A Critic's Enemies

A critic’s enemies - as I discovered when I was music critic of The Scotsman - are mostly his readers. Some of mine wrote angry letters. Others phoned me, accosted me in the street, visited The Scotsman, came to my house to tell me what they thought of me.

Though I worked too far away to offend the Pest of Poole, as my London-based colleagues nicknamed their most persistent adversary, who wrote to them in different colours of ink, he was a man who certainly had his equivalents here in Scotland.

I never quite understood how I could arouse the wrath I did.The very first letter I received denounced my “daily lucubrations.” Another compared me with a pebble rattling inside a tin can. Complaints were almost always worded in terms I would not have dreamt of employing myself about a performer.

When, after long and careful thought, I decided to change The Scotsman’s spelling of Tchaikovsky to Chaikovsky, the verbal abuse I received astounded me. Yet it was at a time - the 1970s - when other publications were likewise beginning to make the change. The music faculty of Edinburgh University, under Michael Tilmouth’s professorship, had already done so. Peter Diamand, the Edinburgh Festival’s director at the time, gave me permission to do so in my role as programme editor, though his successor John Drummond changed it back, as also did The Scotsman after my retirement.

Yet when Tchekhov became Chekhov, nobody, so far as I  remember, erupted in rage.  My Tchaikovsky campaign eventually bit the dust - not least, I always thought, as a result of the complaints of readers resistant to change. The New Grove, as Grove’s Dictionary came to be called, had already felt forced to retreat from its plan to change the spelling of Tchaikovsky when libraries all over Britain and America advised the editor, Stanley Sadie, to back off - he would be opening, they said, a very nasty can of worms if The New Grove started spelling Tchaikovsky with a “C.”

Maybe, in the end, it did not matter too much that the decision failed, and I myself now accept that Tchaikovsky remains the prevailing British spellng. Readers did worse things than crumple their copies of The Scotsman when I offended them. Members of choirs were partucular culprits when they received what they regarded as rebuking reviews.

A correspondent who signed himself B.Cook responded vigorously whenever I wrote about the Edinburgh Bach Choir. A would-be assassin in the Edinburgh Royal Choral Union said that he frequently saw me walking across Queen Street and vowed one day to run me over. A member of the Edinburgh Nurses Choir expressed the hope that she would find me in front of her on an operating table, and another contrived to get British Airways to send me a one-way ticket to Bahrain ( BA, discovering what had been done, telephoned me and asked me to destroy the ticket).

Yes, critics make enemies. At least I was never punched, though two members of the Scottish National Orchestra’s Friday audience once got me up against a wall in Lothian Road to ask why I hadn’t reviewed the previous week’s concert. “Whaur was your crit?” they shouted in my face. I replied that I had reviewed the same programme in Dundee on a different day, but they had obviously failed to see my report. They were not amused, but at least it showed  that my reviews mattered to them.
28 April 2015    

This week’s wine: Picpoul de Pinet

The announcement of a merger between Naked Wines and Majestic Wines sounds promising. Both are interesting outfits, the former a Norfolk-based supplier concentrating on new young wine producers. These include Benjamin Darnault of the Languedoc, whose latest (2014) vintage of the whimsically-named Picpoul de Pinet tastes like his best yet.

Though Languedoc wines are nowadays ten a penny, they are generally reliable and Picpoul continues to have a deserved rarity value. Darnault’s version of this dry, nicely prickly southern French white is thoroughly characteristic, and an excellent aperitif which is fine with seafood. The bottle comes with a personal message from the trophy-winning producer on the label along with a pretty line-drawing.  Darnault can be seen introducing  his wine on You Tube, followed by a convivial regional wine tasting, complete with singing and dancing.

If Majestic, a long-established wine seller who have a good track record and a way of finding inviting premises, including a former garage designed by Sir Basil Spence in Edinburgh, start stocking it, it will be well worth buying there, and the Majestic insistence that you buy their wines in bulk - minimally six or twelve bottles at a time - should seem no hardship. But Naked Wines themselves are prompt deliverers and the 2014 Picpoul is attractively priced at £8.25 a bottle.
26 April 2015

The Trials of Flying with (and without) an Orchestra

Touring a symphony orchestra is like an army manoeuvre.  Touring a chamber orchestra, if it happens to be the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, is a lot simpler and more pleasant.  Yet the occasions when I have  joined up with the SCO in mid-tour, or said adieu to the players when I have returned home ahead of them,  have not always been so easy.  It’s on these occasions that I have been alone in the hands of airlines, and more aware of discomfort and of what is apt to go wrong. Though flying is infinitely safer - while no less tedious - than it has ever been, there is always the possibility, however faint, that you will find yourself on board a flight where the pilot is trying to axe his way back into the locked cockpit where his crazed co-pilot is intent on flying himself and the passengers into a mountain.

Flying by British Airways in the nineteen-eighties to what was still called Bombay, before proceeding to Hong Kong and Taiwan, where the SCO was in the midst of a series of concerts, proved simple enough, though balanced on a knife-edge of timing. Breakfast in Bombay’s transit lounge was far from bliss, but waking finally  from slumber after several more hours in the air,  and glancing out of the window to see the windows of tower-blocks flashing past was not the most comforting way to realise that the plane was on the notorious hairpin descent into the old Hong Kong Airport.  Safely installed an hour or two later in the Hong Kong  Hilton I just had time for a cup of tea before catching an underground to the “New Colonies,” as they were called, in suburban Hong Kong, where the orchestra was playing that night.

Arriving in that seething pedestrianised suburb was like stepping into a scene from the film Blade Runner.  A policeman directed me through the crowds to the hall where, just before the concert, things seemed suddenly refreshingly calm. In the foyer, a small, polite Chinese boy tested his English on me by asking: “How are you? Are you keeping well?” Directed backstage, I encountered David Todd and Steve Carpenter, the orchestra’s two assistant managers sitting to left and right at the rear of the platform, David reading the New Yorker magazine, Steve playing electronic chess with himself.  The orchestra was not yet on the platform.  David gave me my ticket and I went  in search of my seat.

These concerts in Hong Kong were an eating as well as a listening experience. James Conlon, an excellent American conductor with whom the orchestra had been  making some successful appearances, was in charge  and  constructing his programmes around the Jupiter and other Mozart symphonies. The main auditorium in central Hong Kong, where the subsequent performances were given, had been modelled  it was said on the Royal Festival Hall in London. Despite being in furthest Asia,  I felt peculiarly at home.

It was the eating that differed. Sauntering through Food Street, which was clearly the place to go, was like exploring a pedestrianised encyclopaedia of Chinese cuisine, a day-to-day adventure of the choicest sort.  In contrast,  a fascinating trip to the clifftop abode of Run Run Shaw, the suave Chinese philanthropist by whom the orchestra was invited to lunch,  was like stepping into the luxury of a James Bond novel.

Flying from Hong Kong in a thunderstorm felt even more dangerous than flying into it. But the island of Taiwan was an idyllic setting for the next portion of the tour, as a day off among its rivers and mountains revealed, even if the city of Taipei, at the time of the visit, was choked with motorbikes. There the culinary speciality - snakes alive - was a challenge most of us resisted. In other respects I found Taipei, with its exquisite botanical garden, a pleasure to visit.

But it was  the Japanese tour, a year or so later, which involved me in the worst journey of my life.  Flying out with the SCO on British Caledonian’s new weekly direct flight over Siberia was fine. The performances, featuring the beguiling Portuguese pianist  Maria Joao Pires in Mozart concertos conducted by James Loughran, were a delight. Travelling by bullet train was sensational. But my flight home, some days before the orchestra returned, was my undoing.  The long morning bus journey to Tokyo airport on teeming Japanese motorways was the most fatiguing of starts. The sight of the British Caledonian aircraft, with one of its engines gaping open, looked unpromising. Unexplained delay thereafter followed unexplained delay.

 The departure lounge was claustrophobic. Throughout the day, new departure times were announced and ignored. Such hold-ups, as the writer Geoff Dyer recently remarked, are to be endured rather than enjoyed.  In the end the plane was slowly towed away and we were given a choice: either to trek back to Tokyo for the night with no guarantee of a flight next day (“heaven forbid” was my silent exclamation, Tokyo  by then being my least favourite city in the world) or fly to London by Japanese Airlines via Anchorage, taking off around midnight. I opted, wrongly,  for the latter,  but the desire to escape forever from that airport was very strong.

On board the plane, dinner was served promptly but was dreary even by airline  standards.  At dawn we landed in Alaska in a snowstorm on a runway glassy with ice. The long wait at the terminal was  alleviated, though only slightly, by the sight of a fellow passenger, the clothes designer Jasper Conran,  trying on scarves in the vast timbered shopping mall.

Then off we went again - still sliding, or so it felt like, on sheet ice - for London. Only it wasn’t going to be London. Somewhere over Shetland it was announced that London was fogbound and the plane would be flying to Paris instead.

Being imprisoned in a small transit lounge at Charles de Gaulle airport  proved, however, to be no Parisian pleasure. Flight transfer staff  informed me that I would be eventually flown to London by another airline. But I spied a ray of hope. Since my final destination was Edinburgh, could I not, I asked, take Air France’s nightly much-hyped  champagne flight direct to Turnhouse? Though the absolute impossibility of this was meticulously explained to me, I won my way in the end. Clutching my boarding pass I was allowed on board to enjoy what was this time, by airline standards, a delicious French dinner with copious champagne. The following day, as I struggled to produce a column, I confessed to readers that I was beyond jet lag.

Was it, apart from its closing stage, my worst journey ever?  Its only rival, again under the auspices of the SCO, was not long afterwards when, with Barry Tuckwell as conductor and solo hornist, the orchestra toured Sicily. Flying out with the players entailed changing planes in Rome, where a number of instruments and suitcases were accidentally left behind. By the time this was partially rectified the following day, the opening concert in Palermo had to be given with some players wearing t-shirts and jeans.

A bus drive along Sicily’s shimmering north coast brought us to Messina, the second stop on the tour, after which I was departing because I was scheduled to visit Amsterdam directly after returning to Edinburgh.  The SCO had deftly booked me on a sleeper to Rome followed by a morning flight home. But a sudden sleeper attendants’ strike in Sicily  put paid to my rail journey. Astutely the SCO booked a taxi to take me by ferry at four in the morning from Messina to Reggio Calabria in southern Italy, where I could catch an early flight to Rome. Amazingly it worked.  Two days larer, after writing my report in The Scotsman office, I was en route to Amsterdam.
22 April 2015

Lunching with Jessye Norman

Lunch with the FT - the weekly column in which the Financial Times interviews business, political, and cultural celebrities in restaurants of their choice at the paper's expense  - yesterday turned its focus on the statuesque Jessye Norman, the Edinburgh Festival’s star singer of the nineteen-seventies.

Now in her own seventies, she is inevitably no longer the soprano she was when, under Scotsman auspices, I had lunch with her at Raffaelli’s Edinburgh  restaurant, an occasion to which I have alluded once before in this blog.

Now in the twilight of her career, if so dim a word can be applied to so huge a personality, she is still a star in her firmament, even if the Financial Times, in its review of her most recent New York recital, fearlessly tore her apart. The fact that her interviewer in yesterday’s paper was not the reviewer of her recital, was clearly an advantage for the interviewer.  Neither of them, in the course of lunch in Oxford where the singer was attending a book launch,  referred to the review - one of the notorious Martin Bernheimer’s most supreme hatchet jobs - though the interviewer could not resist quoting from it in her resultant article.

But evidence that Norman is still the indomitable presence she used to be was not lost in what appears to have been an almost placid conversation. Though her choice of food seemed modest by her standards - battered oysters followed by crab salad and camomile tea - the occasional flashing riposte made its point. Clearly, she has not been tamed by time, and the woman who arrived at Raffaelli’s all those years ago with her own unexpected retinue was still recognisable.

Those were the days when she could alarm the Scottish National Orchestra by disappearing in the middle of a Scottish concert tour until a search party located her chauffeur-driven car in the grounds of a hotel in Aberdeenshire.

Trains and aircraft were never her scene. Rather than cram herself into a sleeper, she once took a taxi from Edinburgh to London. Rather than risk the perilous staircase down to the platform of Glasgow City Hall for a concert performance of Act One of Die Walkure under Alexander Gibson (a conductor whose finesse she always admired and with whom she once recorded a disc of her favourite spirituals) she insisted on special stairs being built to the stage from the level of the stalls. The Edinburgh Festival was lucky enough to programme her - in songs by Schubert, Brahms, and Strauss - in her prime.

As for that Raffaelli lunch, it was not an occasion to interview her but simply to say thank-you and to bask in her glory, as did all the restaurant’s eavesdropping customers that day. It cost the usually parsimonious Scotsman a bomb, but in the opinion of this critic it was worth every penny.
19 April 2015  

Subduing Elektra

Strauss’s Elektra, Patrice Chereau’s final opera production for the Aix en Provence Festival in 2013, is out on DVD. Seen in close-up, it is a searing experience and a fine memorial to one of the most interesting opera directors of our time, who died a few months after his staging of the piece. The German soprano Evelyn Herlitzus sings the title-role, with Waltraud Meier and  and Adrianne Pieczonka as the two other outsize female members of Strauss’s Sophocles adaptation. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts,

More often than not, Strauss’s family drama seems like a piece of grand guignol along the lines of the New Yorker’s Addams Family. But that is the way directors like to direct it, and conductors, with 111 orchestral players at their disposal, conduct it. This version, abrasive though it sometimes us, is not like that at all. The three women are not grotesque caricatures but startlingly human. Elektra’s final dance of triumph is not clod-hopping, as it was when Birgit Nilsson danced it at the Edinburgh Festival in the 1970s, but stops well short of ridicule. Only Mikhail Petrenko’s blank Orestes stands on the brink of being a sort of Boris Karloff.

Yet to call this a subdued   Elektra would depend on what you mean by the word subdued. Coming from Chereau, whose centenary Ring cycle revolutionised Bayreuth in 1976, it is an updated family drama of the subtlest sort. Apart from the gratuitous dumb show of mop-wielding  charwomen at the start, nothing is overstated. Small roles are exquisitely drawn. The Orchestra de Paris produces beauty of tone, even at the most blockbuster moments.

The production, a co-production with some of the world’s most distinguished opera houses, is now on tour and seems to have survived Chereau’s death. But this DVD, showing what it was like in his sadly short lifetime, is what to spend your money on.
17 April 2015

Rite in focus

Daniel Barenboim and Martha Argerich - two of the starry young names of the nineteen-sixties when Peter Diamand was running the Edinburgh Festival -  are starrier than ever.  Each in Diamand’s day was a startlingly precocious Argentine pianist.

Barenboim memorably played Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations at the Usher Hall. Argerich sped like a meteor through Schumann and Prokofiev. Born within a year of each other in Buenos Aires,  they are now in their seventies and still in full command of their musical faculties.  As conductor of the Berlin Staatsoper, Barenboim brought his Ring cycle to last year’s London proms, showing his abilities to be split to perfection between one side of his career and the other.   As director of her own extraordinary festival in Switzerland, Argerich assiduously nurtures new talent alongside her own.

Together,  whenever they can, they play piano duets of the highest calibre, and their recent evening of Mozart, Schubert, and Stravinsky in the inspirational surroundings of  Berlin’s Philharmonie has been preserved on DVD.

Do not fail to add it to your collection, for it is a triumph of its kind. Mozart’s Sonata in D major, K448, is frolicsome, tender, and adoring.  Schubert’s A flat major Variations, D813, sound touchingly sweet, modest, and, like all Schubert’s musical modesties, gloriously inspired (sample, for confirmation, their playing of the great, late A major Rondo on You Tube).

But it is The Rite of Spring, of course, which is the programme’s tour de force. Flamboyantly  presented on two pianos, rather than on the single keyboard for which it was originally written, it gains new, sensationally impressionistic colouring in the process,  in the same way as Sviatoslav Richter’s playing of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition somehow transcended Ravel’s and other orchestral versions.

Reducing the Rite to piano tone here does not reduce its impact but, if anything, almost increases it. How Barenboim and Argerich manage it is uncanny, and the sight of them side by side in close-up is part of the experience.
14 April 2015

This week's wine: Gavi

Gavi can be one of Italy’s more disappointing wines, seldom as savoury as it is said to be. Its pedigree looks  impeccable. The noble wine of the north, the pride of Piemonte, the white equivalent of Barolo and Dolcetto. But all this seems to prove is that Italian whites are rarely as good as the reds.

Or is it simply that our supermarkets are too prone to go for inferior Gavi at £7 or £8 a bottle  when we should be prepared to pay £14 or more for something that lives up to its name, as we would in the case of a French Chablis.

The result, at least for me, is that I tend to avoid  supermarket Gavi altogether, knowing that I shall never find one that is sufficiently palatable. Waitrose does its best by stocking two, a basic run-of-the-mill Gavi which is as drinkable as an average Pinot Grigio, and a somewhat superior Gavi di Gavi (the double name being supposedly a symbol of quality) whichis indeed a little better.

But, reduced from £10.99 to £8.24, is it better enough? My answer, despite its crispness, would be no. Faced with a bottle even at that reduced price, I would be inclined to say to hell with pedigree names and go for something else, such as the lesser-known southern Italian Triade which Waitrose also sells and which is an excellent buy at around the same price.
11 April 2015

The Immortal Andrew

Among my mentors as a music critic, Andrew Porter, who has died at 86, stood high. Writing assiduously to the end, he had always seemed immortal.  His thorough, substantial, enthralling reviews in the Financial Times half a century ago (which could only be cut with his personal permission) were always the first I turned to, and constantly savoured, from one day to the next. Britten’s Curlew River in the 1960s? He caught it to perfection. Death in Venice a decade later? Nobody else surpassed what he wrote about it.

As editor of the Musical Times from 1960 until 1967, he encouraged me to write about Sottish events and to contribute profiles of Scottish musicians who mattered to him and to me. The quietest and most diffident, as well as the most knowledgeable, of critics, he first crossed my path in the foyer of the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, in the early days of Scottish Opera. I had just become music critic of The Scotsman. The much more assertive William Mann of The Times introduced us.  Andrew smiled shyly and said we must have a talk in the bar across the road. There he asked me if I would like to review a Holland Festival production of the Shostakovich version of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov for him. “If you dislike it, I would expect you to say so,” he murmured.

I disliked it and said so, and he printed precisely what I wrote.  In that way a firm though often long-distance friendship began. I told him of Scottish Opera’s future projects.  More often than not he was excited,  especially by the prospect of Janet Baker singing Dorabella in Cosi Fan Tutte, though occasionally - as when I spoke of a (not  fulfilled) plan to cast Peter Glossop as Eugene Onegin - he raised an eyebrow.

When he moved to the New Yorker magazine I saw less of him, though invariably, if I was over there, he would invite me for a meal in his penthouse apartment near the Metropolitan Opera before attending a performance. The tales about how he lived in a total world of books, and of how we would have to eat on the floor, proved not unfounded.

Yet his reviews were the most meticulous imaginable. A clumsy new production of The Marriage of Figaro which I saw with him at the Met failed to win his approval. “Come,” he said at the interval. “Let’s freshen up with some Ezio Pinza drinking water” and he led me to a fountain in the foyer which had been installed in memory of the great Italian bass whose Figaro was one of the 56 roles in his repertoire at the Met in the old days.

Once, sitting behind Andrew at a concert performance of Verdi’s earliest opera, Oberto, at the Edinburgh Festival, I noticed he was following the music with a  rare first edition of the score.  At the interval, he left the score on his seat when he went to the bar for a drink with me. When he returned, it was not there. Amid much personal consternation and agitated grovelling  he found it to his relief  in the space beneath the arm rest, where it had slipped unnoticed while  he was away. Though seemingly the calmest of critics, Andrew had his flustered moments.
8 April 2015

This Week’s Wine: Brazilian Chardonnay

Though Chile and Argentina remain the principal producers of South American wine, Brazil, on the strength of next year’s Olympic Games,  is striving to catch up. Restaurant wine lists in Britain are already reflecting this, as are the shelves of our supermarkets. But is Brazilian wine worth drinking, or just something else to sample? The piquantly peppery red we recently drank for dinner in an Edinburgh hotel was one we would buy again, and now from Waitrose comes a white with its own quite distinctive personality - a Chardonnay that does not taste even slightly Australian but has a fresh fruitiness entirely its own.

With its bright yellow screw-top and label, the bottle is certainly eye-catching, and even if the fact that Brazil possesses the longest beach in the world (245 kilometres) is not perhaps the most relevant piece of label information, it does carry the prospect of a wine which, we would hope, is enticingly quaffable -which, on a mild April day in Scotland,  it certainly is. Indeed this 2013 Serra Gaucha Chardonnay has a cheerful zest, a bit of bounce, and enough strength (13 per cent) to give it some muscle.


Reduced from £8.99 to £6.99, it is one of the cheapest of the five Brazilian wines - both white and red -  which Waitrose is offering at inviting prices. We shall be trying some of the others.
6 April 2015

Travels with an orchestra

As time passed, foreign touring with Scottish orchestras became more and more a part of my job as music critic of The Scotsman. But while chronicling these adventures was seldom less than pleasant, it became - at least for me - less and less important, more a matter of travel writing than genuine  musical criticism. 

Invitations flowed in, either to be accepted or rejected. The fact that they invariably covered my flight and hotel expenses was welcome, especially as I knew I could write whatever I liked, but boring offers - of standard programmes in places I had visited before - became easy to resist.

Yet there were always side benefits - familiar music in unfamiliar places, long dialogues with players who had bcome friends, the opportunity to meet interesting conductors and soloists - which provided unexpected topics to write about. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra, as I had 
discovered, were the nicest people to travel with. Their early trips to Eastern Europe and the United States led to other shared adventures - an annual residency at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, ever one of the best European festivals to write about, a week in Barcelona, trips to Hong Kong and Japan. 

Barcelona, well before the Olympics, was still its true self. The Palace of Music, where the SCO was teamed with Sir Chalres Mackerras and the Philharmonia Chorus in performances of Haydn’s Creation and Mozart’s German  version of Messiah, was an art nouveau extravaganza befitting the city of Gaudi architecture. Sitting there each morning during rehearsals, I could do nothing but gaze and marvel at the design while listening to Sir Charles’s steady clarifying of the musical detail. 

During time off there was much to see, including  the peageful little Picasso Museum, and much to eat in  an enticing but no-longer-existent seafood shack on the waterfront, serving bowls of shellfish zarzuela with carafes of local wine. At the final rehearsal the administrator Michael Storrs seized his chance to berate the orchestra for slovenly playing, warning them that if they did  not improve and sit up straight  they would not be coming back. Later, during the introduction to The Creation, in front of a packed house, the difference was startling.

But it was Aix en Provence which, for a while, was the mosr idyllic date in the orchestra’s - and my - summer schedule. With Scottish Opera on stage, and the SCO in support, Mackerras conducted Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and choral music by the same composer. Raymond Leppard followed with a seductive black-and-white treatment of Handel’s Alcina with Teresa Berganza, a knight in black leather, slowly traversing the entire widith of the stage, first forwards, then backwards. On other days Roderick Brydon conducted Mozart and Dvorak  wind serenades beside a small plashing fountain.  Towards midnight, in one or another of the local bistros, Leppard  or Mackerras could be encountered dining with their retinues, while up on the square, beneath the stars, the great Ray Charles played and swayed.
2 April 2015