackay’s man. He had been a reliable financial and political writer on the paper, and Mackay, himself a political authority of courage and distinction, gave him his blessing - which only went to prove the old adage that nobody should be allowed to appoint his own successor.

Baur, a solemn, sometimes morosely brooding presence - nicknamed Chris Bore by some of the less sympathetic of his fellow journalists -   was prone to stalk  conspicuously up and down the newsroom thinking out his wording for whatever article he was working on. Though by no means ineffectual, he was never a specially popular member of the staff and, on becoming editor, he made no effort to rectify this.

His brief reign, admittedly, began at a difficult time, when the paper was switching from the use of portable typewriters, much loved by hard-hitting journalists, to what had become known as “new technology,” involving the use of desktop computer screens.

The system adopted by The Scotsman, and presumably backed by Baur, was not welcomed by many of the journalistic staff, who believed that it had more business orientations than journalistic ones.  But it was just another of the changes, seemingly accepted by Baur - himself a noticeably untidy typist - which were inexorably leading to one of the most traumatic journalistic strikes in the paper’s history.

Baur’s task, come what may, was to keep The Scotsman coming out each day, unimpeded by strike action.  Freelance journalists were hired to replace staff - the bulk of us - who had downed tools and been shut out of the premises.  It was a dismal time during which we were all  theoretically  dismissed. On one occasion, inadvertently finding myself speaking to Baur on the phone, he invited me to return to work.  “Come back in,” he  said amicably.  “It’s  business as usual.”

Though it seems a long time ago, the memory sticks.  And though Mackay, too, had endured staff strikes, he weathered them to his own - and our - satisfaction, ensuring that while the strike continued, the presses did not roll.   But Baur, as a newly appointed editor, lacked Mackay’s vast if ultimately somewhat wry and world-weary experience and expertise. Within a short time, and after a few further editorial dramas, he had departed.

For me, the principal problem of working for him lay in his lack of interest in, even apparent disdain for, music. It was something towards which he seemed not only unsympathetic but actually opposed. He simply could not grasp why a paper had to have a staff music critic (in this, though I did not know it then, he was ahead of his time, for staff music critics in Britain today have become an almost extinct species).

Though Baur tolerated my presence, he seldom supported or encouraged me, and made clear that he deemed music criticism to be an unnecessary, indeed incomprehensible, aspect of journalism. How could anyone write in a newspaper about something so arcane? How could anyone write about something as abstruse as music at all?

Mackay likewise lacked enthusiasm for music, but saw it in newspaper terms as a necessary evil and always gave me sufficient space and encouragement to express myself.  He even, or so I was told,  bought a copy of my edition of the Collins Encyclopaedia of Music for one of his children.

Indeed, as Philip Hope-Wallace of The Guardian and BBC once famously remarked, the best sort of editor is one who does not know the difference between Bayreuth and Beirut but who does not interfere. Mackay did not interfere.

Baur, on the other hand, favoured using the paper’s resources in other ways. When, at one point, I became embroiled in a public brawl with Scottish Opera over where its future should lie, he printed a short statement to the effect that The Scotsman and Scottish Opera “needed a rest from each other.”  The Scotsman would therefore stop reviewing Scottish Opera and cease commenting on its policies. He had, at a stroke, deprived me of my power as an opera critic.

He could, I suppose, simply have sacked me. But he refrained from going that far. The trouble was that, having forbidden me to write on the subject, he was in difficulties finding a way of letting  me restart.  The opera company, as I believed, was on the wrong track after many rewarding years of being on the right one. But I was being consistently prevented from saying so, or from suggesting what might be done. The road remained blocked.

Yet the passing of Scottish Opera’s golden years, one of the pinnacles of which had been the company’s visit to the Fenice Theatre in Venice, incorporating a residence at the great Hotel des Bains, long associated with Diaghilev and Thomas Mann, was something Eric Mackay had encouraged me to chronicle.

Invited to stay with the singers in the grand old hotel, I had been able to observe them, and write about them, at close quarters in the most atmospheric of settings.   And watching the scenery arrive at the Fenice by canal was certainly an experience worth writing about. So, more distressingly, were the managerial mishaps that began to befall the company a short time later. later. But by then Mackay had retired and I was deprived - albeit only briefly -  of my opportunity to write about them.

Yet  every responsible music critic finds himself at some point in his career involved in such occurrences, and is lucky when his editor lets him deal with them in his own way. Mackay placed that trust in me. Baur, alas, did not, and when, before long, he resigned I could only rejoice that I had regained my freedom.
18 October 2015   

This Week’s Wine: Boschendal Chardonnay

Its assertiveness is the giveaway. This is not quite the distinguished white French burgundy which, at first taste, you might assume it to be, but it is nevertheless a pretty impressive simulation of the real thing.

With an alcoholic strength of 14 per cent it is a big wine and its impact is like a smack in the face. It may not be a Meursault, but this South African 2014 Boschendal seems something special all the same, bold and buttery and certainly worth buying at the £9.99 price tag Waitrose has placed on it  - Tesco is charging the same for the Boschendal sauvignon blanc  which is its rival. Mistaking the Chardonnay for a white burgundy you might think you were doing very well.

Waitrose’s genuine domestic white burgundy - now reduced by 10 per cent to £8.99 - is less sensational  but is undoubtedly the real thing. At its price it is good buy as well as being genuinely French. So this, too, can be recommended, not merely for its authenticity.
12 October 2015

What poise!

Lovely to listen to from the start but the drama begins four minutes in!

A Delicate Touch

With the demise of Lucy Carolan, who died at the age of 62 alone in her Edinburgh home, Scotland has lost an ace harpsichordist but, at least  in my experience, deeply private musician.

A pupil of the renowned Edinburgh teacher Mary Moore, as well as of the austere Gustav Leonhardt in Amsterdam, she was admired for her performances of Bach’s keyboard partitas, which she also successfully recorded.

When her career got going, Edinburgh’s alluring Russell Collection of old keyboard instruments at St Cecilia’s Hall became her adventure playground, from which she could select harpsichords and other instruments for specialist recitals.

A fine accompanist, and valued member of the Scottish Early Music Consort, she lectured at Cambridge and Birmingham, toured Europe, yet appeared less frequently in public than she might have done.

Opportunities to review her were, for me, few and far between. The discreet strains of a tiny domestic clavichord - a sound-world offering much, so it has been claimed, to the solitary performer-listener -  were something  she could employ as expressively  as the glitter of a harpsichord. She will be quietly missed.
9 October 2015

A night at the Met

To my chagrin, I had to miss the New York Metrolpolitan’s international streaming of Verdi’s Trovatore on Saturday. For some people it remains  the most ramshackle an incomprehensible of operas. For others it is a masterpiece of the choicest sort, perfectly easy to follow. I am one of the latter, which does not prevent me from enjoying the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera as the most comic of all operatic spoofs.

With Anna Netrebko as Leonora and Dmitri Hvorostovsky, who underwent treatment for a brain tumour in June, as the nobly baleful Count di Luna, it was enticingly cast. But having recently bought the Berlin State Opera’s new Trovatore, again with Netrebko and with the now baritonal  Placido Domingo as the Count, along with Daniel Barenboim as conductor, I allowed myself to be too complacent about missing the Met’s version.

The shadowy abstraction of the  Berlin production is wonderful. But so, quite clearly, is David McVicar’s Napoleonic updating of Verdi’s great costume drama in New York. I was mad to miss it.

Even the wittily abrasive Martin Bernheimer in the Financial Times gave it the full force of his praise, declaring that he hardly missed the Marx Brothers.

No doubt the performance will be issued in the end on DVD, when I shall certainly buy it. But the live streaming on Saturday, celebrating the tenth anniversary of such events at the Met, and watched by hundreds of thousands of people around the world, must have been something very special. If, like me, you failed to see it, don’t let the opportunity go next time.
5 October 2015

Brendel Finalised

The final, revised, perfected version of Alfred Brendel’s essays on music is like the final, revised, perfected version of one of hid great performances - his last thoughts, say, on the Diabelli Variations, on which he sees possibility of improving, and amid which there is nothing to be amended.

His last performances were given some years ago now, the ne plus ultra a performance of Mozart’s E flat  major Piano Concerto, K271, in Vienna with Sir Charles Mackerras as conductor, after which he retired from the concert platform.

The perfected version of his essays, entitled Music, Sense, and Nonsense, were published last month, and are comparable with, or I would now say preferable to, those of Donald Francis Tovey, which I devoured in my boyhood  but feel that I have now outgrown, at least  in the sense that I am unlikely to read them again.

But I am still reading, and re-reading, Brendel. He can be tough going, especially on the complete piano works of Beethoven, but he continues to be worth the overcoming of any obstacles he places in your path. He is witty, though less so than Tovey. He is a formidable authority on whatever he writes about. And he has his occasionally irritating foibles, such as his refusal to accept the vast, important repeated section in the first movement of Schubert’s last piano sonata, his failure to like Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto, and his lack of enthusiasm for Chopin, in comparison with Liszt.

But on Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, in general, he is massively convincing, and happily they form the main substance of his book, along with his exhaustive thoughts on pianos. It is a wonderful book, which I have followed through its previous versions and extensions, marvelling at its wealth of experience and perception.

Yet so far I have seen only one review of it, by Alan Rusbridger in The Guardian, which is not enough. Perhaps because it is a perfecting of something already written, reviewers have failed to see the point of reading or writing about it again. But every word counts, and that remains the book’s whole point, and in its Kindle edition it is much easier to handle than in book form, even if its many musical examples are inevitably harder to read and its omission of the word “flat” from flattened keys  is a persistent irritation.

Yet reading  the book makes you understand why he gave up public playing when he did because it  will outlive him in conjunction with his recordings, which, as he says himself, should all be clearly dated, so that we know what position each of them holds in his long  journey to Brendelian perfection.

Re-reading the book, alongside Simon Schama’s big new study of British portraiture, has made me extremely happy that good things continue to happen, even if I need some moments of light relief, such as Nina Stubbs’s memories of being a nanny for Mary Kaye Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books, and her family, now out in a televised version written by Nick Hornby.
1 October 2015

Cousins reunited

At the Edinburgh Eye Pavilion  the other day, I met  a cousin  I did not know existed. Aged ninety, she was, like me, being treated for macular degeneration, an irksome malady which, for me, interferes with writing and reading but is held at bay with eye injections.

In the waiting room, along with her daughter, she had heard my name being called, and recognised it. My wife, who was with me, heard the words “music critic ” being murmured by someone  nearby. Not until later, when I was  about to leave, did we come face to face, and I realised that I was more than a music critic to her.

Spry and alert, she came straight to the point with the information that  she was related to me, on my mother’s side of the family. Her grandmother had been my grandmother’s sister.

This was news to me, since I did not even know that my granny had had a sister, although, married twice, she had made me aware that she had had two husbands, both of whom (the first,  my grandfather,  an army bandsman, the  second a prosperous traveller who collected antiques in Japan) were  dead before I was born.

My newfound cousin, I learned, had holidayed with me and my parents in Comely Bank, where I spent my early childhood, though I have no recollection of this, since I was scarcely out of my pushchair at the time.

Yet she had always remembered my unusual name which, she said, was that of the gynaecologist who had delivered me at a nursing home in Walker Street -  though my own understanding has always been that I was called after the German actor Conrad Veidt and the Polish writer Joseph Conrad. Still,  the gynaecologist struck me as a perfectly plausible addition to the list, especially as I knew that mine had been a difficult birth.  Nevertheless, had we had time, I would have liked to hear more from her about this.

But she correctly recalled that my Aunt Maymie, my mother’s sister (who, as I now realised, my cousin looked quite like) had lived in West Maitland Street at Haymarket;  and  she  confirmed that she belonged to the Paton side of the family, my granny’s name having been Joanna Keith Paton and my mother’s Joanna Paton Hunter,  with me myself following up the rear as Conrad Keith Wilson - the Paton link seeming by then to have been discarded.

Yet who knows? There are still things to discover  and I can see why  ancestry research has become a flourishing industry on the internet. Today, I should add, happens to mark what would have been my mother’s 110th birthday.
27 September 2015

A chance meeting at The Edinburgh Eye Pavilion

I'm writing a message to a lady called Joanna who's grandmother was my grandmother's sister. We met this morning at The Eye Pavilion. We parted without exchanging contact info but I mentioned my blog and hope you find it. I would love to invite you and your daughter for coffee. My email address is wilson.conrad@ymail.com

It would be lovely to hear from you.

Conrad
24.09.2015

This week's wine: Pinot Gris

Pinot Gris is one of the great white grapes of Alsace, which has recently been adopted by New Zealand.  In both guises it yields excellent, strongly recommended wine.

True, its most prevalent source of supply - the hinterland of Venice, where it is Italianised as Pinot Grigio - lies elsewhere, and  produces something not only quite different but by no means always a satisfying buy.


So take care.  Pinot Grigio wine, in its numerous Italian  forms, can be found everywhere, both cheaply and surprisingly dearly, though the dearer wines are not always superior to the cheap.

Produced by a  single vineyard, however, they can be very good and not to be sneered at.  Mass produced, on the other hand,  they are usually very basic, and not worth buying, except as a companion for fish suppers or the most routine pasta dishes.

But an Alsace Pinot Gris, if you can find one, is another matter. This week, unexpectedly, I came upon an admirable one in my local branch of Morrison’s, with a £7.99 price tag well below  what I would have been prepared to pay for it.

Alsace  wines are generally regarded as sweet with an interesting  undertone of dryness, or else dry with an overtone of sweetness, but this one got the balance right. Served as an aperitif and then with trout it was a success.


A New Zealand Pinot is similar, though with predictably more pronounced Kiwi notes. Waitrose currently stocks a nice one costing £9.59, with one of those rollicking  Kiwi names,  that you should not let yourself be deterred by. But if you can bear to ask for a bottle of Marlborough  Hunky Dory The Tangle, mixing Pinot Gris, Gewurztraminer, and Riesling, you are not likely to be disappointed. Again, as  an aperitif it is delicious.

Alternatively, also from New Zealand, there is Rod Easthope’s Pinot Gris, which goes up and down in price, but never rises too high.  Eashope is one of those new young producers whose wines are available through Naked Wines, and this is a particularly inviting one.
23 September 2025

Flourishing Bonds

The latest James Bond novel not to have Ian Fleming as its author is Anthony Horowitz’s flippantly entitled Trigger Mortis, published this week.

Horowitz is a master of pastiche whose predecessors as exponents of brilliantly faked Fleming include Kingsley Amis, Sebastian Faulks, and William Boyd. Reviewing Trigger Mortis in the Financial Times, the zealous Simon Schama - whose fascinating study of great British portraits, tied in with the National Portrait Gallery and a new BBC  television series is also out this week - has proved to be a bit of a Fleming himself.

His review - wonderfully witty,  observant, substantial, and to the point - is a glorious tease, suggesting that the next James Bond novel to be written may well come from whom else but Simon Schama.

Not that Horowitz’s book is in any way disappointing. Though not perhaps quite the equal of William Boyd’s Solo - which is surely the most seductive and persuasive  piece of neo-Fleming of them all, and the one which has the most disturbing ending - it is alive, fast-moving, and perfectly pitched,  with a grippingly oblique prologue, an artful reappearance of the hard-edged American, Pussy Galore, and, before the story  has gone very far, a vivid trip to 1950s Germany for a hair-raising  car-race in Burburgring, south of Cologne,  with Bond secretively at the wheel of (I speak as a non-driver) an alluring red Masarati.

Schama in his review conveys its freshness of  flavour,  scrupulously identifying one or two minor blemishes, just as Horowiitz himself works wonders of Bondian reincarnation and resourcefulness.  As his recent piece of mock Conan Doyle confirmed, he knows how to feel his way into the style of authors he clearly cares about,  and Trigger Mortis can be warmly recommended as a ripely convincing Bond experience.
15 September 2015

This Week's Wine: Try Lidl

Lidl, like Aldi, is finding better and better wine with which to tempt its customers. Though both firms are German in origin, neither of them seems to use German wine as a regular sales ploy. Personally I would not regret it if they did, such is the dearth of good German wine in British supermarkets.

Nor does the focus seem to rest particularly on the New World.  It is in France that both firms are finding their specialities and from French sources that they are assembling their most attractive offers.

True, Lidl’s  wine shelves are notoriously a shambles. You hardly notice the good bottles resting amid the much less good on their side walls.  The Cimarosa range which they do make some effort to display are mostly dull and drab.

Steer clear of these and trust that your eyes will catch sight of other things, whose price tags are often obscured, whose printed descriptions may seem to apply to different bottles altogether, whose layout is just a muddle - it almost as if supplies have been simply dumped on the shelves - but which happen to include some real riches.

The French offers, as I have said are the ones to go for, if you can find them  - and inevitably not all branches of Lidl carry the same stock. But every month there is something good available, including, at present, a pair of admirable white burgundies and the 2014 vintage of their established stand-by - a pale pink, nicely dry Cotes de Provence costing £5.99, which would seem a good buy at double that price.

There is also an excellent Fronsac claret, which does cost more than double the price of the Provencal pink, as well as a Margaux at nearly £17, showing that Lidl is not frightened to charge a bit more for something really special.

As Christmas approaches, Lidl also stocks up with lobster, pheasant, quail, and langoustines in Japanese batter, all attractive matches for the better wines.

I first came upon this supermarket some years ago when I praised in one of my musical reviews an ergonomic stool, visually very striking, on which a visiting cellist sat for his Edinburgh recital. A friend who read my review telephoned me and told me that his wife, also a cellist, had bought the same stool and that it was on sale very cheaply in the Leith branch of - guess where? - Lidl. Going to the shop to see for myself, I was too late. The stool was sold out.
11 September 2015

How Sweet the Caress?

William Boyd’s big new novel, rather uninvitingly entitled Sweet Caress, is not winning the best of reviews. Is it as poor as it is said to be? It was still on my reading list when I was warned off it by a close friend and Boyd enthusiast who told me he had passed the 30 per cent marker in his Kindle edition - Kindle still employing percentages rather than page numbers as gauges, perhaps because of the variety of font sizes they employ as aids for readers who, like me, have bad eyesight - and that his interest in it was dwindling. The book, he said, was deeply disappointing.

The story of a woman photographer born in 1908, it toys with reproductions of her pictures (in reality anonymous odds and ends Boyd had evidently acquired in car-boot sales), with walk-on roles for twentieth-century celebrities (a device which, like some other novelists, he has sometimes irksomely employed in previous travels into the past) and, aptly enough, with a sort of snapshot literary technique which gives the book an extremely fragmented structure.

Was I going to like it, I wondered, as I picked up my Kindle at page 0 per cent? Since I generally enjoy the innovatory aspects of Boyd’s literary style, I did not feel automatically opposed to those that are incorporated in Sweet Caress. I began by liking it quite a lot, but by the time I reached the 30 per cent point, my enthusiasm for it, like my friend’s, had begun to wane.

The fragmentation, especially in its Scottish sections, set on an island near Mull in 1977, failed to grip. But I persevered, and never wholly lost faith in it. It is really quite a good read, if sometimes uneven and sometimes, by Boyd’s high standards, somewhat slack.

I would like to read a review of it by Geoff Dyer, a good writer and novelist who shares Boyd’s affection for cameras and photography, but who has not yet pronounced upon it. How accurate it is in terms of photographic information, of which there is an abundance  (always in my view quite interesting), I cannot say.

But my friend, a fellow music critic, has pointed out to me that it contains, as so many modern novels do, at least one musical howler, a reference to Bartok which is wrongly dated.  Read Ian McEwan’s novels to find some similar mishaps.

The next book of its kind, employing the twentieth century as its backdrop, will be from Sebastian Faulks.  Let us hope for the best.
7 September 2015

Why critics?

In a recent posting on the subject of  critics (see my blog “ Days of Yore”) my friend John Duffus asks if reviews really matter.

To be dismissed as a parasite - not that John goes that far - is something quite familiar to me, and I have my answers to such accusations. One of them is Kenneth Tynan’s definition of a critic as “someone who knows the way but cannot drive the car” - which has always struck me as a sharp, succinct observation. Once, quoting it to the conductor Sir Charles Groves in the course of an interview, I was interrupted by his wife, who was present and remarked proudly that “Sir Charles not only knows the way but can also drive the car.” Coming from a conductor’s wife, It was a neat riposte.

In fact, there are plenty of conductors  well qualified to drive the car - think of Herbert von Karajan - but who cannot be said to know the way, if their opinions and style are to be taken seriously (just consider  what Karajan had to say about the abilities of Nikolaus Harnoncourt, his Viennese rival).

But whether or not critics matter can perhaps seem a moot point. Do bad reviews stop people going to a show if they want to do so?  Does a good review prompt them to go to an  event they do not desire to attend?  Sometimes yes and sometimes no, it seems to me.

“Beyond the Fringe” may initially have received no more than moderately appreciative reviews but there was something about it which rightly caught public attention and its four protagonists went on to win world fame.

Some critics, such as Bernard Levin, gained readers because they were witty and vicious, but I do not think people were greatly deterred by him from going to what he despised. Edward Greenfield of The Guardian, on the other hand, was the kindest - and one of the most popular - of critics,  who never wrote a bad word against anyone, yet never lost his following.

Reviewing events - such as concerts - which are already in the past by the time the review is printed has understandably perturbed John Duffus, though I myself  see it  as a vital part of newspaper criticism. The critic as chronicler is invaluable to the art of reviewing, if he or she is a good enough writer, and the fact that an event is already over seems to me of no consequence.

Every review of a work, even  the most familiar of works, is an incident, however small, in the ongoing life of that work.  Andrew Porter, who died recently, was the supreme exponent of that sort of review, and wrote in a way which showed why his large-scale reviews were worth collecting, as they were in the five volumes of reviews he wrote for the New Yorker magazine.

In this respect Bernard Shaw, whose reviews are still deservedly in print, was Andrew’s forerunner, a lesson to us all. William Mann’s reviews for The Times were, alas, never collected, though he did produce two fine big operatic books, on Mozart and Strauss, filled with a musical journalist’s spirited knowledge.
3 September 2015

Good Food Guiding

Now a wing of Waitrose, the Good Food Guide seems inevitably to have lost some of the character it possessed 65 years ago when it was edited single-handedly by its founder, Raymond Postgate, and thereafter by his successor, Christopher Driver of The Guardian.

Today, though printed on much better paper, it looks too like a the product of a committee, comprehensive but impersonal. In the old days, it is true, Postgate and Driver relied on the suggestions of readers for the restaurants it reviewed, but you felt that it was always finally dependent on one man’s opinion of each place.

Each entry was a small enthralling essay, so that if you wished, you could read the book from cover to cover, as I did, as if it were a single fascinating narrative. That special idiosyncratic flavour has long since gone - the decline began when Driver was deposed - and sadly it continues today.

Yet the 2016 edition, out this week at £17.50, is a handsome enough book. It is just not interesting enough to read rather than consult. Times, of course, have changed. The old pioneering spirit, when every mentioned restaurant seemed like a discovery, belongs to the past. All the expected places are in the latest guide and the taste of the 1950s and 1960s, not such a bad time for eating out as it is made out to be, so long as you picked your destination carefully,  has certainly vanished.

But what you have to pay in many places nowadays is too often shocking and there is little sense of discovery. So I am disinclined to name the Edinburgh restaurants which are listed in the latest issue or to enumerate which cities outside London win the most entries, which used to be a little game I played with myself whenever I used to review it.

It’s not just a sense of deja vu that prompts this response. It is a sense of boredom and of preferring other ways to spend my money. Also that many of my own personal favourites do not win a mention, which seems more a matter of bad luck than anything else.
31 August 2015

Days of Yore

When William Mann of The Times, Andrew Porter of the Financial Times, Martin Cooper of the Daily Telegraph, Desmond Shawe-Taylor of the Sunday Times, Gerald Larner and Philip Hope-Wallace of The Guardian, and Peter Heyworth of The Observer used to arrive in Edinburgh for the Festival, you knew they were here.  All were deservedly established professional voices of British music criticism, staff writers on their papers, with prominent, allotted spaces to fill. If you wanted to read their reviews, you knew exactly which page to find them on, because their editors valued them and were proud to employ them.

Today, when British newspapers no longer have staff critics, reviews are demoted, no longer essential reading, often hard to find, and lacking the old authority.  Quite a lot of events this year seem to have gone unreviewed or been inadequately reviewed. How aware were you that John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique were in town at the start of the Festival to perform Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique along with Lelio, its still little-known sequel? Presented as a unity they had been heard as an unity in the 1960s but never since then. They deserved a detailed, thoroughly perceptive review, but from whom did they get it?

As a boy, I used to compile my annual Festival scrapbook of clippings I wanted to keep, vaguely hoping but not yet realising that one day I myself would be writing about the same events.  Newspapers were smaller then, but their editors knew what mattered. Christopher Grier, my predecessor on The Scotsman, used to speak of what he called, perhaps somewhat pretentiously,  the Corps Critical de Londres filling Edinburgh’s small supply of first-class hotels - just three in those days.  Every night a  taxi would arrive at the George to deliver Percy Cater’s (now unremembered) reviews to the Daily Mail’s Edinburgh office at Tanfield.

Whenever  Kenneth Tynan, who famously claimed that to have a play staged at the Edinburgh Festival was the kiss of death, deigned to write a scathing report on the experience, his words were unmissable. Martin Cooper and his fellow music critics (particularly the Viennese-born Peter Stadlen)  on the Telegraph - for in those days leading newspapers fielded a whole team of staff music critics - developed their loathing of Mahler into what somebody called a heavy industry.

Well, Mahler’s position now stands unquestioned - who is given space to question it? -  but Cooper stated a formidable and memorable case for the opposition.

Peter Heyworth’s reviews were perhaps the most authoritative and penetrating - he was sound, too, on the subject of food, and once stormed out of an Italian restaurant in central Edinburgh declaring the place to be ridiculous - and I missed him a lot when he died suddenly in Athens. But all these critics, one or two of whom were to become among my closest, most learned friends, set the city alight in a way impossible now, seeming as vital   to the Festival as many of the events they wrote about.
28 August 2015

This Week's Wine: Triade

Triade is not an evocative name for an Italian white wine. Supermarkets do not plant bottles of it alongside their stock of Soave, Pinot Grigio,Verdicchio, and Orvieto, all of which have vivid place associations even if not always the stamp of quality.

Triade owes its name, in fact, to the three grape varieties -Fiano, Falanghina,  and Greco (as in Greco di tufo) - that go into its manufacture. Matured in small oak barrels, it is the taste of Southern Italy, and its flavour is sophisticated, nutty, vibrant,  and distinctive enough to make you remember it with pleasure.

Waitrose is one supermarket that supplies it, but the name, it would seem, has not caught the attention of customers - which is surely why it has just dropped in price from the £9 level to what deserves to be a very tempting £6.74. Whether or not the drop is permanent remains to be seen, but snap it up while it is on offer.

For swordfish or shellfish it is a perfect partner, but it is good enough on its own to seem the most inviting of aperitifs.
26 August 2015

Take it as it Comes

“Edinburgh must ask what its festivals are for.”  Voiced irascibly by TheTimes this morning, it’s a good request, but to whom should it be addressed and what, if anything, will be the answer?

What Edinburgh’s festivals are - if not what they are for - seems clear enough. They are a gigantic muddle, increasingly based on the principle that too much is not enough. Too much of what? Too much of what does not matter seems to be the irritated answer.

Lost somewhere in the middle, and striving vainly to re-assert itself, is what  we now call the EIF, which was once its raison d’etre.  Do you remember - I do - how Sir Thomas Beecham was once for presbyterian reasons forbidden to conduct Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis at the Usher Hall on the opening Sunday of the Festival and gave us the Ninth Symphony instead?

It caused a scandal at the time.Today the Missa Solemnis is just another work, conducted this year amid much else by a very young musician. The sense of occasion, thwarted though it was,  has gone. The Missa Solemnis, like Mahler and Bruckner symphonies, turns up anytime, hidden among stand-up comedians and similar enticements.

I accept that stand-up comedy is today something special to Edinburgh, and that there is little point in longing for the old days when the opening Sunday of the Festival was a sacrosanct night when nothing but the opening concert happened. The first night could be tremendous - think of the time when Sir Georg Solti conducted Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust and hissed to Arthur Oldham afterwards that his boy choristers had been out of tune.

But many of the Festival’s opening concerts were very dull indeed, and you could not even buy a consoling drink at the Usher Hall.

This year the opening concert is on a Friday, amid much else, which has been one way of shelving  the old tradition. The reviews were as slapdash as the concert itself appears to have been. But then the decline - some would say the international demise - of real music criticism is just another sign of the times.

So, as The Times asked today, what are the Edinburgh Festivals for, and what is to be done about them? The answer presumably is nothing. There are still high-minded festivals in Europe, such as Lucerne’s, which has just named Riccardo Chailly as its new musical director, an inspired choice in the wake of the great and glorious Claudio Abbadio. Such things continue to matter in cities whose cultural boundaries have not been eroded. Edinburgh is not the festival it was, that’s for sure. It is far bigger and more varied, but it is still a great event and, like it or not, we must take it as it comes.
21 August 2015

This Week's Wine: Soave

Supermarket Soave is not, on the whole, something to look forward to. It does not bring back happy memories of Verona and Lake Garda,where the better Soave flourishes . It does not bring back memories of anything more than humdrum supermarket Soave, whose only virtue lies in its cheapness.

But are other Soaves marketed in Britain really much better? I certainly have good memories of the one which British Transport Hotels used to sell in their wineshops around the country. Long since gone - the one in what used to be Edinburgh’s NB Hotel was a particular favourite of mine, transformed into a humdrum brasserie when the hotel became the Balmoral - and I miss it a lot.

But even in specialist wine shops it has become hard to find a Soave as smooth as its name implies. When Naked Wines of Norfolk, now operating in conjunction with Majestic Wines, announced its 2013 Marta Soave Classico, describing it as a “bright little beauty,” I hoped the best. At £10.99 a bottle, reduced from £16.99, it is clearly no bargain but is it any good?

No better than all right I would say, adding that you might as well stick to Waitrose’s or one of the other routine Soaves costing less than £8. The search continues.
18 August 2015

Barenboim in Bloom

Richard Morrison’s substantial interview with Daniel Barenboim in The Times this week was a journalistic work of art.

In the days when the chance to write a Barenboim interview used to come my way - around half a century ago - I thought him very hard work. For a start, he had almost nothing to say, and what he did say was usually a statement of the obvious. Despairing, sometimes unscrupulous, journalists tended to put words into his mouth and pretend he had actually said them.  He was, from boyhood onwards, the finest of performers, but meeting him was invariably a disappointment and something to be avoided.

Writing about a Barenboim performance was much easier.  Mozart’s last piano concerto, played with the gentlest, most luminous finesse with Alexander Gibson and the SNO, still sticks in the mind, as also does. very differently, the time he cut his his thumb on a bottle of beer just before playing  Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto on the opening Sunday of the Edinburgh Festival, yet performed it imperially, his thumb conspicuously bandaged, improvising new fingerings, again with Gibson as conductor in the Usher Hall.

So, once he had started his conducting career, he gave a ravishing account of Boulez’s Rituel as prelude to The Rite of of Spring at the end of one of Peter Diamand’s Edinburgh festivals. As conductor of Edinburgh Festival Opera - another Diamand caprice - he gave us a Marriage of Figaro gloriously sung, but so mature in its casting that one critic hailed it as Figaro’s Golden Wedding. Joined by Peter Ustinov as director, he later presented a very eccentric Don Giovanni with the violinist Leonard Friedman leading the costumed on-stage band on the roof of Giovanni’s revolving villa.

It was shortly before that performance that I flew to London to discuss the forthcoming production with Ustinov and Barenboim in a busy trattoria in Victoria. Ustinov  predictably, did most of the talking, wittily dwelling on Mozart’s stage directions and digressing about Massenet’s Don Quixote, which he had just directed at the Paris Opera, expressively humming its famous cello solo to the delight of the restaurant’s neighbouring customers. From Barenboim came the occasional interjection - some of them, so I fancied, pre-planned - but not much else. Since I’d met him before, I knew what to expect.

During the same period, before conducting the SNO Chorus in a doom-laden account of Brahms’s German Requiem at the Israel Festival, I gave him every opportunity to tell me about his exceptionally dark, Mahler-like interpretation of the work, but little was disclosed. The performance, when it finally took place, said it all - which was much to be preferred to the other way around, but somewhat tantalising all the same.

Even to talk to him about Beethoven -  his wunderkind treatment of the Diabelli Variations had been one of his early showpieces in  Edinburgh - proved a struggle.

Today, however, everything has changed and Barenboim at 72 has become one of the great musical orators of his time, declaiming with authority about Wagner and Bruckner, about music and politics, about modern conditions in Germany, where he is in command of the Berlin State Opera and Berlin Staatskapelle. and where he recently failed to apply for the vacant conductorship of the Berlin Philharmonic because it was not something he needed.  His latest piano, which bears his name, was played by him in a recent Schubert cycle in London. His Schubert duets - particularly the late A major Rondo  with his compatriot Martha Argerich as partner - provide some of the most revelatory and tender experiences in modern pianism .

He is now so busy that Richard Morrison had to interview  him on board the Eurostar - with the most rewarding result. Read it and be enlightened.
13 August 2015
               

On the Tightrope

Simon Mawer was Booker short-listed six years ago for The Glass Room, an admirable novel inspired by the building of a famous Mies van der Rohe villa in Czechoslovakia in 1929 and by the people who, in the author’s imagination, lived there before the Gestapo moved into it.

Since then Mawer has written two more novels, The Girl who Fell from the Sky and, published last month, Tightrope, in which the menace of Nazi occupation, and its aftermath, again looms over all that happens.

The heroine of the first of these is parachuted into France to live dangerously while helping the Resistance. Her story continues in the second, growing out of  its predecessor’s quietly chilling ending.  Both books have been compared favourably with John Le Carre. The writing is of a similar high quality but Mawer travels his own route into the world of espionage, with gripping results.

Mawer, who teaches in Rome, is a good writer -  he deserved his Booker nomination - who does not overdo the menace but lets his heroine, Marian, deal with it as it comes. Do her wartime experiences change her personality as the story of Tightrope moves into the Cold War? Has Ravensbruck driven her mad or was she - inevitably you come to think  - a bit mad anyway?

On the basis that you do not have to be paranoid to believe that you are being followed, the book advances strongly. I liked it very much and look forward to Mawer’s next.
9 August 2015

This Week's Wines: Summer Pinks

The paler the better is the established rule of thumb about pink (some would say punk) wines, now enjoying their annual wave of popularity among people on holiday. Provencal pinks are, by informed assent, the best of them all, dry and balanced, genuine in colour and quality, discreet in personality, they are vin rose which proves that this wine is not the rubbish some of us deem it to be.

But the paler the worse is, unfortunately, an equally reliable rule of thumb when applied to the so-called “blush” wines which have infiltrated the market in recent years, oozing a sweetness which is no more palatable than the taste of those other pale pinks which resemble humdrum whites to which a touch of colouring has been added. Avoid these if you can, even if some of them have inviting names and  may seem to have their origins in the prettily named, old-fashioned Rose d’Anjou, which looks a lot nicer than it it actually tastes and which at one time littered Parisian restaurant tables before being ousted by superior, somewhat darker, tarter Tavel from the Rhone.

But if you want to drink pink, Provencal Rose should today be your choice, even if it is harder to find and more expensive when you find it (though oddly Ikea serves it in their cafes).  Waitrose, with their usual perception, supply a couple of good ones in the £9-£11 category, not cheap but preferable in my view to pink Sancerre, which costs much the same, or even more but tends to be disappointing compared with its renowned  white equivalent.

But Waitrose’s lightly lemony  own-brand 2014 Provence Rose at £8.99 lives up to its price tag, as also does their Esprit de Biganay Cotes de Provence at £10.99. Their cheaper but not uninteresting Bijou Cuvee Sophie Valrose from the Languedoc is likewise worth sampling.

And what of all those almost tomato-coloured Spanish pinks which crowd our supermarket shelves?  Avoid most of them I say. For all their quaffable, affordable and initially enticing juiciness, many of them are crude and  deceptively high in alcohol strength. 
5 August 2015

Ryman de Bergerac

Nick Ryman, who has died at 83, was one of the first small British wine producers to buy his way successfully into the French wine trade and the first I interviewed as newly-appointed wine critic of The Scotsman almost half a century ago.

Though not the friendliest of people, he welcomed me to Chateau la Jaubertie, his property in the Bergerac region of central France, treating me to the delicious blend of Sauvignon and Semillon. He had been struggling to develop as a novice winemaker who had previously helped to run Ryman’s, the family stationery firm but had grown fed up with it.

Having dreamed for years of owning his own French vineyard, he spent his share of the family profits on doing exactly that. Though he had no wine experience with which to bring this about, his purchase of a beautiful small chateau fired his enthusiasm and he gained his learning the hard way, battling with foul weather  and other setbacks until reaching eventual triumph.

When I visited him with a handful of other wine scribes he had begun winning his first awards and had produced a  successful sweet Monbazillac.  Drinking the drier Chateau la Jaubertie with him in his garden, and eating lunch cooked by his wife, made all of us wish to take the same risk and settle in the same lovely but neglected part of France where Nick had been developing new methods of wine production that made many local growers seem outmoded.

Nick’s Bergerac whites struck me as the best I had tasted, yet for a time he had trouble marketing them in Britain. In Scotland, Judith Paris - who had set up her small Wines from Paris company after a career in the Scottish Arts Council - did a deal with him and made Chateau la Jaubertie famously available in Edinburgh, but before long they fell out, which was something that Nick appeared to have a talent for doing - his career was tarnished by recurring family disputes and break-ups making him come to seem one of those people who are called their own worst enemy (a description to which Judith could surely have added the words “Not while I am alive”).

Yet his wine was undoubtedly good and I have vivid memories of sipping it in the Bergerac sunshine - no bad weather on that occasion. His tie-up with Majestic Wines appeared to be a success and my first taste of  Chateau la Jaubertie continues to haunt my memory.

31 July 2015
Please visit my blog:  conradkmwilson.blogspot.co.uk

This Week's Wine: Italian Verdicchio

Verdicchio - especially when its name is enhanced with the words “classico” and “superiore” - is one of Italy’s most reliable white wines, dry and firmly structured, with enough flavour to make it interesting.

Most supermarkets stock it in one form or another, in good enough versions to make this product of the Adriatic coast seem a safe buy.

Sipped in a Pesaro restaurant, sometimes under a posher name, it seems the nicest of drinks, the perfect representative of the seaside university town where the composer Rossini was born.

Though now sold mostly in conventionally shaped bottles, it used to be visually identified by the tall, curvaceous amphora bottles in which it was traditionally supplied. Today this is something people have come to associate with poorer-quality Verdicchio, but Sainsbury’s current version, a 2014 “Taste the Difference”  classico, though not a superiore, costing £8, is unapologetically in an amphora bottle and is not to be despised because of that.

Although not markedly better than Waitrose’s 2014 Verdicchio Classico (in an ordinary bottle) at £5.99, it is fresh, thoroughly quaffable and certainly preferable to an average supermarket Pinot Grigio.

A more uncommon Italian white is a Grillo from Sicily, a happy specimen of which is being supplied online by Naked Wines of Norfolk at a not excessive £7.99 per bottle. Slightly stronger than the Sainsbury Verdicchio, this vivacious wine has a bit of bite and can be served as an admirable aperitif.
28 July 2015

Pineau of Memory

The gift of a bottle of Pineau des Charentes  recently given to me by a  friend from Manchester came as a jolt of nostalgia akin to the effect of a madeleine on Marcel Proust.

During my two RAF years at SHAPE in Paris it was my favourite French aperitif, superior in my opinion to the then fashionable Dubonnet. Sipped ice cold, it was one of my little pleasures, its nutty, raisiny taste the equivalent of a good sherry of similar strength. As a product of rustic France, it struck me as delightfully mysterious, surpassed only by the more urbane Italian Punt  e Mes, which I came to enjoy - and still do - a little later.

But Pineau, or the slightly stronger Vieux Pineau which I preferred, disappeared from my sphere of bibulous activities when I returned to Britain, its aroma a distant memory.  It had been introduced to me by a French conscript called Michel Gilbert, whom I got to know at SHAPE and who was deprived of Pineau for a week when he was put on a charge while lugging two heavy boxes of documents from one part of the premises to another. A French colonel, passing him en route, asked him why he had failed to salute, and Michel replied that he thought it would have been ridiculous. He was promptly charged and sentenced to jankers. Later he invited me to his wedding at a charming auberge on the Seine outside Paris, though I have not seen him since.

What happened to him - and to Pineau des Charentes - I do not know. Somehow I never drank it again,  not even  when visiting  France and had the opportunity to do  so. My tastes, I suppose, had moved on. Yet clearly it still exists, and the bottle I unexpectedly received, and quickly drank among friends, bore the mellow old enticing label. But British supermarkets seem not to stock  it, nor does my local wine merchant, though it is available, as most things are, through Amazon.

Whether I go so far as to buy it that way remains to be seen. My favourite aperitif these days is a good white burgundy, which I shall be content to stick to. But the pleasure of tasting Pineau again was  nice.  If you have come across it in Edinburgh, I would be happy to hear from you.
23 July 2015

The Streaming of the Seraglio

While Edinburgh cinemas declined the opportunity to stream  Sunday’s performance of Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail trom Glyndebourne  - Dorking, Bradford, and Milton Keynes were among the unlikely places that laudably accepted it - I seized my chance to watch the company’s transmission of the event on its own website.

It was by no means perfect. Too many blips on the live screening marred the transmission , particularly during the tension of Act Three, but nevertheless I got an impression of what David McVicar’s fine if controversial new production is like, as well as glimpses of the audience enjoying their picnics in the grounds.

Die Entfugrung - originally better known in Britain in its Italian version entitled Il Seraglio and now anglicised as “The Abduction” - is one of Mozart’s longest operas.  The Glyndebourne  version, largely uncut, started at five and finished more than four hours later, which may have been one reason why Edinburgh cinemas rejected it. But sung by a really good young cast, as this one was, it is a  marvellous, though still slightly underrated work, thanks partly to the Austrian Emperor’s famous comment to the composer after the premiere  that it contained “monstrous many notes.”

Dating from 1782, when Mozart was newly arrived in Vienna, it is a startling precursor in some ways of Cosi fan tutte, with a Fiordiligi-like heroine torn between two men and a story balanced on a knife-edge between the comic and the distraught.

McVicar, I thought, brought out this aspect of the piece more disturbingly than most directors, just as Glyndebourne’s new young music director, Robin Ticciati, admirably conveyed the music’s mixture of drama and exuberance, shot through with the clash of Turkish percussion, which was all the rage in Vienna at the time (it can even be heard in the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony).

Yet there is nothing racist in the approach, as there evidently is in the new production at Aix-en-Provence, which has provoked such fears of terrorist reaction that members of the audience have been searched for weapons as they arrive.

McVicar’s production is impressively truthful and unsensationalist, though undeniably irascible. Everyone, even the usually amicable Pedrillo, is made to seem on the point of exploding with impatience to the extent that Osmin, the Pasha’s threatening overseer, is not the accustomed shaven-headed brute but looks like someone fair-haired  and nasty out of Wagner’s Ring.

Though some of the London critics in their reviews chose to share the Emperor’s complaint about too many notes, the chance to hear a really complete performance  of the work struck me as well worth taking. Whether or not there were too many spoken words, they were part of the character of the piece and the extra music (including the heroic Belmonte’s Act Three aria, almost always omitted) was compensation. It was also a performance enlivened by its passionate and beautifully focused power of observation. When the DVD is issued next year I shall be buying it.
20 July 2015

God's Tenor

The death of Jon Vickers the other day  at the age of 88 prompted me to listen to him again in the DVD of one of his major roles - Don Jose in the Salzburg Festival performance of Bizet’s Carmen with Grace Bumbry in the title role and Herbert von Karajan as conductor.

The lavishly detailed   production by the conductor himself, was very much a spectacular Karajan show, with dozens of extras, a full Spanish corps de ballet, clacking heels,  sumptuous costumes, and a Seville townscape for Act One, complete with sunshine, busy cafe terrace and big stairways - the obverse, in every way,  of the sombre , characteristically “urinary” Beito production streamed on July 1 from the London Coliseum.

Yet the heart of the Karajan performance was where it belonged, not only down in the Salzburg orchestra pit with the Vienna Philharmonic but in the outsize personalities of Vickers (slightly bandy-legged in uniform) and the alluring Bumbry  themselves, along with the expressive, wide-eyed Mirella Freni as Micaela. 

Although, like Beito, Karajan shunned the spoken dialogue which is an essential feature of Bizet’s masterpiece, the strengths - including the melodic sweetness -  of the opera shone through, however grand the scale. God’s Tenor, as Vickers used to be nicknamed, was in eloquent form. Though his Christian zeal - his first wife was a missionary’s daughter and  he pulled out of two major productions of Tannhauser because he deemed Wagner’s opera to be blasphemous - affected much of his career, sometimes to its detriment, his granite-voiced singing was of fierce intensity.

My wife, watching part of Act Two   of Carmen over my shoulder, remarked that he looked just like Billy Graham - an unexpected but apt comment, given his religious background, bringing to mind a profile of him written by Andrew Porter which said that the trouble with Vickers was that there were  moments when he wondered whether he was watching and hearing Jon Vickers as Peter Grimes  or Peter Grimes as Jon Vickers.

It was this aspect of the great, craggy-faced tenor, son of a Canadian  lay preacher, which my wife seemed to have picked up, and which undoubtedly marred some of his performances, memorable though they were. I heard him seldom - as Verdi’s Otello and Handel’s Samson - and almost always in London. But it was a memorable, if sometimes exhausting and finally exhausted voice. Karajan was said to admire him enormously but Sir Georg Solti - a “bully” according to Vickers, though Vickers seemed to be a bit of a bully himself - fell out with him and refused to work with him. 

And his Don Jose? Undoubtedly impressive,not least in the Flower Song,  though his soft notes, as light as feathers in contrast with what has been called the blunderbuss effect of his loud ones, are what stick in the memory.  It is easy to imagine what his Messiah, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham, must have been like - the sound of God’s Tenor at full throttle, but at times on the edge of inaudibility,  was something to savour.

17 July 2015 

Please visit my blog:  conradkmwilson.blogspot.co.uk

This Week’s Wines: Summer Whites

If you find Sancerre too lush for your palate as a summer sauvignon, and perhaps also too pricey, an alternative lies in a Touraine Sauvignon, which comes from the same French region but is more mineral in flavour and costs a lot less. Waitrose’s own-label version at £6.99  from Cave de Oisly is a particularly nice example, refreshingly dry but with ample flavour.

Also worth sampling,  from a different part of France is Simpson’s Sauvignon, a product  of the Languedoc. which Naked Wines of Norfolk, now operating  in conjunction with Majestic Wines, sell for £7.99.

Charles Simpson, in partnership with his wife Ruth, is a young Englishman, formerly in pharmaceuticals, now working in southern France under the name of Simpsons of Saint Rose. His Sauvignon is not his only wine - his low-yield Roussanne at £9.99 is a rarity also worth drinking and deemed a fine match for crab.

More readily accessible, however, are a pair of classic  white burgundies, a St Veran and an even better Montagny, both being marketed by Tesco around the same sort of  price. The Montagny can be bought by the half case (six bottles) for under £60. Strongly recommended.
11 July 2015

A Carmen for Today

Gratuitously vicious and violent, Calixto Bieto’s English National Opera  production of Carmen, streamed earlier this month from the London Coliseum to cinemas everywhere, was in some respects less lethal than expected. Though his devotion for opera as sensationalism was emphatically still present, it was not wholly at odds with the Merimee story on which Bizet based his final opera.

The feebleness with which it has been so often characterised - it was the first opera I saw as a boy and I thought it too soft-edged - was ruthlessly swept aside. But what replaced it was musically unconvincing. Carmen is a sublime example of French lyricism, and its beauty needs to be respected. By Beito, alas, it wasn’t.

The heroine’s “goodness”, as opposed to her badness, was famously portrayed by Teresa Bergaza at the 1977 Edinburgh Festival  in a performance where her feminism, not her sluttishness, was what mattered. Some people thought her too puritanical for the part, but with Placido Domingo as her Don Jose the combination worked, and her death was a feminist victory.

Viewed in remorseless close-up, there was no doubt about Carmen’s sluttishness in Justina Gringyte’s brassy ENO portrayal. Even Micaela, in Bieto’s hands, became something of a slut as she wobbled round the stage in high-heeled shoes, in total defiance of the tenderness of her music.Yet Eleanor Dennis in this role gave us the best singing of the evening, even when Beito was intent on making her respond with triumph when she persuaded Don Jose to return to his mother at the end of Act Three.

Beito’s was, in fact, a Carmen without dramatic contrast. Eric Cutler’s big, bullish Don Jose was a long way from Domingo’s, and sounded merely crude in the Flower Song. Leigh Melrose’s apparently world-famous portrayal of Escamillo, thanks to Beito’s updating, seemed no more than an Al Caponish gangster in Act Two.

Nor was the decor helpful. Lilias Pasta’s tavern was non-existent, and the mountain scene was a car park big enough for five cars to be brought on to the Coliseum stage - a triumph of sorts. In Act One, shorn of its lyricism by one of Beito’s scenes of public urination, the Spanish flag was made to symbolise the barracks and cigarette factory. Spoken dialogue, perhaps fortunately in the circumstances, was in short supply. The English translation, for once all too audible, was crude.

Yet the final act was an unexpected success. The excellent ENO Chorus sang vividly from the front of the stage. The chalk circle within which Carmen and Don Jose brought the opera to its climax, was effective. Richard Armstrong, as he did in the days when he was  Scottish Opera’s expert music director, proved himself a real conductor, even if the orchestral reproduction in Castle Douglas’s nice little cinema, where we heard it, sounded far too loud.

Operatic streaming has become one of the success stories of modern times, enabling more and more people to experience famous productions from which - for reasons of distance and high ticket prices - they are customarily excluded. Though this Carmen was not one of the better examples of beaming live opera to the masses, it showed what has become possible. Along with DVD, a more subtle format, opera streaming is one of the musical assets of the day.

10 July 2015

Happy Holidays!

Conrad's blog is on holiday until 10th July, when it will resume with a review of the streaming of the ENO Carmen.

Fathers' Day

Orkney Days and Nights

From 1977, when it was founded, until 1990, when I stopped going to it, the St Magnus Festival in Orkney was my annual midsummer escape. Presided over by Peter Maxwell Davies and his music, it was my favourite festival of them all, set in two small towns, Kirkwall and Stromness, where one event led straight into the next, and the last of them each night led into the next day’s dawn.

It was the Scottish equivalent of Aldeburgh, Benjamin Britten’s fine little festival in Suffolk.  In both of them you encountered music evoking the landscapes and seascapes amid which you were listening  to it.  Britten’s spoke of the fens, Davies’s of luminous turquoise skies (not every year admittedly, but always hoped for) above Kirkwall harbour, filled with fishing boats each of them  identified, like Mozart masterpieces, with a “K” number.

One day, sauntering with Malcolm Rayment, music critic of The Herald, along the waterfront, we named the boats we were passing. “Look.” I exclaimed, “there’s the early opera Mitridate.”   “And there,” replied Malcolm, “is one of the best of the Salzburg divertimentos for wind and strings.”

On Sundays, prior to to an afternoon recital in the old Stromness hall, we might spot the likes of Gennadi Rozhtdestvensky walking the length of the long narrow High Street before playing piano duets with his wife, Viktoria Postnikova.  Stromness Books and Prints, formerly Broom’s Bookshop, was an essential pedestrian pit-stop, a tiny, cluttered Aladdin’s cave of a place, filled with literary treasure  trove, run by Tam MacPhail, a resident American who had once worked in Jim Haines’s and John Calder’s Paperback Bookshop in Edinburgh, and who was married to Gunnie Moberg, an adventurous, poetic Swedish photographer armed with an Olympus camera, who scoured the islands for the most sensationally picturesque views, which she sometimes captured from the windows of small aircraft  that transported her around.

Near the bookshop, in his council house, lived the Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown. Davies, who set many of Brown’s words, composed some of his best music in his isolated cottage near the Old Man of Hoy. Stone Litany, written for the Scottish National Orchestra and conducted by Alexander Gibson down south in Glasgow, set Davies’s inspiration flowing.

The Blind Fiddler, written for  the Fires of London, Davies’s own chamber group, was unveiled in St Magnus Cathedral. A long work, sung by Mary Thomas,  it ended just at the point where, outside, sunset was soon to become sunrise. On a solitary walk afterwards, I brooded about what I had just heard, then returned to my hotel to write about it.

The place, and its atmosphere, were magic. Each year there was a new Davies work to hear, often more than one - sometimes an opera, performed by local people, or a piano piece, portraying the voyage to Hoy, where the festival invariably ended with a merry party entailing a five-mile walk to Davies’s cottage.

Gradually things expanded. Big works replaced little ones. Isaac Stern arrived with Andre Previn to give the premiere of Davies’s Violin Concerto - not, it seemed to me, one of his greatest works.  A new music arena opened. Davies composed a frolicsome tone poem, Orkney Wedding with Sunrise, now popular around the world.  It ended with a sonorous skirl of bagpipes, even though it is fiddles, rather than pipes, which are the Orcadian instruments that matter.

The old visions began to fade.The rough-hewn voice of Ted Hughes, declaiming his poetry in the Pier Art Gallery, hangs ever more distantly in the air.  Recently Davies has been  ailing. George Mackay Brown is dead, and so are Gunnie Moberg, who died before her time, whose pictures were so redolent of Mackay Brown,  and Archie Bevan, teacher and co-founder of the festival.

Before these things befell, I had stopped attending. I had had my fill.  The festival was recognisably changing. The event as it originally was was wonderful. To venture back might be too daunting but the memory - of stormy organ music in the cathedral, of lobster and scallop suppers with Highland Park whisky after concerts, of sharing  a duck with George Mackay Brown in the Stromness Hotel (“dicey thing, duck,” he remarked as he poked at it with his knife and fork) - lingers on. This year’s St Magnus International Festival, as it is now rather grandly called, opened last Friday.
20 June 2015


www.stmagnusfestival.com