As Royal as They Come

Good song recitals gave become rarities in Edinburgh outside of the Festival, but Kate Royal’s New Town Concert at the Queen’s Hall tomorrow looks like being something special.

As Glyndebourne’s lissom Feldmarschallin in Der Rosenkavalier last year, she became one of the stars of British opera and the programme of songs with which she has been making a short tour looks wonderfully enticing. It is a themed programme, planned to a nicety - the sort of thing that shows the most scrupulous preparation on the part of the performer.

Aloneness - rather than loneliness - forms its subject, starting with Schumann songs, and passing through Clara Schumann, Mahler, and Samuel Barber before returning to Schumann his long, greatly moving Song of the Hermit as a stand-alone finale.

A mixture of familiar and less familiar items, with Roger Vignoles as pianist, it has been artfully constructed, with Mahler’s I Am Lost to the World as its central highpoint. Since Kate Royal, who has been heard in Edinburgh before, has become a soprano of the utmost poise and delicacy of utterance, seize your opportunity to hear her. Her programme is one to stick in the memory.
30 November 15

this Week's Wine: Cuvée de Luberon

Luberon is a wine you tend to forget about. It’s not that it is insignificant. In fact it is really rather good. But its name does not hang on the tongue and it never stands out on the supermarket shelves, inviting you to grab a bottle of it.

As a white Rhone, indeed, it has a bit of body, and this example of it, costing £8 from Marks and Spencer, speaks admirably for itself and is robust enough, without lacking finesse, to go with sea bass, sea bream, or some similar fish, but is also fine as an aperitif.

It is certainly smooth enough to stand alone, and to stay in the memory as something more than vin ordinaire - and to remind you that Luberon wines are worth drinking. So don’t forget about it this time. If you do, the loss is yours.

The same can be said for Morrison’s Muscadet at £6. Any fears that this, too, could be something rather drab should be quickly dispelled by this northern French bottle whose “sur lie” (on its lees) tag confirms that it will bring a nice prickle to to your palate.

Again it is a good wine for seafood, in this something nordic, but it can similarly stand alone as an excellent aperitif.
17 November 2015

Cinema Days

Even before I found a music critic in whose footsteps I wanted to follow - he was Christopher Grier, my predecessor on The Scotsman - I had found a film critic who would have been my model, if ever my inclinations went in that direction, which for a while they seemed in danger of doing.

She was not a newspaper writer - in other words, she was neither CA Lejeune of The Observer nor Dylis Powell of the Sunday Times, much as I admired them both - but someone whose reviews appeared much less frequently, in the British Film Institute’s quarterly magazine, Sight and Sound. Her name was Penelope Houston and, though I never met her, she was for years my heroine.

Her essays were substantial reflections on the great films of the day - I first encountered her in the 1950s and never lost track of what she was writing - and I liked her because she treated a film such as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, John Ford’s 1949 western that opened with the words “Custer is dead,” with all the seriousness and perceptive detail she brought to everything else she watched.

And now, at the age of 88, Houston herself is dead, and her era of film reviewing has come to an end. She was always deemed somewhat intimidating, though that was not how she seemed to me, and I still cherish the memory of the first and only picture of her I ever saw, sitting on the edge of a  chair, looking sophisticated with a cigarette in a long black holder between her fingers.

I was not long out of school when I first saw it, and I thought I had gone one better when I started smoking, also with a long black holder, Sobranie Black Russian cigarettes with gold tips, which for a time were the only (dauntingly expensive) cigarettes I bought, before abandoning their exquisite aroma, along with that of Gitanes, Greek Papastratos, and my other favourite smokes, in the1970s.  Though I never inhaled - the art of simply puffing them was enough for me - they were, like Houston herself, part of my life.

In Houston’s day, Sight and Sound was a great magazine, and she presided over it with an eagle eye. It was there that Lindsay Anderson wrote his famous diatribe, “Stand Up! Stand Up!”, and there that everything else worthwhile on the subject of cinema found its place.
The Times said farewell to Houston the other day, complete with the picture of her I remember so well. Although for a while, during my journalistic apprenticeship, I doubled as music and film critic of the old Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, it was music that won me, even if my memories of writing about films during the early days of the Edinburgh Film Festival were to remain vivid in my mind.
13 November 2015

This Week's Wine: Macon Villages

Macon is a dicey wine partly because there is so much of it, which, by French chardonnay standards, is conspicuously manuscript. But here, from Waitrose, is one that is better than most.

As supermarkets go, Waitrose is strong on white burgundy, and its Macon Villages - the Villages identification always a sign  of quality, in burgundy as in Beaujolais - at £8.99 can be recommended for its zestiness, bite, and personality.

Not only is it a Macon Villages but it is from the Cave de Lugny, which is another guarantee of crispness  and we have bought several bottles to keep us going, drinking it with  scallops and with Hester Blumenthal’s prawn cocktail, with its good prawns and subtle dressing, also available from Waitrose.

Meanwhile, down in Norfolk, Naked Wines - in conjunction these days with Majestic - has extended its range of New Zealand Pinot Gris to include  a good  German wine employing the same grape but bringing it closer to Alsace, where the best Pinot Gris comes from. Produced by Gerd Stepp, it is honeyed yet by no means oversweet. It is Reduced from £16.99 to £11.49 -  not cheap but well worth sampling.
10 November 2015

This Week's Wine: Sauvignon Blanc

Sauvignon Blanc, white wine of the Loire, Bordeaux and other parts of France, has also become, with increasing fame, the white wine of New Zealand.

There, its rise and rise is one of the success stories of modern times, and its tang of gooseberries more pronounced than that of sauvignons from other countries.

The tang, indeed, is in danger of becoming too overpowering - to the extent that there are many Kiwi Sauvignons, some of them quite expensive, which are becoming positively deterring.  The initials once insultingly applied to Australian Chardonnay - ABC, standing for “anything but Chardonnay” - seem in danger of finding a New Zealand Sauvignon equivalent, especially if the wine comes from the productive Marlborough region, primary source of some of the most aggressive Sauvignons.

But in the supermarkets at present there is a refreshingly non-assertive Kiwi Sauvignon, whose source is admittedly Marlborough and liable to be dismissed as ordinary.

In fact the 2014 Mud House Sauvignon, in its rather plain bottle, which Waitrose has reduced from £9.99 to £6.64, is a very  pleasant specimen of its kind. To some palates it may seem uninteresting but it is muscular enough to be appetising and as an aperitif it will not undermine a more  voluptuous New Zealand Pinot Noir to follow.

Majestic Wines are selling it for £6.99 and, since Tesco's price is likewise higher, the Waitrose offer is the one to go for.
2 November 2015