This week's wine: A Taste of England

English white wines are notoriously - some would say ridiculously - expensive. To pay the price of a classic Meursault for something with a pleasantly pastoral but by no means famous name is an act of patriotism into which few people are surely tempted.

Yet there is no doubt that English wines can be good and are getting better. But how much to a supermarket shopper are they actually worth?

It is Waitrose, as so often, which at the moment is putting them, and us, to the test. The  2013 Flint Dry Chapel Down, reduced from £9.99 to £7.99, is not only well priced but extremely attractive. Its name, admittedly, could be that of a cheap English cheese. But “flint dry” is an eye-catching description and, more than that, it is apt.

As a Kentish wine, produced from chardonnay and three other grapes, its predominant taste is predictably apple-like, but flintiness is a captivating presence, lightly mineral with a hint of stone. At 11 per cent proof the wine is certainly light - this is not at all an aggressive Kiwi sauvignon blanc - but it is a delicate aperitif and, I would say, a good match for shellfish.

If Waitrose can keep the price down, I shall be buying it again.
30 March 2015

Thought Conrad and his readers might like this war-time posting. (Sue, Blog Administrator)

Before the Crash

Having reached the not wholly unpredictable end of Michel Bussi’s enthralling new novel, After the Crash, I find myself confronted with  the facts of this week’s genuine air disaster in France, involving exactly  the same type of aircraft, the same deadly descent into a French mountain, a similar number of deaths on the same sort of routine  European flight.

Though the details and the focus of Bussi’s book are otherwise quite different, his readership, already estimated at 700,000, will now surely rise still higher.
26 March 2015

The Editors in My Life (29) - My Week in Warsaw

After the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s successful trip to Eastern Europe in 1978, the Scottish National Orchestra was quick to follow suit with an appearance at the Warsaw Autumn  Festival along with concerts elsewhere in Poland.  

Of all the journeys I have made with Scottish performers, this was by far the most dispiriting. More than thirty years after the Second World War, Poland still seemed a country which had been trampled upon, and which was still victimised. It was not a place at ease with itself. Warsaw’s Old Town, though handsomely rebuilt, looked unnervingly like a film set, leaving you constantly conscious of what lay just below the surface (see Wajda’s searing trilogy)  Shops were devoid of basic essentials. Having accidentally left my toothpaste at home, I found myself unable to buy more.

But Eric Mackay, by then Alastair Dunnett’s successor as editor of The Scotsman, rightly saw it as a trip worth going on and immediately said yes when I was invited to chronicle the experience.  Since Malcolm Rayment of The Herald, a music critic with Poland among his specialisms, would be flying there ahead of the orchestra and staying on after the players had departed for the luxury of Vienna and a concert at the Musikverein featuring a theatrical new horn concerto by the Edinburgh-born Thea Musgrave, Mackay saw the point of The Scotsman taking a different approach from its Scottish rival.  My aim was to track the whole tour and assess the contrasts between East and West.

In Warsaw the featured composer was to be Andrzej Panufnik, who had escaped from his Communist overlords and settled in Birmingham after the Second World War, thereby becoming persona non grata in occupied Poland. The SNO, it was hoped, would help to re-establish him with a performance (for which special permission had to be sought) of his passionate Sinfonia Sacra under Sir Alexander Gibson, along with the Polish premiere of Peter Maxwell Davies’s atmospheric Orkney masterpiece Stone Litany and  of Michael Tippett’s ebullient Fourth Symphony. The days of the SNO going abroad to play Tchaikovsky appeared to be over.

Musically, at least, there was nothing depressing about the visit.  Travelling with the players by LOT Airlines, Poland’s then somewhat uncomfortable national carrier, I found myself immediately separated from them on arrival  and transported to a different hotel, the famous old Bristol on the banks of the Vistula, which seemed a promising enough destination, even though it had been reputedly Gestapo headquarters  during the Second World War. On entering it, however, I was shaken to encounter fierce spotlights in the lobby and what appeared to be Nazi SS officers in the corridors. But I had not, as I feared, entered a surrealistic  time warp. A film was being made, which explained everything.  But, after surrendering my passport at reception, the drabness of my slit of a bedroom, with its filthy curtains and rusty sink, prompted me to flee to the security of the newly-opened Intercontinental Hotel, where the orchestra was staying and where I found a room awaiting me - there had been, it seems, an administrative bungle.

Though the Bristol has now been modernised, the Intercontinental seemed like a little island of American comfort in a cheerless city. Yet it, too, had its drawbacks at the time.  Was it right to eat lavishly available food in a hotel restaurant which few local people could afford to enter? The furtiveness with which the hotel staff illegally sought to exchange zlotys for dollars under the watchful eyes of what may have been disguised security officials was constantly alarming.

But I, as a visiting journalist, had a small risk of my own to take before departing for the joys of modern Vienna. Back home in Edinburgh, a member of The Scotsman’s political staff had asked me if I would deliver a book for him to an old friend in Warsaw. The book was Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope, banned at the time by the Communist regime. As an innocent music critic I agreed to go with it - though what, I now wonder, would Eric Mackay have said had he known? (his fury was limitless when some members of his features staff went on a private parachute jump in Perthshire and broke their legs).

More apprehensive than I pretended to be, I got the book safely through airport security and out to Warsaw’s dispiriting suburbs. But at the apartment block to which I was to take it there turned out to be  nobody at home. A dog growled softly behind the door. I placed the book beneath a dustbin and headed back to town to hear Panufnik.

Two weeks later Eric Mackay received a visit from a pair of bureaucratic Poles. I had written too disparagingly, they said, about flying with LOT Airlines and what was he going to do about it? I wrote disparagingly about many things, he replied with a mirthless grin, and he proposed to do nothing at all. It was pleasant to be  back in Scotland.
24 March 2015

This week's wine: A different Pinot Grigio

Pinot Grigio once seemed the safest of Italian whites - and still does if you buy it from Valvona & Crolla.  Elsewhere it has long been a matter of luck, or lack of luck, but the problem is there to be sidestepped.

If you have rightly become distrustful of northern Italy’s most prevalent white, or if Valvona prices have come to seem too steep, would a southern Italian Pinot Grigio do the trick?  Or a Hungarian one? Or a Slovenian?  Everybody seems to be at it, trading on the fact that it is a wine we have all heard of. 

Though most of these Pinots, for better or worse, taste like Pinot Grigio, choosing something from outside Europe can brings a different perspective. For quite a while now I have been buying Australian Pinot Grigio in the knowledge that it tastes fresher and brighter than most of the Italian stuff, and more interesting than a lot of the Australian chatdonnays that continue to flood the market. 

Lindeman’s Bin 85 Pinot Grigio is a good example. You can buy it with ease at Tesco or Asda or, if you live on Edinburgh’s South Side, at the very useful Avenue Store in Blackford Avenue, where the 2014 vintage is selling, very invitingly, at £7.99, 

Without losing contact with its traditional taste - as Australian Chardonnay certainly does -  it has a cheering Pacific overtone, and adding a bottle to your basket is the easiest thing in the world to do. It’s fine with salads, or pizza, or pasta - all the things Pinot Grigio should match but today often does not.
22 March 2015

After the Crash

The recent explosion of Scandinavian thrillers is what we have come to call a literary phenomenon. But the trend is spreading. From France this month, much of it set in northern France, comes Michel Bussi’s After the Crash, which opens with a Turkish Airbus crashing in the Jura Mountains on a Christmas flight from Istanbul to Paris. Even today, “Don’t fly home for Christmas” remains one of the most alarming warnings people receive from morbid friends about the dangers of flying.

Here is the story of a disaster in which all but one of a flight’s passengers die. The survivor is a baby girl, found near the wreckage. The twist is that there were two baby girls on board and, since both sets of parents have been killed, nobody can precisely identify the survivor.

The year is 1980, just before the establishment of DNA testing. The story, in which I am now immersed, is endlessly unfurled but undeniably gripping.  With rival grandparents - a rich industrialist family on the one hand, the impoverished owners of a waffle-and-chip van on the other - claiming adoption rights, the tale develops in a very French manner. Who will end up winning the child? There are tiny hints of Zola, perhaps even of Flaubert, along the way.

But, with the advent of a private investigator,  After the Crash also becomes a tease - spookier and more sinister as it progresses. Now about halfway through it, I admit I am hooked.  Even if the ending may prove to be less revelatory than I am hoping for, it is easy to see why this substantial book has already sold more than 700,000 copies. Michel Bussi is clearly  someone to watch.
21 March 2015
   

Late Additions

The gaps - tantalising or otherwise - in the 2015 Edinburgh Festival programme have now been filled. Two operas were added yesterday to the schedule at the Festival Theatre plus an electronic encounter with The Four Seasons at the Playhouse.

The Magic Flute will have  four performances from Berlin’s Komische Oper, and The Marriage of Figaro three from Ivan Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra with sundry soloists . Compared with the old days, when the two Mozart operas might have been given up to ten performances each in the (admittedly smaller) King’s Theatre,  it is not a lot. But it is obviously better than nothing.

Indeed Fischer’s decision to break down the barriers between performers and audience, already successfully tried out by him in New York, has good omens, though how it will work on the stage of the Festival Theatre remains to be seen. If you admire Fischer as much as I do, you will certainly want to see and hear this progressive - and superlative - Mozartian in action.

As for The Magic Flute, it, too, this German expressionist production in the style of the 1920s  is coming from a reliable source. But how well will Vivaldi’s four violin concertos survive  their updating, in which, besides the electronics, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra will be taking part?  Better, let us hope, than Handel’s Messiah at the long-defunct Crystal Palace.
18 March 2015

This Week's Wine: Something Slovenian

Yugoslavia’s Lutomer Riesling was one of the great party wines of my younger days, and something to drink convivially by the bottle in restaurants that stocked it.  Its red equivalent, a good deal heftier,was Hungarian Bull’s Blood, but Lutomer Riesling, being light and quaffable, did very nicely, or so I thought at the time.

I have not seen it for years, and what  Marks & Spencer are selling in its place is something which memory tells me is very different  as well as very much better - and so it should be, you may feel inclined to add, considering that it costs £10 a bottle.

Made from a blend of Furmint, Traminer, Pinot Gris, and Riesling grapes, it may be expected to have a certain taste of Alsace about it, since three of these four grape varieties are closely associated with that part of Europe. But as the twelfth-century vineyards from which it comes - the wine has what looks like a fundamental  identifying date, 1139, though the M&S vintage is reassuringly  2013 - lie close to the Austrian border, we may also expect the flavour to have something slightly Austrian about it.

This, at any rate, was what I thought I tasted in it.  Though described as a dry white, there is a touch of sweetness about it, deriving no doubt from its riesling content. There is also, when the bottle is first opened, a slight prickle on the palate, which adds to the pleasure of drinking it. On the whole I think I would prefer to savour it without food, though veal or creamy cheese would not go amiss.

It is certainly something worth trying.The label suggests that M&S bottle it themselves. If so, the result is a coup for the supermarket, even if the name may seem too like a phone number - are we expected to ask, in our local branch, if they have a bottle of the 2013 1139?
14 March 2015

More Than Schubert

So impressed have I been by the tenor Ian Bostridge’s investigative  study of Schubert’s Winterreise that  I have gone back to his earlier book, A Singer's Notebook, which I somehow missed when it was published a few years ago.

Its piece de resistance is the Edinburgh Festival lecture which Sir Brian McMaster invited him to give around the time of Baz Luhrmann’s sensational Australian production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which Roderick Brydon conducted at the Festival Theatre and in which Bostridge, in the process of developing his career, played a part - those were the days when opera was still worth seeing in Edinburgh.

Bostridge’s lecture, drawing on his experience as a historian as well as a singer, makes a somewhat protracted read, but it’s the shorter pieces - mostly essays and commentaries on favourite composers - that really grip the attention. His enthusiasms extend far beyond Schubert to  include Monteverdi,  Mozart, Hugo Wolf, Kurt Weill, Noel Coward, Stravinsky, Bob Dylan and, above all, Britten.  His notes on these figures have been judiciously selected, his essay on Mozart’s tenor roles being particularly rewarding. In writing it he fell foul of that touchy opera director David McVicar, who pinpointed his failure to champion the role of Ferrando in Cosi Fan Tutte, every modern director’s favourite Mozart opera.

McVicar’s belief that Bostridge failed to rate Ferrando because it was not a role that suited him may well be true, but equally right is Bostridge's own belief that Idomeneo was Mozart’s greatest tenor role and the centrepiece of what Mozart himself considered to be his greatest opera. Not for nothing have such tenors of the calibre of Pavarotti and Vickers been attracted to it in their time.

Compared with Idomeneo, claims Bostridge, Mozart’s other tenor roles seem pallid. In The Marriage of Figaro there is scarcely a tenor to speak of. In Don Giovanni there is only the insufficient Don Ottavio (though one of the best Ottavios I have seen was the one who, in Graham Vick’s fascinating Scottish Opera production, kicked over a wastepaper basket in his frustration). Belmonte in Die Entfuhrung suffers from a surfeit of arias at least one of which seems expendable in comparison with what is sung by his beloved Constanza - and, to be blunt, something the same can be said of Ferrando in Cosi.

Such essays, coming from an intelligent singer rather than a critic, are worth encountering, but Bostridge’s preference for Weill over Brecht in The Threepenny Opera is equally sharp. as is his passionate championing of Britten’s War Requiem, a work more about death than about war, as one of Britten’s two most crucial masterpieces - the other being The Turn of the Screw.
11 March 2015    

Another New Coffee Pot

There are coffee pots - avoid them -  which manage to make all coffees taste disappointingly the same. But our latest household pot is not a failure in that or any other respect.  What I brew in it - be it my favourite organic Ethiopian,  Waitrose’s Peruvian decaff, or Taylor of Harrogate’s mellow Lazy Sunday -  tastes quite distinctively how we expect it to taste.

This glass coffee maker with its heat-retaining zip covering comes with a funnel-filter of fine mesh and stainless steel, and a neatly foolproof pourer which fits snugly into the neck. The pot comes in two sizes - ours holds a bit less than a litre but is fine for a single cup - and making coffee in it is simplicity itself. It is also easy and quick to clean.

It is a Danish device named Eva Solo, an utterly non-gimmicky, non-mechanical, non-steam-belching  invention, not cheap, but which can also be used, if you so wish, as a small wine decanter. That, in the first place, was why I bought it and how I used it, until I received a superb big Le Creuset decanter as a present from my son, at which point I started employing Eva Solo correctly as a coffee maker - clearly its primary purpose.  As such it seems peerless, or will be until I find something even better.

It comes in two sizes, and you can buy it from Amazon.  It looks good and is nice to hold, infinitely more so than a fiddly traditional cafetiere or even the Aeropress (slower and messier in comparison. and  with a vacuum plunger that grows increasingly hard to press down) which I recommended not so long ago. The Eva Solo is a delight to use. Since we can get through several types of coffee in a single week, this is just the coffee maker we have been waiting for and I do not know why I did not start using it sooner.
8 March 2015

This Week's Wine: Muscadet Again

Muscadet, as  I keep asserting, is a matter of chance. At its cheapest, it can be vile and harsh. At its dearest, more elaborately named, it can be a French delight. But most Muscadet comes in between, and that is when luck becomes a factor. It’s when we realise that cheap can sometimes be good, and expensive disappointing. 

This week from Waitrose it is a Muscadet which is cheap but good enough to make you want more. At £6.49 a bottle, it can hardly fail to be unpretentious. Named La Mariniere, with a sketch of shellfish on the label, this is unquestionably a basic Muscadet, its appellation as plain as can be, but its taste as bright as you could wish. 

It tastes, quite simply, like Muscadet, and that is why we loved this 2013 specimen. If stocks last, we shall be buying it again.
5 March 2015

Schubertian Strains

Halfway through Schubert’s Winterreise comes the moment of lilting sweetness - and of sweetness defiled - which is the song Fruhlingstraum. It is a problematic song, in some ways almost sugary, as Ian Bostridge admits in his searching new book on the great song cycle, not least when the music reaches the word Seligkeit, meaning bliss or happiness.

It’s a word ominously familiar in Schubert, and there is a separate, buoyant  little Schubert song of that very title, which was one of the first I ever got to know and love. I was still a schoolboy when I bought Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s early recording  and I chose it for what lay on the other of this ten-inch blue-label Columbia  78rpm  disc, which happened to be Die Forelle, The Trout, source of the Trout Quintet.

This  was a  song I already knew and adored and wanted to hear again and again.  These were the  days when Schwarzkopf’s voice had few of the mannerisms it gained later in her career and when Gerald Moore was her sublime accompanist.

But though her youthfully exuberant recording was fleet and blissful, Seligkeit (like so many Schubert songs) has its undercurrents, which were ominously caught by the mezzo-soprano Brigitte Fassbaender in a more recent recent recording which was her contribution to the vast CD collection of Schubert’s songs devised by the pianist Graham Johnson.  On the front of the plastic box is a picture of a graveyard and Fassbaender’s is a Seligkeit to remind us that Schubertian bliss - as we are increasingly coming to realise - all too easily ends in despair.  It is something that Ian Bostridge, in his exhaustive new  study, rightly devotes much space to explaining.
3 March 2015

Eastward Bound

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra, founded in 1974, made its first major foreign tour just four years later. Based, like the players, in Edinburgh, I was the only critic to be invited on this enthralling trip to Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria -  and to chronicle what I  heard and saw. The Scotsman was amenable. My expenses were being paid. It was the first time a Scottish orchestra had ventured into Eastern Europe. Roderick Brydon - still in place as its admirable Edinburgh-born musical director, though alas he  would not be there much longer -  conducted every concert.

The interesting Michael Roll, winner of the first Leeds Piano Competition, played Mozart. Budapest, Bucharest, and Sofia were the principal destinations, but there  were some unexpected  diversions - to Brasov, not far from Dracula’s castle, where Andras Schiff, another early Leeds contestant, was in the audience, and to Bekeszaba, a salami town in  the far east of Hungary, with earth roads but a passable hall.  It was a long bus ride from Budapest. Memories of the hotel now escape me, but musically the place was virgin territory, and the coffee bat frequented by members of the orchestra carelessly  served salt in its sugar bowls.

It was possible - just - to imagine Bartok and Kodaly  once  turning up there in  quest of rare  folk songs, and indeed Bartok’s Divertimento and Kodaly’s Galanta Dances formed part of the orchestra’s repertoire. Brydon, with his flair for these composers, was still in his heyday, as indeed was Michael Roll, who subsequently vanished into obscurity.

At that time  the SCO had yet to cultivate  its relationship with international conductors and  soloists, but what it did it did well. Its new administrator, the  flamboyant Australian Michael Storrs, was busily reshaping the orchestra’s destiny, and was assiduously  hiring soloists who could also conduct.  One of these, the violinist Jaime Laredo, would soon take the players on a mammoth American trip, performing  Vivaldi’s Four Seasons all the way,  with immense success. By then, and on tours even farther afield,  it was no longer the orchestra Brydon helped to found, but it was certainly going places.

Meanwhile Budapest seemed triumph enough. The city, still under communist oppression, had a faint air of Janes Bond about it, especially in the tea room  and ornate subterranean baths of the Gellert Hotel. In the centre of town there was a historic art nouveau restaurant, modelled on Maxim’s in Paris, though the food was nothing much. Hungarian violinists serenaded the Scottish players after their concerts in the handsome Liszt Hall. Lunch at the residence of the British Consul on the heights of the old town consisted of food flown in by diplomatic bag.

Flying to Bucharest by the erratic Tarom Romanian Airlines, or so it was said to be at the time, seemed perilous. Take two valiums suggested Michael Storrs to the players before departure. En route a pair of air stewardesses fiercely fought with each other, their quarrel accidentally amplified by loudspeakers throughout the plane. In Bucharest  there was a louche young audience and a Romanian music critic asked  me if I could find a place for him on a Scottish newspaper. Later, still pleading earnestly, he wrote to me at The Scotsman.

It was easy to see why he wanted out. At the opera house, in the midst of what looked like a depressing season, I saw a dreadful production of Mozart”s Seraglio, supposedly enhanced by a gratuitous corps de ballet. On the square near Bucharest’s simulation of Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, a soldier prodded me in the stomach with his  gun and told me to move along. My crime was that  I had been standing still. Olivia Manning’s great Balkan trilogy, which I been reading throughout the trip, made me hope to eat carp but none came my way.

Sofia, however, was a delight. With its spacious walkways, impressive buildings, and airy views of distant mountains, it hardly mattered that the only food was meatballs. At the end of the tour, the place was a tonic. Travelling with a small orchestra, I discovered, was nicer than travelling with a big one. It was not the last trip I would make with the SCO. Spain,  France, America, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, with further experiences to record, still lay ahead.
2 March 2015

More about David

On the last day of February - while the wind still blew, the rain still lashed, and I continued reading Ian Bostridge’s vast and absorbing new study of Schubert’s Winterreise - my friend David Shaw’s sister Christine came to supper with us in Edinburgh.

She had returned a week previously from Hull, where she had organised David’s funeral with the greatest care and love, said my wife Sue, who had driven down with Cosima, the second of our three daughters.

The deaths of good friends are one of the recurring penalties of old age, but our supper with Christine avoided sadness.  We looked back with cheer. Inevitably we spoke of old times, as David and I had often done, but also of the present.  Though still conscious of how much I shall miss him, I talked with pleasure of his gifts as a mimic - something of which other people, even Christine it seems, were scarcely aware. But in my experience, with sudden and complete adroitness, he could evoke the visual tics and and gestures, the vocal mannerisms, of those we had known up to half a century ago.  Not even Philip Larkin, his boss at Hull University Library, could escape his warm attention.

It was an accomplishment which, of course, he shared with Larkin’s friend Kingsley Amis, a famous and priceless imitator, whose funniness could be more malicious.  David’s - like that of the conductor Alexander Gibson, another brilliant mimic - was always kindly, with none of the edge of cruelty personified by, for example, Herbert von Karajan, whose mimicry of his fellow conductor Otto Klemperer was not only embarrassingly inaccurate but also positively nasty.

Our evening with Christine was one of fond anecdotes, of good times remembered, which had been eloquently evoked by my youngest daughter Marcella who, on the day of David’s funeral, had said to me, “Don’t be sad that David is dead, be glad that he lived.”

I had been sitting with her, on the afternoon of the service, playing recordings of the music that was being heard in Hull - The Lark Ascending, Ae Fond Kiss, and Elgar’s Cello Concerto, chosen by Christine, along with that splendid hymn, To Be a Pilgrim.  The vicar, a portly and not unjovial man,  was a member of the  Church Army, an institution I know nothing about. But he was clearly a welcome presence, possibly in some ways faintly like David himself.

Christine resides just down the road from us in Edinburgh, so her journey, even on a stormy night, was perhaps not too daunting. The thought occurred to me that in childhood the Shaw family also lived “just down the road” in a different house.    It seemed a nice thing to remember on Saturday.
1 March 2015