Rejoice rejoice!

Intimate performances of Handel’s Messiah, at one time impossible to find in Britain, are nowadays the norm, and life has become better because of it.

Yet, despite their welcomely smaller scale, not all intimate performances are good ones, and few are quite as good as the Dunedin Consort’s in the close acoustics of the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh, where this year’s showed exactly what a good performance should sound like.

Though not always of quite the most impeccable polish, its three-hour span - even when taken fast, as it now usually is, Messiah remains a long work, with plenty of scope for minor mishaps - it was preceded on this occasion by an afternoon Messiah for Children from the same forces and was due to be followed the next night by a further performance at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery.

Despite this pressure on the tiny group of singers and instrumentalists - and the  smaller the group the more  exposed the detail -  the results  possessed an authority, vitality, and responsiveness that went far beyond the mere notes of the music.

With the orchestra mostly on the conductor’s left and the choristers -  twelve in all, four of them the soloists - on his right, detail was needle-sharp, light, alert, never limp, even in the flare-up of the Hallelujah Chorus.

Words were crystal clear, rhythms bouncing, cadences keenly pushed into the textures without old-fashioned plink-plonks, and orchestral descriptiveness - Handel’s flair for onomatopoeia - was jabbingly vivid.

The endearingly wandering sheep moved with a due sense of comedy. The soloists were Mhairi Lawson, Rowan Hellier, Matthew Long, and Matthew Brook. The little band of altos had a counter-tenor planted in their midst, an audible and striking effect. John Butt, one hand on the harpsichord, the other shooting aloft, was the irresistibly unflagging conductor.
29 December 2015

Messiah Days

Times have changed for Handel’s Messiah since I first reviewed a performance of it in The Scotsman in the 1960s.

On that occasion the Edinburgh Royal Choral Union’s annual performance, given at noon on New Year’s Day in the Usher Hall, was a heavyweight event, a penitential antidote in notoriously alcohol-free surroundings  to the previous day’s jollifications.

I dreaded it, and wrote a preview, maligned by stuffy readers, asking why it always had to be Messiah, portentously performed by a big choir and dreary orchestra, featuring star soloists who perhaps did not even know each other and a Hallelujah Chorus for which everybody, audience included, stood up. The conductor in those days was Herrick Bunney, much more of a Bachian (an admirable one) than an exuberant Handelian. He took the annual ritual as it had been handed down to him, and any changes he made were seldom for the better. In response the audience brought flasks of tea and sandwich lunches for the long interval.

“Crumbs in the corridors,” my predecessor Christopher Grier once sighed. It was hardly an event for real Handelians, who loved his other oratorios also, to look forward to.

Today such performances still exist in Britain, but circumstances have  generally changed for the better. Modern slimline performances, sung at cracking speeds by small choruses and accompanied by stylish orchestras, are the order of the day.  Colin Davis and Charles Mackerras,while still employing quite large forces, were the first to make the move towards lighter, springier rhythms, with soloists who knew how to achieve recognisable musical unity of purpose.  Today, even better, we are able to hear the work in smaller, more intimate halls, sung by choristers who are themselves quite often the soloists.

In Scotland, the John Currie Singers were the first to set the ball rolling at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh. Now it is the Dunedin Consort, directed by the effervescent John Butt, whose performance could be said to tick all the Handelian boxes. Even if you hear no other Christmas performances, make sure you hear this one at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh on December 20 or The Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow on the 21st. You will not even have to rise to your feet for the Hallelujah Chorus and the bar will doubtless be open at the interval.
19 December 2015  

This Week's Wine: Pinot Grigio

Pinot Grigio, the white Venetian wine which in recent years has spread throughout the rest of Italy with the ease - or so its detractors  would claim -  of cholera, now has other European versions as well as plenty in the New World.

But the Veneto remains its authentic home, producing bottles as good and as bad as ever, though the Pinot Grigio listed by Marks and Spencer as one of its wines of the month in fact comes from Pavia, south of Milan.

Pavia, too, routinely produces plenty of junk wine, as well as a foaming red which people love or loathe. But M&S’s Pavese Pinot, reduced umpromisingly from £11 t0 £5, is really rather good, clean, sparky, and not at all drab - in other words a genuine bargain which, drunk very cold, would brighten anyone’s Christmas party.

At a different extreme, M&S’s Macon-Villages Uchizy has not been reduced from £11, which is admittedly not particularly high for a decent white burgundy, though there are others just as good available for less.

Waitrose’s Champteloup Muscadet Sevre-et-Maine is not a white burgundy at all but is certainly a good Loire, worth every penny of its £7.99 price tag, possessing all the frisky petillance you would hope for from a wine bottled on its lees. Drink it with a bowl of mussels and be happy.
18 December 2015

Triumphant in Scotland

With the death of Luc Bondy at the age of 67, Scottish Opera lost one of the most gifted stage directors in its history.

He only worked once for the company, on a production of Verdi’s Macbeth in 1999, and its cost was crippling - Scottish Opera, at the time when Richard Armstrong was musical director, took years to recover from it.

But it was worth all the effort on the part of the company and the festival, and it was also seen in Vienna and Bordeaux.  Ever since Glyndebourne had launched the very first Edinburgh Festival with Macbeth in 1947, starring the great Margherita Grandi as Lady Macbeth, Verdi’s early drama, very difficult to bring off, had held a special place in Edinburgh’s annals.  In the 1970s, Scottish Opera staged it for the first time, in a gory David Pountney production starring Galina Vichnevskaya in a vivid scarlet dress for the supper scene, described by one critic as “a bad night at the Macbeths.”

But Luc Bondy, with Brian McMaster’s support, did it differently, as a pure ensemble piece, as good as they come, in a production in which every movement of every member of the chorus meant something. It was a riveting evening. (Bondy was also a specialist in the Shakespeare play).

Born in Zurich and once described as “Swiss with a twist of French,”  Bondy was a man of impeccable cultural pedigree. His grandfather was an impresario in Prague, his father the editor of a French literary magazine, his mother a dancer daunted by the Nazis. In Paris he studied drama and mime under the famous Jacques Lecoq. McMaster, as director of the Edinburgh Festival, had already recognised his brilliance and had presented, to high acclaim, Covent Garden’s full-length five-act version of Verdi’s Don Carlos at the Festival Theatre.  His Turn of the Screw, imported later from Aix-en-Provence, was peculiar but undoubtedly haunting, with a Peter Quint who lurched around  the stage like Frankenstein’s monster.

But with McMaster’s departure, Bondy’s opera productions in Edinburgh came to a halt.  By then his career was expanding internationally, in Vienna, Paris, New York - though his Tosca at the Met was loathed by the conservative audience, accustomed to the ornate lavishness of Franco Zefirrelli.  Facing a torrent of booing on the opening night, he tersely informed the audience that he was scandalised by the fact that they were scandalised. The production survives around the world. Bondy died last month, having suffered from cancer for most of his professional life.
13 December 2015

This Week's Wine: Montagny

Mountainy, like Saint Veran, is one of the good white burgundies, and Waitrose’s current version of it, a 2013 premier cru les coeres, is very good indeed.

True, at £14.99 a bottle, it is not particularly cheap, but its vibrancy speaks for itself. We had it with salmon en croute and with seared scallops a la Fred the Shred, and it was a great success, shared last week with a close musical friend.

As prelude, a 2013 low yield Marsanne from the young wine-producing Simpsons of Sainte Rose, with an alcohol content of 14 and a half per cent, seemed overwhelming, even when thoroughly chilled.

Costing £9.99 from Naked Wines of Norfolk, also available from Majestic, it needed a different occasion for its huge fruitiness to blossom and would have been much too powerful for what we were eating that night.

At £8.99, Waitrose’s Macon-Villages Cave de Lugny is pleasing but more ordinary. Reduced  by 25 per cent to the same price until December 12,  Louis Jadot’s reliable Macon-Villages Chapelle aux Loups from the same supermarket is more interesting, and can be more enthusiastically recommended as an aperitif.
3 December 2015

Edinburgh's Royal Occasion

For a soprano first seen standing in the shower at the start of Glyndebourne’s new production of Der Rosenkavalier in Sussex last year, Kate Royal attracted a surprisingly small and elderly audience to her New Town Concert at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, last night.

Admittedly the weather was wintry, but during the Edinburgh  Festival she would have packed the place for a programme so skilfully constructed and so exquisitely sung.

True, her choice of music may have seemed somewhat specialised, even with Mahler’s five Ruckert settings as a heart-rending centrepiece. These were beautifully delivered, at the risk of making the rest of the programme, similarly chosen as an expression of aloneness, seem merely doleful.  But it was never as dull as that, even if Samuel Barber’s ten Hermit Songs, in the second half, could have been considered caviar to the general.

Composed in the 1950s for the famous American soprano Leontyne Price, they did perhaps depend too much on the brightness of their piano accompaniments to make their effect. They were certainly vividly brought to life by Roger Vignoles, but Royal used ample artifice to rejuvenate each song, even if her articulation was not always as clear as it could have been.

It  was Schumann’s haunting Hermit Song, standing alone at the end of the evening, which brought things back to the raptness of the Mahler. Once a Fischer-Dieskau favourite, it regained all  the slow beauty of expression he used to give it, deftly counterbalanced by the lighter Schumann songs, and the lovely Clara Schumann ones, heard earlier in the recital.

Not that Schumann’s Bachian song about a pious girl could be called particularly light. But its romanticised baroquerie was touchingly caught, the Schumann equivalent of some of the Bachian strains to be heard in the first scene of Wagner’s Meistersinger.

Though Kate Royal’s voice is not enormous - as Roger Vignoles’s accompaniment sometimes underlined - she floats it to admiration. This was a recital to remember, enhanced by the limiting of applause to the end of each half.
1 December 2015