This week's wine: Pinot Gris

Though made from the same grape as Pinot Grigio, here is a wine whose only element of similarity seems to be that it is white. It would take the palate of an experienced Master of Wine to discern what the two actually have in common, but what the Italians do with this prevalent Venetian grape and what the French do with its Alsace version is something that teases my own taste buds.

In northern Italy, Pinot Grigio is produced in bulk, is immensely and often undeservedly popular, but at its best makes a nice dry aperitif or accompaniment to pasta dishes and seafood. It has the attraction of being usually  fairly cheap unless, in Britain, you buy it in a large pub-sized wine glass.

Pinot Gris is more of a rarity which, when produced in Alsace, gains that balance - or some might say imbalance - between sweetness and dryness so typical of the region. Its attraction lies principally in this often somewhat disconcerting feature. Is it sweet or dry  or neither?  At its best it is certainly delicious, poised somewhere between a Riesling and a Gewurztraminer, though it can undeniably become cloying if you drink too much of it.

That, it seems to me, is the problem with the Pinot Gris which Waitrose has added to its wine list. Make no mistake, this 2013 Pinot Gris Reserve produced by Beblenheim from 25-year-old vines is a lovely wine, praised by the enthusiastic Jane MacQuitty of The Times for its oomph and attitude.

But one glass of it as an aperitif is quite enough,  and perhaps another glass with a first course of white asparagus, but thereafter, with my main course, I would want to part company with it.

On the other hand, if you want to stay with the one bottle, a Chinese meal might do the trick. Or perhaps, once again, the sweetness of the wine might pall. At £10.49 a bottle, the price is on the steep side, and I am not sure if I would go for it again.

True, Rod Easthope’s New Zealand Pinot Gris from Naked Wines of East Anglia does not cost much less, but it is better balanced, with more tang to it and, in my opinion, it is definitely preferable. It’s also worth remembering that Australian Pinot Grigio, often cleaner in taste than many an Italian Pinot Grigio, can be worth a try, especially as it is widely available around £7.99.
28 January 2015

A wee memoir

“And how did you become a music critic?” was a question  I was continually asked in earlier days.  “By intransigence” was the answer I should have given, if only I had thought of it.


The ambition went back to boyhood, when I wrote reviews of the first few Edinburgh festivals for my school magazine and was singled out by my headmaster for the trenchancy of my style. Charles Munch and the Concertgebouw Orchestra performing Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique  at the Usher Hall in 1948 was my turning point. Transfixed, I watched Munch, who appeared to be conducting himself to death,  from a seat in the organ gallery, just behind the kettledrums, and thereafter  kept scrapbooks of cuttings by all the London critics, though Christopher Grier of The Scotsman was my hero. I vowed that one day I would succeed him. I was nevertheless amazed when I did so.

Having passed through my pop vocalism phase - though it was by no means gone for good - I had found my path into the classics by way of Tchaikovsky’s B flat minor Piano Concerto, whose first movement I could not hear often enough, Schubert’s Unfinished, Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro, Walt Disney’s Fantasia, and as much Sibelius as I could find.  My grandmother bought me a piano, and my parents chose a teacher.  I played all day, though with no great aspirations, sat and  passed Higher Music, listened to the Third Programme, which had been recently launched by the BBC, and spent all my pocket money on shellac gramophone records, which I bought in four Edinburgh shops - Clifton’s and Methven Simpson on Princes Street, Rae Mackintosh and Paterson’s in George Street, all of which had listening booths with glass windows where I passed entire afternoons.

Methven Simpson was the best and sold catalogues (HMV’s for some reason being particularly hard to get) over which I would pore. Rae Mackintosh was the first to recognise the virtues of Decca’s FFRR (full frequency range recordings) through which I discovered The Rite of Spring and Ravel’s La Valse, neither of which featured in Scotland’s concert halls at that time, nor even, if I remember rightly, down  in London.

At home I compiled my own concerts for performance on my parents’ polished wood radiogram, before saving up to buy my own table-top Deccalian, with its distinctive white speaker grid, though I could never afford what was known as automatic coupling, whereby records were stacked on a long spindle and dropped, disc by disc, on to the turntable.  Nor did I invest in thorn needles and sandpaper sharpeners, which struck me as somewhat fussy compared with golden metal (though they were almost certainly better).

In the days before there was a recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, I compiled gramophone concerts and  wrote my own programme notes for them, inviting like-minded friends to attend these  domestic evenings complete with coffee during the interval.  Beethoven’s Ninth, conducted by Herbert von Karajan on a heavy pile of Columbia discs, became my pride and joy.  Though these boyhood events developed in adolescence to the founding of an Intimate Music Circle (“how intimate?” asked one potential member - “will there be girls?”) which hired a room each week at  the Adelphi Hotel in Cockburn Street.

At home, though never in public, I played duets with pianist friends - Haydn symphonies, Moszkowski dances - but concert-going was largely dependent on the presence of Walter Susskind as conductor of the SNO (Elgar’s Violin Concerto and Mahler’s First Symphony in a single programme in the 1940s). Carl Rosa Opera brought its repertoire of touring productions.  The Beatrice Miranda company, a bunch of local amateurs, annually sang operatic excerpts, often excruciatingly. But there was enough for The Scotsman to employ a full-time music critic, the only one in Scotland. In anticipation of this responsibility, I wrote my own private reviews of every performance, good or bad, which I attended and circulated them among friends. Thus did I become a music critic.
27 January 2015

Farnes Triumphant

The first time I heard Richard Farnes, some years ago at the Perth Festival, I thought him potentially the best opera conductor in Britain.

He was, at the time, in charge of that plucky little company, English Touring Opera, and the way he handled its artful production of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos at the Perth Theatre riveted my attention.

Since then he has become music director of Opera North in Leeds and, with a Ring cycle and a much-praised Peter Grimes under his belt, has proved that my thoughts about him were no idle prediction.

There was a point, after he conducted the premiere of David Horne’s challenging Friend of the People, a complex modern opera if ever there was one, in Glasgow in 1999, when Scottish Opera could have grabbed him. It never happened, though he was to make sensational appearances around that time with Glyndebourne and English National Opera.

Now, a few nights ago, he made a guest appearance conducting a concert by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in Glasgow City Hall.  The programme included Delius’s Walk to the Paradise Garden and Walton’s film score for Henry V, among other things. Though I was unable to attend the event myself, I noticed that my colleague Michael Tumelty gave him a five-star review in The Herald, adding that he would have awarded six, if he had been allowed to do so. Will Scottish Opera offer him a production next season? Let us wait and see.
24 January 2015

The editors in my life (27) - to Italy

Holland’s handsome modern concert  hall - the Doelen in Rotterdam - gave the Scottish National Orchestra the closing success of its first long European tour. Back home in Glasgow, nobody appeared to notice that the players had ever been away, but there was a reason for this which greatly pleased my editor Alastair Dunnett. The fact was that Glasgow’s newspaper, the Herald, had failed to chronicle the tour because its newly appointed music critic, Malcolm  Rayment, was forbidden to go. In newspaper terms, this was a coup for The Scotsman, sensationally confirmed when the orchestra strode triumphantly  on to the Usher Hall platform  to perform its first concert after its return from abroad.

 The audience gave the players a huge welcome, and at the end of the evening Alexander Gibson rewarded his listeners with an encore - something unheard of at what would otherwise have been a standard winter season concert (and which, let me add, did not happen  when the same programme was performed in Glasgow). Suddenly re-raising his baton, Gibson unleashed the final fugue from Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, a work that had been played in its entirety more than once in the course of the tour. It was an apt and exhilarating moment as the players entered the performance  section by section, and the audience went wild at the end.

Though my reports had cost the paper what was said to be a fortune, they were reckoned by Dunnett to have been worthwhile and they paved the way for more to follow. Next time, less than a year later, it was Scottish Opera which made its first foreign trip, with Italy as its destination and Britten’s Albert Herring as the work it premiered at the annual Maggio Musicale in Florence’s historic Pergola Theatre, where The Marriage of Figaro had had its first Italian performance and  Verdi’s Macbeth was unveiled in 1847.

With around 1500 seats on five levels, the auditorium had a charming intimacy which suited Britten’s comedy to perfection and I had no difficulty getting my editor’s permission to attend - not least because Scottish Opera agreed to meet all my expenses (unlike the SNO, whose administrator Robert Ponsonby had billed Dunnett even for my bus journeys with the orchestra). Yet once again the Herald missed its opportunity by refusing to let Malcolm Rayment go along, though times were to change later when he joined me on many such trips.

Arriving in Italy in the midst of a torrential thunderstorm soon after the Florentine floods of 1966, when the River Arno broke its banks and thousands of works of art were damaged or destroyed, the opera company thought itself lucky to find the Pergola Theatre running as normal and fully renovated. With Roderick Brydon, Scottish Opera’s Britten specialist, as conductor, the performances won rave reviews from the leading Italian critics, who were seeing the work for the first time.

Here in Britain the Sunday Times previewed the production with words of which the company, as it now stands, should take heed. Pointing out that Jon Vickers had already appeared that year in Verdi’s Otello and that Joan Sutherland had starred in Rossini’s Semiramide, the paper declared: “But it’s  to Scottish Opera that the real honours go. That company, started seven years ago with two works and one week in Glasgow, will give two performances in Florence of its much-praised Albert Herring. And you can’t establish yourself in this field much faster than that.”

Representing Scottish Opera in Florence was its chairman, Robin Orr, who took me out to lunch in the first luscious pizzeria either of us had ever eaten in - which gave me an extra topic to write about. But it was the company’s first experience of a real opera house that mattered. For all its snugness, the backstage was big enough to hold  the scenery for the company’s entire repertoire - whereas in Glasgow, Wotan’s mighty ash tree in Die Walkure had been so big that it had to be stored in the street outside the stage-door of the King’s Theatre.
22 January 2015

The Editors in my Life (26) - Still travelling

The second leg of the Scottish National Orchestra’s first major European tour was a traversal of Germany from Munich to Dusseldorf, incorporating enough detours to make the players say that their agent, in planning such a trip, had folded his map the wrong way.

It was certainly more tiring, and for me less fascinating, than the first leg.  With Austria, and its final stop in Innsbruck, now behind them, and with Prokofiev’s Symphony No 5 as their running theme, the players arrived in Munich’s marmoreal Hercules Hall with nevertheless high expectations. But the polished marble interior was acoustically less friendly than it looked, and the concert never fully took wing. Dining afterwards with Sam Bor, the orchestra’s leader, and his wife Dorothie, a first violinist, I found that their feelings were the same as mine, and that, though central Munich was was exciting, neither of them was much looking forward to the more industrial cities that lay ahead.

True, there was Nuremberg, but its concert-hall turned out to be another disappointment, more like a modern conference centre, with acoustics that muffled the string tone, and an offhand audience.

And what of the detours, zigzagging around Lake Constance and the river Main? For my own part, as a critic, it was the diet of Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony - a fine work in small doses - that daunted me, and I opted out of one of the performances to see Antonioni’s brilliant London-based film Blow-Up (albeit dubbed into German) for distraction.

Back on orchestral track, I was alarmed to discover that the Dusseldorf programme would be at the giant Bayer aspirin factory at nearby Leverkusen.  The conductor Alexander Gibson, anxious to get on the road again afterwards, decreed that there would be no encores after this industrial event (as such things were known in those days back home  in Scotland). This suited me fine, as I had a long review to write - my editor wanted a substantial summing-up of the German portion of the tour - but it displeased the factory authorities and indeed provoked a minor incident.

As Sam Bor was leading the players off the platform at the end, he found his way blocked by the stage manager, who ordered him back on again. Sam, irritated by this intervention, thrust forward to the exit, but it was an unpleasant moment of misunderstanding at the end of an arduous tour of a country where Sam, in 1967, still felt ill-at-ease.

Only Rotterdam’s brand-new hall, with Jacqueline Du Pre playing the Elgar Cello Concerto, lay ahead and this went without mishap in more relaxing surroundings.
20 January 2015

The Editors in my Life (25) - travels

Graz, which was the second stop on the SNO’s first vast European tour in 1967, was where Richard Strauss sixty years earlier conducted the Austrian premiere of Salome, with Gustav and the lovely Alma Mahler, Puccini, Schoenberg, Berg, Zemlinsky,  Johann Strauss’s widow, and - it was said - a young Adolf Hitler in the audience. Along with the Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913, it remains high  on my list of historic performances I have missed.

The first I  learned about the charms of Graz was when, as a schoolboy, a neighbour with the memorable name of Stanley Concha advised me to go there. He had known it before the war, and loved it. When I joined The Scotsman I was on the mailing list of its opera house, so I received frequent invitations to attend performances there. The SNO’s two-day visit gave me the opportunity.

 Alas, Salome was not showing but there was a dreary Madama Butterfly, sung in German by a humdrum cast and staged on a shiny black linoleum floor which has remained for ever in my mind. Though it gave me a night off from a repeat concert by the SNO, I walked out at the interval. It was the first, but certainly not the last, time I had left an opera early - a critical weapon I soon learned to use when the occasion demanded.

At the first of the SNO’s Graz concerts, Jacqueline Du Pre had been soloist in the Dvorak Cello Concerto. A convivial member of the party, she had been in the hotel foyer while I was trying to phone my review to The Scotsman from behind the glass window of the hotel’s solitary phone booth. Spotting me, she donned my hat, which I had hung on a hook outside, pressed her nose against the window and, a cherished memory, pulled funny faces at me through the glass.

After Graz, the SNO proceeded to Linz, where it performed in a large school gym beside a noisy railway branch line. Sir Georg Solti had once conducted there, and famously got the trains diverted. Alexander Gibson had no such luck and Janet Baker’s singing of Mahler’s Ruckert Lieder had to wait until Salzburg’s Festspielhaus for acceptable surroundings.

Between these two stopping points, the orchestra had a night off in a somewhat sinister fogbound mountain village where the hotel proprietor, with a huge white moustache, said threateningly “I want to welcome you to my house.” Mass-produced schnitzels for supper formed his unappetising welcome.

Before leaving in its three buses the next morning, the orchestra’s administrator Robert Ponsonby, a former officer in the Guards, held a snap parade on the village square, where he asked the unforgettable question: “Who has left his boots on his bed?” The culprit was not, I  am relieved to say,  the music critic of The Scotsman.
19 January 2015

This week's wine: Soave

Soave, in Britain, is deemed one of the most basic of Italian white wines, but the Italians themselves think more highly of it. And rightly so, because much of the Soave they drink is better than what they send to Britain.

In Verona and around Lake Garda, Soave is a wine restaurants take pride in and serve  as a house speciality. It may be good, it may be less good, but it is usually worth drinking, especially on a warm night, after a performance at the Verona Arena, with lightning flickering in the distance. 

In Britain, it is what you find in corner shops amid a jumble of odds and ends. If the label simply says “Soave” - a place name but also a word meaning smooth or suave, it is best avoided. It will not be suave. But if the defining word “classico” or “superiore” - or preferably both - is also  on the label, it is likely to be a safer buy.

As so often, Waitrose sells a good one, a 2013 classico costing £7.99. It is certainly suave, without being sweet, but with a background hint of nettles which adds to its interest and makes it a match for pasta and antipasti, though it is equally enjoyable on its own. 

16 January 2015 

Paris Nouvel

Amid predictable controversy, France’s latest concert hall, La Philharmonie de Paris, opens this week - too soon according to its gifted architect, Jean Nouvel, whose hall on the lakeside in Lucerne can claim to be the finest modern concert hall in Europe.

According to Nouvel, the Paris hall is not yet ready - something that can be said about the opening of most other new halls. From commentators come complaints that its name is second-hand, acquired from the great Philharmonie in Berlin, which it resembles in its in-the-round audience layout, and in the terracing which has come to be called  “vineyard” design, in contrast with the conventional shoebox shape.

 Its position on the city outskirts, near the peripheral ring-road, has also been criticised. But its materials, employing a great deal of aluminium, are  undeniably striking, and its seating capacity of 2400, though large, evidently does not distance listeners from the music.

Until now, Paris - like London - has possessed no great halls. The Salle Pleyel, the Palais de Chaillot, the Chatelet and the Theatre de Champs-Elysees (the best of the bunch) all have serious acoustical deficiencies, as I well remember from the days, half a century ago, when  I lived there.

With the award-winning  Jean Nouvel as designer, there is surely hope for the new home of the Orchestre de Paris, whose conductor, at least for the moment, is the spirited Paavo Jarvi, son of the much-loved Neeme, whose period in Scotland was a good one for the RSNO.
14 January 2015

The Editors in my Life (24) More Travels

My most elaborate trip as music critic of The Scotsman began in 1967 as a week at the Berlin Festival and continued as a daily report of the Scottish National Orchestra’s first European tour, which took the players and their conductor, Alexander Gibson, from Vienna to Rotterdam, with Jacqueline Du Pre and Janet Baker as soloists.

By the time my career on the paper had run its lengthy course, tours by Scottish orchestras had become commonplace, but this one was the first of its kind and thus very special. My editor Alastair Dunnett agreed that I should go along, too, and chronicle the orchestra’s travels in detail. For the paper it was a considerable expense, but Dunnett valiantly footed the bill. Not until years later would Scottish orchestras start subsidising critics to travel with them abroad, in the  expectation of getting reviews back home.

Berlin - West Berlin at that time - was the easy bit of the trip,  entirely paid for by the festival. I had been there before, and knew my way around to the extent that not even Checkpoint Charlie proved much a problem when I wanted to attend a wonderful performance of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Komische Oper in the East. Only Magnus Magnusson, in his days as a Scotsman reporter, had preceded me to Berlin and he failed to make it across the border to the East.

In my own case, my Critics’ Circle membership card served as my pass - the only time it was ever of use to me. “They will be very impressed when you show it to them,” Horst Koegler, a distinguished West German critic, said to me beforehand. His prediction was correct, and so I got my first taste of the Komische Oper, a short walk through deserted streets  from the Wall. The only oddity about the glittering production of the Britten was that the role of Oberon was sung by a baritone, because counter-tenors at the time were frowned upon in East Germany, thus depriving the work of a bit of its sparkle.

From Berlin onwards, however, I was financially on my own. My flight from Berlin to Vienna via Munich was already paid for by The Scotsman, and so was my bill at the Intercontinental Hotel. Arriving there a day ahead of the SNO, I reviewed Josef Krips conducting Fidelio at the Vienna Opera, a showy but humdrum production with an enormous Karajan-style prisoners scene - it was he who had originally conducted it.

Then, back at the hotel, I transmitted my review - a tiresome and expensive task in the days before laptops, requiring the assistance of the hotel’s teleprinter department and a guarantee from The Scotsman that the transmission would be paid for at the other end. This was the nerve-racking procedure - which entailed “waiting for a line,” sometimes for more than an hour - I had to endure daily for three whole weeks.

The orchestra, when it flew in from Glasgow, was in churlish mood, not at all excited.  The players disliked the hotel, and found no joy in the great Musikverein hall - scene of the annual New Year’s Day concert - where they were to perform the following night. But the concert, with the doomed Jacqueline Du Pre as soloist, went well, even though no encore had been planned and the scherzo of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony had to be repeated instead.

At the end, the vibration of the playing caused one of the organ pipes to fall to the platform and crumple amid the players - a mishap less dangerous than it  looked, because the pipe was obviously very light. But it was a shock that caused a gasp from the large audience.  By the night of the second Viennese concert, Berlioz’s Corsaire overture was at the ready as an encore, the mood was happier, and the tour had properly begun.  Graz,  Linz, Salzburg, Munich, Nurnberg, Dusseldorf, Rotterdam and elsewhere lay ahead, but reminiscences must wait for another instalment of this blog.
13 January 2015

The editors in my life 23 - Travels

The big benefit of my budget for foreign travel as music critic of The Scotsman was that I never had to justify it. It was enough to get me to three or more festivals a year, especially if the festival was willing to pay a portion of the expense - usually the hotel bill, sometimes the flight.

In this respect the Holland Festival was the most generous, as also were Savonlina in Finland and Bergen in Norway. You could always assume that, wherever you went, tickets would be free - something especially useful if Bayreuth was your choice. Salzburg was notoriously ungenerous, at least in my day, and so, according to colleagues from elsewhere, was Edinburgh - the belief being that festivals which did not need to subsidise critics seldom did so.

In general I succeeded in getting to the festivals I wanted to attend each year - which firstly meant Holland, particularly in Peter Diamand’s time, when it seemed the nicest festival of them all, and specially inviting to critics because the performances were so good and so worth writing about.

In Amsterdam, critics were invited out to meals in small groups - Peter did the same when he became director in Edinburgh - but it never seemed like bribery.  Critics are invariably happy to bite the hand that feeds them. My first Scotsman editor, Alastair Dunnett,  was always appreciative if I  chose to attend a festival which was sending one of its events to Edinburgh, thus enabling me to write about it in advance.

Only once do I remember the Holland Festival blundering in this respect, when a new production of Don Giovanni, wonderfully conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini, had been booked to come to the King’s in Edinburgh after its Dutch premiere. But in Amsterdam, as I felt bound to report, it was a disaster - an early example of new-wave opera production so distorted in every respect that Giulini refused to conduct it a second time - i.e. in Edinburgh - unless it was completely changed.

Lord Harewood, who was Edinburgh’s director at the time, had two months in which to do something about it. He was up against his old foe, Lord Provost Duncan Weatherstone, who, after reading my review, demanded instant action.

By this time the Dutch production team had washed their hands of the entire performance, so Harewood placated Giulini by hiring an ad hoc team from Covent Garden, who designed a replacement backcloth at short notice and placed the most routine production, still with the original cast, in front of it.

Atrocity was transformed into nonentity, but Giulini conducted it in the form of a semi-staged performance and the Lord provost was reputedly pleased. I was not.
10 January 2015

This week's wine: Sauvignon Blanc

Sauvignon blanc comes in many guises. It can be dry or sweetish, soft or aggressive, cheap or dear, enticing or dull. It can come from France or Italy, Australia or New Zealand, South Africa or Eastern Europe.  Some of the best - and some of the worst - are French. 

Good ones - and bad ones - come from Bordeaux.  It has been compared, by one illustrious English wine scribe, with cat’s pee. Why do we drink it?  Because a good one is delicious, and does not have to be expensive. Chateau la Jaubertie, which mixes sauvignon grapes with semillon and gets the balance right, has long been one of my favourites. It comes from Bergerac, a good area for wine, and Judith Paris used to import it in her days of wine trading in Edinburgh. 

Visiting friends the other day, we were poured a South African sauvignon called First Cape, which Tesco sells for a tenner but is currently on sale at half price. This, too, is worth a taste - it’s soft enough to be a more-ish aperitif  but has a bit of life to it as well. 

First Cape wines are imported by Brand Phoenix of Dorking, Surrey, and you can buy them also at Waitrose, where their limited release Chenin Blanc - not actually one of my favourite grapes - costs £7.99, but their Coral Tree Semillon/Sauvignon, reduced from £8.99 to £5.99, looks like a bargain. 

9 January 2015

A musical editor

Michael Kennedy, who has died aged 88, was not one of the editors in my life. But as the Daily Telegraph’s long-established northern editor in Manchester he was an old friend and the only genuinely musical editor I have ever met.

How, amid his official duties, he found time to write so much, and so well, about music, I shall never know. But his books on Elgar, Britten, and Richard Strauss, whom he revered above Mahler - about whom he also wrote a book - remain very readable, as do his biographies of Sir John Barbirolli and Sir Adrian Boult, though his masterpiece was his study of the music of Vaughan Williams. 

His Oxford Dictionary of Music is still the best single-volume reference book of its kind - though Paul Griffiths’s Penguin dictionary is more illuminating and refreshingly opinionated if not always so accurate - and his sympathetic views on Richard Strauss’s Germanism  remain interesting though  inevitably controversial. 

As a newspaper editor he had an eye for talent, finding two freelances in Glasgow, Kenneth Walton and Michael Tumelty, who went on to hold major posts on The Scotsman and The Herald.

8 January 2015