Canadian Capers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A true Theodora

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

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

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

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

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

More Editors in My Life (1)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Week’s Wine: Boschendal Chardonnay

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

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

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

What poise!

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

A Delicate Touch

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

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

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

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

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

A night at the Met

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

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

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

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

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

Brendel Finalised

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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