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