Conrad sends his best wishes to all his readers for the festive season and thanks you all for reading his blog this year. He's been a bit poorly so is taking a break from writing his blog during December. Please keep reading his past blogs and sending comments in. There will be the usual list of countries where his readers live, around New Year time. The list is longer this year. Recently there have been large readership numbers in Russia and USA and ongoing readership from around the world. A big thank you from Conrad.
The Edinburgh music critic and journalist, Conrad Wilson, writes about classical music/ opera, food and wine in Scotland and from around the world. He writes about his life as a music critic, his travels to opera houses at home and abroad and the many musicians he's encountered along the way. He reviews DVD films of performances you may not have been able to attend. His wine reviews can help you to keep up-to-date with the good things available in wine shops and supermarkets.
Saturday 10 December 2016
Friday 11 November 2016
The History Boys
Authors, claims Alan Bennett in his latest section of the enthralling landscape of his life, can feel threatened by their biographers, be they official ones or unofficial - and maybe rightly so, it is tempting to add.
As attitudes to biography change, and modern biographies tend to grow longer and longer, the need for such outsize books - just look at the size of some of them - seems conspicuously to lessen, their existence increasingly a matter of self-indulgence on the part of the biographer and publisher. Who is reading them and why? What makes them seem threatening? Somerset Maugham famously said that modern authors led dull lives, unworthy of biography, and he sternly resisted the idea of a biographer writing a book about him book about him.
So when a distinguished living author responds to his official biographer, as John Le Carre has just done, by writing an answer in the form of a witty and artfully structured autobiography, you begin to wonder what is going on.
Has he been taking humorous revenge on his widely admired but clearly serious official biographer, who was commissioned to write a substantial book about him to which he himself presumably gave his blessing? Did he secretly dislike the finished product?
Being an alert and long established novelist, and as a one-time British spy, Le Carre has more than once proved prickly, but whether his biographer has displeased him in some way is hard to say. I have refrained from reading the official biography because it has not grabbed my attention strongly enough. There are other books I have been more eager to read recently than this one, including Le Carre’s own very funny and enjoyable response to it.
As a music critic, however, I remain on the fringe of the debate. Music critics are seldom themselves the subject of official biographies and never has one been written, or likely to be written, about me. In such a situation I am a bystander seeking a message. Do I get it from Alan Bennett in his admirable new diary? Entitled Keeping On Keeping On, this is certainly something I can recommend, which does not shrink its responsibilities.
As a music critic, it is true, I have responsibilities of my own. What about these? I do not give interviews. Biographers do not write about me. Once, having a drink with a Glasgow magazine editor, I found myself chatting to him about my critical philosophy, taking my customary care to be guarded. But not guarded enough. A month or so later a printed interview appeared in the magazine in which not a word was accurate.
“Silly ass” I said to myself, to have let this happen to me. “Should I I have expected otherwise?” But, though it was a long time ago, and was no more than a minor irritation which cost me an hour of my time it only cost me a tiny prick of annoyance and an hour of my time, I took pains to ensure it did not happen again.
When the same happens to a celebrity like Alan Bennett, who gives interviews frequently, there are various ways he can deal with it, as he does in his latest diary, in broadcasts, in books and plays and sermons, or simply by clenching his jaws to modify its effect on him.
“Modifying the effect” is perhaps not a bad way of describing it, whether it is political, as it is quite likely to be, or quietly despairing. Though he can be repetitious, which irks some of his readers, I do not find this bothers me greatly. We are all repetitious in our own ways and Bennett’s repartee, even if familiar, can be something to savour.
So I don’t count it against his new book that he sometimes seems to lay himself open. When Edward Heath, on the other hand, wrote his musical memoirs some years ago, I can remember an altercation in which, in my review,I accused him of telling the same anecdote twice in the same book. He was clearly displeased, though I am not sure with whom, when he found out and reacted instantly, demanding that his publisher remove the offensive repetition. The publisher wrote to me and The Scotsman about sorting it out. Where exactly had the mishap happened? I scanned the book and drew a blank.
Realisation slowly dawned. The repetition was not there. Were Heath’s anecdotes so dull that I imagined I had read this one twice? Would I find it somewhere i a different book? Was he accusing me of falsehood? Had I been careless in my reviewing of the irascible prime minister?
I never discovered. He never wrote to me personally. Maybe he was too busy. Maybe he found his answer. But it was a reason to remember that references need to be checked. It just seemed a pity that it had to be Edward Heath. Music critics have to be wary.
What might Alan Bennett have done? Though I do not think he knows much about music - a common failing among authors - the question has not reduced my liking for his admirable new book.
11 November 2016
Monday 31 October 2016
Gripping from the start
Having abandoned Nutshell, Ian McEwan’s latest novel supposedly written by Hamlet in his mother’s womb, I have turned my attention more rewardingly to the third volume of Alan Bennett’s compendious diaries, now out and written more enticingly from London, Yorkshire, and abroad.
Though McEwan compounded my problem by updating what happens to Hamlet - not without wit, it must be said - Bennett is plain sailing in comparison, his 800 pages, squeezed into my Kindle with no added weight. The result is a vast and enthralling landscape of the most recent portion of his life. It is a subject to which I shall return, but not the only one.
For I have also been reading Sir Peter Hall’s candid autobiography, amusingly entitled Making an Exhibition of Myself, written in the wake of his exhaustive National Theatre diaries and beginning his story back at the beginning. In other hands this could have proved hard work but Hall did not go into a theatrical life for nothing. The son of an impoverished railway station master in East Anglia, he tells the tale of his career vividly, writing of his Cambridgeshire schooldays when, among other things, he learned the piano and served as a church organist, practising - more than a little scared - alone in a darkened church at night before having to lock the premises and creep home.
Though Philip Larkin said he preferred to begin reading autobiographies halfway though, “when the chap has grown up and become more interesting,” Hall is interesting from the start, which is what you would hope. He makes clear how soon, despite all the obstacles, he was drawn into the theatrical life, firstly at school, and then gradually succeeding in adulthood. It is very much the book I would have wanted from him - alert, perceptive, edgy to the point of paranoia - and it follows his trail to the top with a sense of wonder that it is actually happening. How in the end he won international fame is, as they say, un-put-downable.
Alan Bennett in his latest diaries admits to a Larkin complex about autobiographies and confesses that he reads them backwards. Their opening chapters - like those of many outsize modern biographies as well - can indeed be heart sinking, even when their authors have something to say. Happily, Sir Peter Hall, though he now suffers in his eighties from from dementia in a London retirement home, was not like that.
Though I may yet return to the new McEwan - while being aware for now that, as several of his previous novels have done, that it merely irritates me - I am giving myself no guarantees. His monologue from the womb has proved increasingly hard work. We shall see.
31 October 2016
Tuesday 25 October 2016
Wine choice: Petit Chablis
Petit Chablis, I used to think, was cheap Chablis, its flavour drab in comparison with the real thing and its price unreasonably high for what it was. In supermarkets it could seem something to avoid, especially if it was going to be a present for somebody for whom the word “petit” might only arouse suspicion and seemed to me a good example of a name making perhaps higher claims for itself than it should have done.
But things appear to be changing. Sainsbury, Tesco, M&S and Waitrose are all stocking Petit Chablis that tastes better, or so I would say, than it used to, at least to my palate.
Though I would not go so far as to claim that it is now a safe buy - there are still some sour, sharp-edged ones around - the Petit Chablis now in these stores is worth tasting, and holds a deservedly prominent place on their shelves. At around £9 or £10 a bottle, the price of the Sainsbury (“Taste the Difference”) and Tesco Finest versions looks about right, though M&S at £12 and Waitrose at £11 may perhaps seem verging on the greedy.
It may not be classic Chablis as we know it and love it, but it is better than some of the more anonymous white burgundies widely available, makes a good aperitif and goes well with the food - turkey if you are already looking ahead to Christmas - you mean to eat with it.
If this is a new, more ambitious development, so much the better for that. If not, buy some anyway while current stocks last. You could do much worse. The white burgundy to be wary of at present is Macon-Villages. There is a lot of it around, too much of it depressingly dull.
25 October 2016
But things appear to be changing. Sainsbury, Tesco, M&S and Waitrose are all stocking Petit Chablis that tastes better, or so I would say, than it used to, at least to my palate.
Though I would not go so far as to claim that it is now a safe buy - there are still some sour, sharp-edged ones around - the Petit Chablis now in these stores is worth tasting, and holds a deservedly prominent place on their shelves. At around £9 or £10 a bottle, the price of the Sainsbury (“Taste the Difference”) and Tesco Finest versions looks about right, though M&S at £12 and Waitrose at £11 may perhaps seem verging on the greedy.
It may not be classic Chablis as we know it and love it, but it is better than some of the more anonymous white burgundies widely available, makes a good aperitif and goes well with the food - turkey if you are already looking ahead to Christmas - you mean to eat with it.
If this is a new, more ambitious development, so much the better for that. If not, buy some anyway while current stocks last. You could do much worse. The white burgundy to be wary of at present is Macon-Villages. There is a lot of it around, too much of it depressingly dull.
25 October 2016
Tuesday 18 October 2016
Wine choice: Arneis
Arneis is a white Italian wine quite hard to find in Britain and not always easy in Italy either. Nor, when you do find it, is it always at its best. More often than not it is a disappointment, and the mystique surrounding its name a little puzzling. Yet good Arneis does exist and, when bought absolutely fresh, can be delightful.
Naked Wines, the East Anglian suppliers who now operate in tandem with Majestic - have recently added a good one to their list. The problem is that though it is certainly Italian and white and easily sipped, it does not taste very like Arneis, at least to my palate. Its identifiable undertones are missing.
Yet Italians speak proudly of Arneis and call it their white Barolo, while admitting that the Piedmont grape is difficult to grow. The name, quite aptly in the circumstances, means “little rascal.” Therefore is the one from Naked Wines really worth pursuing? Costing £8.99 a bottle, it is not the cheapest of Italian whites, but people are clearly buying it because new stocks of the 2015 vintage are awaited.
The wine conforms with the usually admirable Naked Wines policy of supporting new and independent winemakers, which is perhaps why it is not immediately recognisable, with the new taste concealing the old. Think of it perhaps as an alternative to something like Gavi and you might be on the right track, in which case you would enjoy it's fulness and brightness of flavour.
I bought two bottles, and would consider buying it again.
17 October 2016
Naked Wines, the East Anglian suppliers who now operate in tandem with Majestic - have recently added a good one to their list. The problem is that though it is certainly Italian and white and easily sipped, it does not taste very like Arneis, at least to my palate. Its identifiable undertones are missing.
Yet Italians speak proudly of Arneis and call it their white Barolo, while admitting that the Piedmont grape is difficult to grow. The name, quite aptly in the circumstances, means “little rascal.” Therefore is the one from Naked Wines really worth pursuing? Costing £8.99 a bottle, it is not the cheapest of Italian whites, but people are clearly buying it because new stocks of the 2015 vintage are awaited.
The wine conforms with the usually admirable Naked Wines policy of supporting new and independent winemakers, which is perhaps why it is not immediately recognisable, with the new taste concealing the old. Think of it perhaps as an alternative to something like Gavi and you might be on the right track, in which case you would enjoy it's fulness and brightness of flavour.
I bought two bottles, and would consider buying it again.
17 October 2016
Saturday 8 October 2016
Online opera awards
As the 2016 Edinburgh Festival recedes into obscurity, I have been compiling a personal list of online opera awards, dating forward from 1947, when as a schoolboy I attended my first festival events The memories linger on, and it is time I listed them.
Opera, for eighteen nights out of 21, was originally the pride of the festival,as it was, and usually still is, of all the great international festivals. It is sad that in Edinburgh it no longer holds that dominant position but here, for what they are worth, are my nominations for my first online opera awards, complete with the names of the festival directors and opera companies who was responsible for them.
If you have memories, let me share them now. But note that, for me, they are petering out.
The online opera awards:
Verdi A Masked Ball, Glyndebourne (Rudolf Bing)
Verdi The Force of Destiny, Glyndebourne ( Rudolf Bing)
Rossini Count Ory, Glyndebourne (Ian Hunter)
Strauus Ariadne auf Naxos/Le Borgeois Gentilhome, Glyndebourne (Ian Hunter_
Hindemith Mathis der Maler, Hamburg State Opera (Ian Hunter)
Stravinsky The Rake’s Progress, British premiere, Glyndebourne (Ian Hunter)
Bellini La Sonnambula (Callas) La Scala Milan (Robert Ponsonby)
Janacek Katya Kabanova, Prague Opera (Lord Harewood)
Strauss Intermezzo, Bavarian State Opera (Lord Harewood)
Berg Lulu, Stuttgart Opera (Peter Diamand)
Stravinsky The Rake’s Progress, Scottish Opera festival debut (Peter Diamand)
Stravinsky The Soldier’s Tale, Scottish Opera (Peter Diamand)
Henze Elegy for Young Lovers, Scottish Opera (Peter Diamond)
Rossini Cenerentola, La Scala Milan/Edinburgh Festival Opera (Peter Diamand)
Prokofiev The Fiery Ange, Frankfurt Opera (Peter Diamand)
Zinnernann Die Soldaten, Deutsche Oper am Rhein (Peter Diamand)
Bizet Carmen, Edinburgh Festival Opera (Peter Diamand)
Monteverdi The Coronation of Poppea, Zurich Opera (Peter Diamand)
Handel Aiodante, LA Scala, Milan (John Drummond)
Britten Death in Venice, Scottish Opera (John Drummond)
Verdi Don Carlos, Covent Garden (Brian McMaster)
Beethoven Fidelio, Scottish Opera (Brian McMaster)
Wagner The Ring, Scottish Opera (Brian McMaster)
Please send me some responses.
8 October 2016
Friday 7 October 2016
Pressing on
It all began, through a tiny but remembered fluke of fate, during my boyhood. My parents were employing a house painter, a quiet, vigilant, proudly self-educated working man with a book invariably in the pocket of his whites, to do some decorating for them. One day, on my return from school during his tea break, he asked me what books I liked reading. I mentioned Richmal Crompton’s William books and the Arthur Ransome series and Arnold Bennett’s Clayhanger. He said that sooner or later I should press on and give DH Lawrence a try - “there’s plenty of good reading in there.”
Time passed, but an opportunity came when I spotted an orange Penguin paperback of Sons and Lovers in my father’s bookcase. Could that form my starting point? It looked like a challenge, but I faced it with interest and progressed to The Rainbow, and then to the enthralling but less famous Aaron’s Rod, the story of a miner who becomes a flautist, walks out on his family, and moves to Italy where he is killed by a bomb.
As a teenager who was on the brink of moving into music, I liked Aaron’s Rod very much. I liked The White Peacock, written earlier, rather less, deeming it too abstract for me, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence’s last and most notorious novel, was of course still banned in Britain, though I knew of its reputation and bought a Left Bank edition of it while doing my National Service with the RAF in Paris, as well as seeing a French film starring Danielle Darrieux, with Erno Crisa as Mellors and the fine English Shakespearian actor Leo Genn sitting in a wheelchair as the crippled Sir Clifford Chatterley. My Lawrence fixation was clearly gaining strength.
By 1960, after a sensational trial at the Old Bailey, Lady Chatterley finally gained her liberty in a new Penguin edition which sold three million copies. I thought it a better book than it has been traditionally made out to be. But what authority could a young music critic have been said to possess on the subject? I went on reading. Lawrence was a writer who, thirty years after his poignantly early death from tuberculosis in France, really mattered to me because I trusted him and today still respond to him the way I always have.
As Geoff Dyer, author of a modern study of Lawrence entitled Out of Sheer Rage has argued, you do not need to be a rigid literary academic to admire him or hate him. He wrote books about places in Italy and elsewhere which remain relentlessly alive, incessantly restless, unstoppably irascible, with an emphatically vivid vocabulary full of jabbing words which, for me at least, continue to flash and shine in my private firmament.
After crossing the Alps on foot with Frieda, his future wife and maverick cousin of the doomed air-ace Manfred von Richthofen, Germany’s “Red Baron,” he began his comprehensive Italian adventure by spending months on Lake Garda before switching to Liguria and Tuscany and from there ever southwards until, for his last three Italian years, he settled in Sicily, financed as always by his writing - as Frieda put it with apparent admiration, “he is just a big fountain pen,” though he was also a more cumbersome typewriter.
During the First World War he travelled unwillingly back to Britain, with periods in London, Kent, Cornwall, but only just dropping in at his native mining community of Eastwood near Nottingham, which he loathed, just as he loathed every aspect the war itself, from which, for health reasons, he was never called into.
Yet the Lawrence trail, which ultimately ringed the world, became more and more famous. From the Alps to Taormina, you will always find the long Italian portion of it somewhere along the line and, I hope, it will make you rejoice, even if all you do is read about it.
But read about it anyway. That is how I started, thanks to a literate Edinburgh workman well over half a century ago.
Lawrence’s books remain part of me and, in modern electronic Kindle editions, they travel with me everywhere, weightlessly and occupying no space. It feels good to have them safely in this form, and to have his jagged, darting, prodding prose in versions so easily accessible - and, incidentally, nowadays free to order on line.
7 October 2016
Time passed, but an opportunity came when I spotted an orange Penguin paperback of Sons and Lovers in my father’s bookcase. Could that form my starting point? It looked like a challenge, but I faced it with interest and progressed to The Rainbow, and then to the enthralling but less famous Aaron’s Rod, the story of a miner who becomes a flautist, walks out on his family, and moves to Italy where he is killed by a bomb.
As a teenager who was on the brink of moving into music, I liked Aaron’s Rod very much. I liked The White Peacock, written earlier, rather less, deeming it too abstract for me, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence’s last and most notorious novel, was of course still banned in Britain, though I knew of its reputation and bought a Left Bank edition of it while doing my National Service with the RAF in Paris, as well as seeing a French film starring Danielle Darrieux, with Erno Crisa as Mellors and the fine English Shakespearian actor Leo Genn sitting in a wheelchair as the crippled Sir Clifford Chatterley. My Lawrence fixation was clearly gaining strength.
By 1960, after a sensational trial at the Old Bailey, Lady Chatterley finally gained her liberty in a new Penguin edition which sold three million copies. I thought it a better book than it has been traditionally made out to be. But what authority could a young music critic have been said to possess on the subject? I went on reading. Lawrence was a writer who, thirty years after his poignantly early death from tuberculosis in France, really mattered to me because I trusted him and today still respond to him the way I always have.
As Geoff Dyer, author of a modern study of Lawrence entitled Out of Sheer Rage has argued, you do not need to be a rigid literary academic to admire him or hate him. He wrote books about places in Italy and elsewhere which remain relentlessly alive, incessantly restless, unstoppably irascible, with an emphatically vivid vocabulary full of jabbing words which, for me at least, continue to flash and shine in my private firmament.
After crossing the Alps on foot with Frieda, his future wife and maverick cousin of the doomed air-ace Manfred von Richthofen, Germany’s “Red Baron,” he began his comprehensive Italian adventure by spending months on Lake Garda before switching to Liguria and Tuscany and from there ever southwards until, for his last three Italian years, he settled in Sicily, financed as always by his writing - as Frieda put it with apparent admiration, “he is just a big fountain pen,” though he was also a more cumbersome typewriter.
During the First World War he travelled unwillingly back to Britain, with periods in London, Kent, Cornwall, but only just dropping in at his native mining community of Eastwood near Nottingham, which he loathed, just as he loathed every aspect the war itself, from which, for health reasons, he was never called into.
Yet the Lawrence trail, which ultimately ringed the world, became more and more famous. From the Alps to Taormina, you will always find the long Italian portion of it somewhere along the line and, I hope, it will make you rejoice, even if all you do is read about it.
But read about it anyway. That is how I started, thanks to a literate Edinburgh workman well over half a century ago.
Lawrence’s books remain part of me and, in modern electronic Kindle editions, they travel with me everywhere, weightlessly and occupying no space. It feels good to have them safely in this form, and to have his jagged, darting, prodding prose in versions so easily accessible - and, incidentally, nowadays free to order on line.
7 October 2016
Tuesday 4 October 2016
En route again
The words were uttered by DH Lawrence during his time in Taormina. Today the town is a fashionable, precipitous Sicilian seaside resort to the north of Syracuse, though in the three years he spent there with Frieda it was a very different, less glitzy place. Yet the villa they rented, the Fontana Vecchia, was congenial, their breakfast bacon came from Malta, and it remains one of the Lawrence addresses to which people are still irresistibly lured.
It was the furthest point on his long Italian trail, beyond which he could only change direction. By then the ailing author’s death in Vence, in France’s Alpes Maritimes. lay not far off. He needed mountain air, he had been advised, more than he needed the seaside.
But he still had places to go, and the strength to go to them, and he was still writing with relentless gusto. One January night in Taormina he and Frieda awoke in darkness, filled a thermos of tea, packed what they described as their mobile kitchenino, and walked down the hill to the railway station for an improvised trip to Sardinia. At dawn they caught a local train to the wrecked town of Messina, destroyed by a mighty earthquake in 1908 with thousands of dead, before changing in pouring rain to the single-track Palermo express with a 32-hour voyage to Sardinia - “lost between Europe and Africa” “
as Lawrence put it - in prospect.
No journey, even the later one with Lawrence’s death at the end of it, was ever too daunting for them. It was their lifestyle, to which the possibility of a family parenthood was always irrelevant. When they got back to Sicily, Lawrence wrote Sea and Sardinia, one of his best books, in his most tirelessly vigorous prose and went on eating Maltese bacon.
In Sardinia they docked in Cagliari, where in 1990 the World Cup final between England and the Netherlands would result in a draw and Bill Bufford, innocently representing Granta Magazine was beaten up by the carabinieri during a nasty clash between the Italian police and the public. For the Lawrences, striding up the steep hill from the harbour to find a hotel for the night, things were less eventful. Next day they steamed by puffer train to the centre of the island to continue their adventure.
A decade after Lawrence’s death, during the Second World War, Taormina became the home - as well as Gestapo headquarters - of the ruthless Albert Kesselring, Germanys’ Nazi commander in Italy, from which he was eventually driven out by the start of the Allied thrust northwards from Sicily through Anzio (scene of the admirable new novel by Sebastian Faulkes) and Monte Cassino, the area from where so many of Edinburgh’s resident Italians came.
But the Lawrence villa in Taormina still stands in a street beyond the public esplanade at the top of the town, where Lawrence had thought the sight of the plumes of smoke emerging from Mount Etna had looked so sinister. Geoff Dyer, in his study of Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, wrote of a split level restaurant on the precipice, which Sue and I would also visit during our time in Taormina, when one floor stood empty and the other was serving customers a far from fresh local white wine with a misleadingly inviting name.
We were on our honeymoon and in quest of the Lawrence villa. The town, with its scenic Greek amphitheatre, was now effortlessly attractive. We found the villa, and so, on another occasion, did the modern American travel writer Paul Theroux, who commemorated its Lawrentian connection in a creepy little novella entitled The Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro, set in the town’s best hotel.
Continuing In Lawrence’s wake, Sue and I tramped the streets and down to the station to take a train to Syracuse - familiar to Lawrence - via squalid Catania, birthplace of the exquisitely Chopinesque bel canto composer Vincenzo Bellini at the foot of Mount Etna.
We had reached Sicily from Rome via a week in Paestum, with its spectacular Greek temples, pine groves, and buffalo fields, before crossing to the island on the railway ferry, the long-promised bridge across the straits not yet having been built - it still hasn’t. We returned north via lunch in Rome to the hill town of Todi in Umbria, where we sheltered from rain in shop doorways and warily walked the ramparts. Lawrence’s Italian trail has many strands.
3 October 2016
It was the furthest point on his long Italian trail, beyond which he could only change direction. By then the ailing author’s death in Vence, in France’s Alpes Maritimes. lay not far off. He needed mountain air, he had been advised, more than he needed the seaside.
But he still had places to go, and the strength to go to them, and he was still writing with relentless gusto. One January night in Taormina he and Frieda awoke in darkness, filled a thermos of tea, packed what they described as their mobile kitchenino, and walked down the hill to the railway station for an improvised trip to Sardinia. At dawn they caught a local train to the wrecked town of Messina, destroyed by a mighty earthquake in 1908 with thousands of dead, before changing in pouring rain to the single-track Palermo express with a 32-hour voyage to Sardinia - “lost between Europe and Africa” “
as Lawrence put it - in prospect.
No journey, even the later one with Lawrence’s death at the end of it, was ever too daunting for them. It was their lifestyle, to which the possibility of a family parenthood was always irrelevant. When they got back to Sicily, Lawrence wrote Sea and Sardinia, one of his best books, in his most tirelessly vigorous prose and went on eating Maltese bacon.
In Sardinia they docked in Cagliari, where in 1990 the World Cup final between England and the Netherlands would result in a draw and Bill Bufford, innocently representing Granta Magazine was beaten up by the carabinieri during a nasty clash between the Italian police and the public. For the Lawrences, striding up the steep hill from the harbour to find a hotel for the night, things were less eventful. Next day they steamed by puffer train to the centre of the island to continue their adventure.
A decade after Lawrence’s death, during the Second World War, Taormina became the home - as well as Gestapo headquarters - of the ruthless Albert Kesselring, Germanys’ Nazi commander in Italy, from which he was eventually driven out by the start of the Allied thrust northwards from Sicily through Anzio (scene of the admirable new novel by Sebastian Faulkes) and Monte Cassino, the area from where so many of Edinburgh’s resident Italians came.
But the Lawrence villa in Taormina still stands in a street beyond the public esplanade at the top of the town, where Lawrence had thought the sight of the plumes of smoke emerging from Mount Etna had looked so sinister. Geoff Dyer, in his study of Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, wrote of a split level restaurant on the precipice, which Sue and I would also visit during our time in Taormina, when one floor stood empty and the other was serving customers a far from fresh local white wine with a misleadingly inviting name.
We were on our honeymoon and in quest of the Lawrence villa. The town, with its scenic Greek amphitheatre, was now effortlessly attractive. We found the villa, and so, on another occasion, did the modern American travel writer Paul Theroux, who commemorated its Lawrentian connection in a creepy little novella entitled The Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro, set in the town’s best hotel.
Continuing In Lawrence’s wake, Sue and I tramped the streets and down to the station to take a train to Syracuse - familiar to Lawrence - via squalid Catania, birthplace of the exquisitely Chopinesque bel canto composer Vincenzo Bellini at the foot of Mount Etna.
We had reached Sicily from Rome via a week in Paestum, with its spectacular Greek temples, pine groves, and buffalo fields, before crossing to the island on the railway ferry, the long-promised bridge across the straits not yet having been built - it still hasn’t. We returned north via lunch in Rome to the hill town of Todi in Umbria, where we sheltered from rain in shop doorways and warily walked the ramparts. Lawrence’s Italian trail has many strands.
3 October 2016
Saturday 1 October 2016
South to Sicily
I first visited Sicily to write about some concerts the Scottish Chamber Orchestra was giving there with Barry Tuckwell as hornist and conductor. It was not a major tour but more the sort of event where things go wrong, which makes them interesting to write about. So I accepted the invitation, hoping to find something to say.
There was nothing special about the playing, other than a professional amount of polish. But it was an invitation it might have seemed churlish to turn down. Palermo, for me as for most of the players, was somewhere new.
There were things to could do between concerts. It was a good city for walking. Tall, narrow streets were topped, southern style, by lines of washing and cleavages of blue sky. A restaurant associated with Prince Giuseppe di Lampedusa, distinguished author of Sicily’s historical novel The Leopard, had a mushroom menu it was impossible to resist, with one course of wild funghi after another, cooked in various inviting ways. And there were, before going there, the strains of Tuckwell playing Mozart. For a music critic who was also a food scribe, things looked not unpromising.
But yes, things also went wrong or failed to materialise . The vast Teatro Massimo, where the Mafia reputedly wielded power and whose opera company had given Peter Diamand a rough time when he invited it to the Edinburgh Festival, was temporarily closed, with nothing to offer musical visitors on a night off.
Messina, next stop on the tour, remained scarred by the memory of vast earthquake and tsunami in 1908 when, both there and on mainland Italy, up to 200,000 people were killed between Mount Etna in one direction and Stromboli in the other.
Even the orchestra’s arrival in Palermo had been disrupted by the loss in transit of evening clothes, necessitating the opening concert being performed in jeans. And my penthouse hotel room, as I discovered, had been booked by a local pop group for rehearsals and was filled with equipment. Not for another ten years would I see Sicily again, in very different circumstances. It was a long wait.
1 October 2016
Thursday 29 September 2016
Into Italy
Lawrence and Frieda in the 1920s
You can do worse, it has been suggested, than read the works of DH Lawrence - though FR Leavis, Cambridge’s abrasive Lawrentian sage, would have put it more affirmatively than that. Could you, he might have asked, ever do better?
On trips to Italy, where for a time Lawrence travelled restlessly, I feel I have been reading him for most of my life, not least during the twenty years I was lucky enough to own a tiny property in the mountains above Lake Como, where my Lawrence fixation was linked with another one involving Alessandro Manzoni, whose passion for the Italian north inspired his substantial historical novel The Betrothed. It is a book, I was to discover, as enthralling as Lawrence’s famous reflections on the trek he made just over a century ago with Frieda, his future wife, from southern Germany across the temperamental Alps to the sunny security of Lake Garda at the age of 27, examining wildflowers and eventually munching figs as he progressed.
Manzoni, dedicatee of Verdi’s Requiem, placed his indelible stamp on Italian literature with the adventures of Renzo and Lucia, the young lovers around whom he assembled The Betrothed, and I have delved into this panorama of old Italian life again and again on trips when a music critic should do more with himself than devour the works of Donizetti.
My targeted village was no international tourist spot - it was a workplace, not only for me but for the cheesemakers, creators of the Taleggio now sold by Sainsbury, who were among its other inhabitants. The place never quite became my home, which indisputably remained Edinburgh, especially when people, spotting me in the Queen’s Hall, approached me with a jovial shout of “Back from Tuscany.”
I was conscious that, with its fireflies on warm nights, its platefuls of polenta, its attractive self-containment, home was what in fact my abode in Lombardy could easily have become, if I had allowed it to. I paid Italian tax, had a local bank account, and was registered as a resident. Though friends and relations frequently came calling I never stooped commercially to sub-letting it. But if I had truly lived there, I would no longer have been able to go there. I would be there already. I wanted to retain the joy of being a visitor.
My village’s name was Introbio and I prized it because it was so simply itself. I knew from reading Manzoni that an attack on its ancient fortified tower, during a period of north Italian strife, had prompted him to launch a chapter of The Betrothed with the words “Introbio has fallen.” But each summer when I was there, villagers from far and wide - from neighbouring Primaluna and Pasturo or from Barzio and Ballabio along the valley - commemorated its historical rescue from adversity by ascending mile after mile to a triple conical peak, the Pizzo di Tre Signori, highest in the area called the Valsassina, for a sprawling outdoor service of thanksgiving.
With Sue in quest of Lawrence
Twilight in Italy, the first of DH Lawrence’s collections of Italian travel essays, would spring to mind, even though it was about a different, though not dissimilar, Alpine pass, further to the east. While Sue, whom I was soon to marry, posed with me on one occasion for a snapshot as if we were Lawrence and Frieda tramping the the Pfitserjoch in less settled weather, observing “the crucifix in the mountains,” as Lawrence called it at the start of his book, and dallying at rustic refuges in prediction of episodes from Women in Love, his greatest novel, the circumstances of their renowned walk came invariably into focus.
Even a minor accident, when I slipped and fell while being followed down a narrow track by a random cow with a Mahlerian bell clanging on its neck and was nearly flattened beneath its feet, was all part of the picture.
Previously, on our first overland traversal of the Alps, Sue had driven me south from Alsace with a small cargo of furniture in alarming snow and fog over the top of the St Gotthard Pass before spending a night in a fire-lit chalet run by the Nestle chocolate family as a guest house. There, with a small group of Americans, we had eaten thick veal chops and fresh rosti potatoes for our supper on the heights above the flashy ski resort of St Moritz before descending next day to the small Italian town of Chiavenna, where one of our village friends used to go to have his hair cut, and from there to Lake Como.
But it is the Lawrence route which has now become glamorous showbiz, his long mountain hike evoked on film by Catherine Brown, a British authority commissioned a year or two ago by the BBC Culture Show to follow the track, in company with a fellow Lawrentian, the lanky Geoff Dyer, author in 1997 of Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of DH Lawrence, an oblique but hilarious study of the man. At one point while writing his book Dyer had resolved, he said, not to write it, but he did so all the same, choosing its title from Lawrence’s Collected Letters where, “out of sheer rage, ” Lawrence had been contemplating the idea of a short biography of Thomas Hardy.
As Lawrence, reputedly a man of infinite anger, had asserted, he had no real wish to write about Hardy. Dyer took this as his cue and, scribbling with manic virtuosity, had progressed with his own book.
In Catherine Brown’s filmed re-enactment of Lawrence’s Italian journey, there were unexpected problems to contend with. She had never made a film before and, with a cameraman lugging his big movie camera up the track like a cross-bearer, found it all much harder than expected. The weather was erratic. Her climbing boots leaked. She had a hangover induced by an Alpine liqueur and was feeling dehydrated. But in Lawrentian terms the adventure represented Eternity with a capital “E.” The film, ripened by references to his vivid vocabulary, would endure until the world ended.
She and Dyer were expected to converse on foot about Lawrence’s vexed sense of humour, which she believed in and said definitely existed. She quoted examples but the BBC’s film director was not amused. After several takes, clearer evidence was demanded.
As a side issue there was the knowledge that, en route, Lawrence and Frieda had encountered two young male friends, with one of whom Lawrence went botanising while, in a mountain shed, Frieda had a secret fling with the other. Now this was something with dramatic, possibly even humorous, potential. But when, to Lawrence’s discomfort, she divulged the truth to him a day or two later, they had reached the perilous top of the pass in darkness five miles higher and things were not looking good for Frieda’s safety.
Lawrence’s book and its incidents are now gorgeously evocative and visual, still savoured and avidly pored over, the whole experience re-enacted in the film and on a travel page of the Financial Times featuring Brown and Dyer in transit, accessible on the internet.
The original walk was a far cry from Lawrence’s native mining community of Eastwood near Nottingham, which he wanted to destroy brick by brick, and in two subsequent collections of essays - Sea and Sardinia, with its emotive opening words, “Comes over one an absolute necessity to move,” and in its successor Etruscan Places - move was what he undoubtedly did, while asking people continually where he should move to.
But before then, from high in the Alps, his descent to Lake Garda with Frieda went without mishap. They rented a house set back from the lake. They ate figs. Later they would continue south to Tuscany and ultimately to the coastal resort of Taormina in Sicily, with its views of smoking Mount Etna. There, for three years, they rented another house, the Villa Fontana Vecchia, on the edge of what is now the via David Herbert Lawrence, where the premises with their identifying plaque would later be occupied by a local Sicilian and his nonagenarian mother who, as a girl, had once delivered Lawrence’s letters.
What remains of his furniture - a sofa and the desk at which he furiously wrote and did translations -- is reportedly still there.
Sue and I honeymooned in Taormina in 1995. Following the Lawrence trail has become high-edge travel, an ongoing, unending reality for all who do it, and, with Sue, I remain exultant to have done a few small bits of it.
30 September 2016
Watch this space...
Conrad has been writing a long blog on a topic close to his heart ... which will be appearing very soon.
Wednesday 21 September 2016
Travels with a Steinway
Sviatoslav Richter, for me, formed the starting point. Bruno Monsaingeon’s substantial documentary film of the great Russian pianist, a biographical memoir long available on DVD, remains a haunting masterpiece of musical observation and perception that led to others of its kind, not least the more recent two-hour DVD (Amazon £15.53) of the winter journey by train across Eastern Europe with the gifted young Polish pianist Piotr Anderszewski in company with a shiny Steinway grand.
Playing on a train is not an engagement in the art of the tranquil, as I discovered when I journeyed on the revamped Orient Express with another music critic, the avuncular John Amis of the BBC, from Verona to London, enticed by free tickets, sleeping berths and meals with the chance - at least for me - to write a commemorative article in the Herald newspaper.
There was also an entertainment factor in the form of a Beethoven recital on a grand piano in the cocktail bar by the modish pianist (already heard during John Drummond’s day at the Edinburgh Festival) Jan Latham Koenig, who was working his passage across Europe for a fee, it was said, no more than the price of a ticket. In other words, like me, he probably had a freebie.
It was not, however, the noise of the train which got in the way, even though Koenig seemed impervious to it. It was the frequent plunging into tunnels, which coincided with that portion of the journey through the Alps. Drink, at Orient Express prices, was no sedative, and when Koenig, looking stunned that there were critics on board, joined us for dinner he said we should not treat it too seriously. It was all just a piece of fun.
I cannot say I laughed, except at his embarrassment. But Anderszewski’s impeccable film is another matter entirely. The rightful winner of major awards, it is made for smiles not laughs. It has a scrupulously devised screenplay and is a nostalgic journey, entitled Unquiet Traveller, around his Polish past, with stops for concerts and rehearsals in Warsaw and elsewhere, including some delicate moments of Brahms with Gustavo Dudamel and the Philharmonia Orchestra, slotted into Monsangeon’s probing scenario. The result is musical portraiture of the most entrancing sort.
Seated alone at the keyboard while snowy vistas sweep past the windows, Andreszewski dips into favourite pieces, talking quietly as he plays. If the green train stops at a station - he finds all stations thought-provoking - he steps outside, then climbs back on board, maintaining the continuity of his private dialogue and the sounds he draws from the keys. It is all utterly personal and holds you in its grasp.
I have treasured this disc for a while and, because Andreszewski, an articulate Bachian among other things, has become a familiar figure in Scotland, it is something easy to take pleasure in.
No mere travelogue or conventional interview, it delves into an inspired pianist’s persona, watches what he does, listens to what he says as he sits there unfurls some Schumann and switches straight from the depths of Szymanowski to Mozart, softly singing fragments from The Magic Flute, which obsess him as the snow scene gleams outside.
Snow: ah yes, snow certainly comes into it as the train trundles along then pauses to let him disembark for a visit to a vegetable market with his granny in Budapest. Later, back on board, friends and colleagues materialise for an illuminated supper with frozen schnapps while the end of The Magic Flute rings out in the background.
No it is not the Orient Express and all the better for not being.
21 September 2016
Playing on a train is not an engagement in the art of the tranquil, as I discovered when I journeyed on the revamped Orient Express with another music critic, the avuncular John Amis of the BBC, from Verona to London, enticed by free tickets, sleeping berths and meals with the chance - at least for me - to write a commemorative article in the Herald newspaper.
There was also an entertainment factor in the form of a Beethoven recital on a grand piano in the cocktail bar by the modish pianist (already heard during John Drummond’s day at the Edinburgh Festival) Jan Latham Koenig, who was working his passage across Europe for a fee, it was said, no more than the price of a ticket. In other words, like me, he probably had a freebie.
It was not, however, the noise of the train which got in the way, even though Koenig seemed impervious to it. It was the frequent plunging into tunnels, which coincided with that portion of the journey through the Alps. Drink, at Orient Express prices, was no sedative, and when Koenig, looking stunned that there were critics on board, joined us for dinner he said we should not treat it too seriously. It was all just a piece of fun.
I cannot say I laughed, except at his embarrassment. But Anderszewski’s impeccable film is another matter entirely. The rightful winner of major awards, it is made for smiles not laughs. It has a scrupulously devised screenplay and is a nostalgic journey, entitled Unquiet Traveller, around his Polish past, with stops for concerts and rehearsals in Warsaw and elsewhere, including some delicate moments of Brahms with Gustavo Dudamel and the Philharmonia Orchestra, slotted into Monsangeon’s probing scenario. The result is musical portraiture of the most entrancing sort.
Seated alone at the keyboard while snowy vistas sweep past the windows, Andreszewski dips into favourite pieces, talking quietly as he plays. If the green train stops at a station - he finds all stations thought-provoking - he steps outside, then climbs back on board, maintaining the continuity of his private dialogue and the sounds he draws from the keys. It is all utterly personal and holds you in its grasp.
I have treasured this disc for a while and, because Andreszewski, an articulate Bachian among other things, has become a familiar figure in Scotland, it is something easy to take pleasure in.
No mere travelogue or conventional interview, it delves into an inspired pianist’s persona, watches what he does, listens to what he says as he sits there unfurls some Schumann and switches straight from the depths of Szymanowski to Mozart, softly singing fragments from The Magic Flute, which obsess him as the snow scene gleams outside.
Snow: ah yes, snow certainly comes into it as the train trundles along then pauses to let him disembark for a visit to a vegetable market with his granny in Budapest. Later, back on board, friends and colleagues materialise for an illuminated supper with frozen schnapps while the end of The Magic Flute rings out in the background.
No it is not the Orient Express and all the better for not being.
21 September 2016
Monday 19 September 2016
The unforgotten
Half a century ago, on 17 September 1966, the unforgettable Fritz Wunderlich, Germany’s most vocally perfect young Mozart tenor, died after reputedly falling down a staircase in his home. It was a demise which, in its different way, reminded people of President Kennedy’s fate three years earlier They said they would always remember what they were doing at the precise moment it happened.
I certainly could. I was standing in Stockholm railway station, phoning home on a nordic night after a performance at the Swedish festival, when the news was broadcast. I shall not forget it.
In fact Wunderlich’s final appearance had been a fortnight earlier at the Edinburgh Festival, where with his customary sweetness he had sung at the Usher Hall. As festival programme editor at the time, I had been urgently phoned on the day of the recital to see if I had a copy of the Schubert songs that were to launch the programme. His pianist, Hubert Giesen, had evidently left his own copy of the music at home and, on an Edinburgh Sunday in those days no music shops would be open.
I had the right songs and there was no problem. An hour or so later, from my seat in the hall, I could see Fiesen sitting at the keyboard, my copy of the music in front of him, methodically tearing out the relevant pages in readiness while Wunderlich stood waiting. Happily they were returned to me later, so I was able to piece them together again.
Wunderlich, of course, sang exquisitely, without a hint of tension. He had appeared as Ferrando in Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte with the Bavarian Opera at the King’s Theatre the previous year, and was already adored here.
I never thought that, at the age of 36, his life was almost over. Years later a German radio station rang me to interview me about the Schubert incident. I had not forgotten.
19 September 2016
Tuesday 13 September 2016
Views from the stalls
I have been re-reading, with even deeper admiration, Sir Peter Hall’s diaries about the founding of the National Theatre in the 1970s. I have been told, more than once, that I should not have enjoyed them - that Hall was a vain villain, that he was totally self-centred, evasive, and that he got things wrong.
Yet I cannot see it that way. He remains a man who, perhaps knew too much, whose abilities were too wide, and who paid more attention to directing plays than being an administrator. His enemies, Michael Blakemore and Jonathan Miller among them, have made that perfectly plain.
Yet in their kindle edition the diaries are riveting, wonderfully written, illuminating and also greatly touching - the story of a fascinating, complex man of the theatre, obsessive and, on his own admission, paranoid, in the throes of dealing with rivals, writers, actors, backstage wranglers, aggressive unions.
Sometimes, his hopes and desires bit the dust. Was he over-ambitious? It often looked like it. But not only was he a voracious reader and stage director, he made films (the inspired Akenfield about his native Suffolk more than a century ago), acted in them, ran a high profile television programme (Aquarius, featuring lengthy, absorbing interviews with Dame Janet Baker and others), spent whole nights devouring play-scripts, was constantly tempted into opera production, where he was much at home - including his original, unmutilated Cosi fan tutte for Glyndebourne, perfectly observed and enacted until an assistant got his hands on it and spoiled it when it went on tour.
His knowledge of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Chekhov, Ibsen, Pinter profoundly pervade the diaries, along with delectable walk-on appearances by Ralph Richardson and John
Gielgud. The book, though very long, remains unputdownable.
His Suffolk boyhood - he was the son of a kindly station master - provides the backcloth. But in the end the bomb dropped. Entering his eighties, and long retired from the National Theatre, he suddenly disappeared from public view. He had gone out one evening to see a Chekhov play and started shouting insults at the star actress from his seat in the audience - an unforgettable scene of embarrassment for those who witnessed it.
After what can only be called a full life, including four marriages, dementia had attacked him. He promptly offered himself to Charterhouse, a one-time monastery, now a sort of monastic care home in London where he could live in privacy. He is now in his mid eighties.
Seize your chance and, whatever you thought of his diaries the first time you read them, read them again.
13 September 2016
Wednesday 31 August 2016
Cosi fan fascisti
Taking operas -and their audiences - away from their comfort zones can be a nasty modern habit and rumours had it, when the new Edinburgh Festival production had its first airing in Aix-en-Provence earlier this summer it was that sort of experierce.
Another Aix production of Cosi, rather a good one recently screened on you tube and staged in semi-darkness, turned out to be a different version altogether, which might have been good to see in Scotland. The new Cosi however was set outlandishly in wartime Eritrea during the Mussolini period. Fascism and rape ran rampant in it. Scottish dignitaries who saw it before it reached the Edinburgh Festival Theatre warned audiences off it.
Such warnings have been delivered before about Edinburgh events. I once delivered one myself about a Holland Festival production of Don Giovanni whose conductor Carlo Maria Giulini was threatening to walk out of it before it came here. But the softened revision of it which Giulini conducted in its place was, if anything, worse.
I warned nobody off the new Cosi from the hands of a modish French film director, for the simple reason that I did not see it. But, though film directors are seldom good opera ones, Richard Morrison in The Times liked this Cosi enormously, and since he is a deservedly respected critic, critic it must have had something in its favour.
Yet my reason for not going was simple enough. Cosi fan tutte is a Mozart masterpiece with a good Da Ponte libretto which does not need an entirely new plot superimposed on top it. I was not attracted to what had evidently been done to it, so let it pass me by. My loss, perhaps. But perhaps not. Like his two other Da Ponte operas, Mozart’s Cosi is a work I love. I have seen it change considerably in my lifetime, but usually within the range of feasibility, and often for the better.
If I did not go to Aix’s extremist version of Cosi, it was because I could not see that it had anything to do with Mozart and I felt no desire to write about it.
31 August 2016
Friday 26 August 2016
Changing places
Our recent house move - our fourth in twenty years and in all ways the most traumatic - has left us shattered but confident that we chose the right place.
Shattered has been the word. The removal men never melded as a team, leaving behind them a trail of damage, losses, and breakages. Storage in July was a nightmare. Two fine Jack Firth paintings were damaged. Two beds have had to be replaced ad two more await replacement. The Bosendorfer piano was noisily dropped on the doorstep (by a firm, moreover, supposedly speclialising in pianos) and awaits professional inspection. The glass surface of a hand-made wrought-iron table, designed for my parents more than half a century ago, has been smashed. Our array of art deco lamps are no longer functioning.
Though more may come to light, we are coping. The mighty Bosendorker has its window-space in the front room.The view of the stately Reid Memorial Church across the road gives us pleasure. Good double-glazing shields us from traffic noise. The handsome one-sided Victorian terrace rises gradually towards King’s Buildings. The Avenue Store, mentioned by Kate Atkinson in recent novels, is an easy walk. There are buses to Morningside, Marchmont, and Cameron Toll.
It is very different from the isolation of Buckstone, above the gusty Fairmilehead snowline, where we lived happily for a while. We are in town again.
Our kitchen has a snug corner - once a bed recess - for living and dining in. The back garden, rising towards the red stonework of Ladysmith Road, has won the approval of the dogs.
So, despite our troubles, we are pleased. My desktop computer, whose main lead had vanished in transit, functions. My blog has resumed. My wife, too, is recovering.
26 August 2016
Wednesday 17 August 2016
The biggest in the world
The sensation of this year’s Edinburgh Festival has been the composer James MacMillan's diatribe against Scottish politicians and the ignorance shown of the arts - classical music especially - by people who should know better.
The bragging about Edinburgh’s being the biggest arts festival in the world cuts no ice for someone of MacMillan's perception, and in this respect I wholeheartedly support him. What matters is not size but quality, and the quality of the Edinburgh Festival is something that has conspicuously dwindled in recent years.
But apart from Brian McMaster’s valiant attempt to restore the standards and integrity of the days of Lord Harewood the festival has consistently failed to show what it is really capable of. But the slide into mediocrity and irrelevance has proved inexorable.
The treating of Scottish Opera in recent years as no more than a commodity has resulted in the company’s transformation into little more than that. The Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s aims seem increasingly to confuse musical ambition with routine richness of tone. The Edinburgh Festival Theatre, designed to be a musical powerhouse, now falls far short of that.
Yet when MacMilan dares to say such things he is told he has got it wrong. Does he not know that the arts in Scotland are flourishing as never before? The scale of the Edinburgh Festival proves the point.
But of course - as a musician of Macmillan’s astuteness knows very well - it does nothing of the sort. The festival is an increasingly sprawling mess in the middle of which the international festival, as it is now identified, struggles to seem something special. But without genuinely creative contributions from Scottish Opera and the RSNO the old sense of exhilaration has evaporated, leaving the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the ever-resourceful BBC SSO to fly the flag. But, as this year’s glossy programmes show, it is no longer enough.
17 August 2016
Saturday 9 July 2016
Changing places
We are moving house. Three years of living above the snowline on the heights of Fairmilehead, much as we have enjoyed them, have prompted us to think again about our environment, which has been prey to lusty breezes from the Pentlands.
So we are heading back a bit closer to town, though still on the south side, to that stretch of Blackford Avenue where a one-sided nineteenth-century terrace, complete with stepped chimney stacks and attractive curlicues, rises beside the Reid Memorial Church towards King’s Buildings and the stone archway marking the approach to the Royal Observatory.
We think we are going to like our ground-floor flat, with window space for our old but still admirably functioning Bosendorfer grand, which I inherited a few years ago from Raymond Monelle, a dear friend in the university music department as a replacement for my Bechstein upright.
Fairmilehead never displayed it to good effect, nor enhanced its warm Viennese resonance but in the room where it will live now I think it will feel at home.
Simultaneously with moving house we are staying for the rest of this month in a favourite Galloway chalet, beside a sandy beach loved by the dogs and close to the charming village of New Abbey where we have found a cafe restaurant that suits us.
While there we shall be visited By Gerald Larner, former music critic of The Guardian, a Manchester friend of long standing and critic of impressive austerity - as well as piquant humour and erudite knowledge - with whom we like to spend time. There is good seafood where we are going and not a bad wine shop, which makes us feel we are somewhere on the French coast.
So as usual this blog will be on leave for a spell, before resuming in August in time for what looks like an unappealing Edinburgh International Festival. But you never know. If Robin Ticciati has recovered from his spinal affliction there will be Berlioz’s complete Romeo and Juliet with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, a work on which they will shed the most luminous light. So here’s hoping for this, as well as for Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder conducted by Donald Runnicles.
6 July 2016
So we are heading back a bit closer to town, though still on the south side, to that stretch of Blackford Avenue where a one-sided nineteenth-century terrace, complete with stepped chimney stacks and attractive curlicues, rises beside the Reid Memorial Church towards King’s Buildings and the stone archway marking the approach to the Royal Observatory.
We think we are going to like our ground-floor flat, with window space for our old but still admirably functioning Bosendorfer grand, which I inherited a few years ago from Raymond Monelle, a dear friend in the university music department as a replacement for my Bechstein upright.
Fairmilehead never displayed it to good effect, nor enhanced its warm Viennese resonance but in the room where it will live now I think it will feel at home.
Simultaneously with moving house we are staying for the rest of this month in a favourite Galloway chalet, beside a sandy beach loved by the dogs and close to the charming village of New Abbey where we have found a cafe restaurant that suits us.
While there we shall be visited By Gerald Larner, former music critic of The Guardian, a Manchester friend of long standing and critic of impressive austerity - as well as piquant humour and erudite knowledge - with whom we like to spend time. There is good seafood where we are going and not a bad wine shop, which makes us feel we are somewhere on the French coast.
So as usual this blog will be on leave for a spell, before resuming in August in time for what looks like an unappealing Edinburgh International Festival. But you never know. If Robin Ticciati has recovered from his spinal affliction there will be Berlioz’s complete Romeo and Juliet with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, a work on which they will shed the most luminous light. So here’s hoping for this, as well as for Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder conducted by Donald Runnicles.
6 July 2016
Thursday 30 June 2016
Too much Schicchi
The Los Angeles Opera’s new Sony DVD of Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi is, perhaps inevitably, a disappointment. As so often, too much goes on in it - even the sight of the conductor Grant Gershon laughing uproariously during the opening bars borders on the manic.
But the sight of Placido Domingo in the title role, wagging his fingers at everybody while sporting a gangsterish pin-stripe suit an example of over-the-top updating. Adriana Chuchman’s smooth young Lauretta, in slinky black, is unmoving in the few minutes of what should have been touching repose provided by O mio babbino caro. The relentless updating takes Puccini too far into the realms of Menotti. The final evocation of Florence makes no effect.
How did it happen? Though the Los Angeles Opera never misses a chance to exploit the presence of Domingo, as a tenor or baritone or conductor, this time the result is an example of too much being thought to be not quite enough.
It is not that Woody Allen, as director, is necessarily the culprit, though he certainly does nothing to retrieve the situation. Allen in his films is invariably musically sensitive and his use of Schubert’s great final G major string quartet on the soundtrack of Crimes and Misdemeanours haunts the memory. But most of the comedy in this Gianni Schicchi is just jokiness of a sort that quickly wears thin, the way some of Peter Ustinov’s operatic ventures used to do.
I do not think I shall be watching this DVD again, which is a pity because Gianni Schicchi is a small masterpiece of subtle musical wit, as Tito Gobbi, if I remember rightly, once confirmed in Edinburgh.
30 June 2016
Thursday 23 June 2016
A Bergian Grimes
Among the annual pleasures of father’s day - or faither’s day, as my daughters prefer to call it - I have received a bottle of one of my favourite white burgundies, good French and Italian cheese, some specialist chocolate, a jumper and two unexpected items. From my wife came a black linen cap, bought in Marks and Spencer, which I have been wearing indoors and out, like a rustic Italian or an old-fashioned journalist with an eye shield; and from my son a recently issued and fascinating DVD of Britten’s Peter Grimes, filmed at the Zurich Opera, a handsome, intimately scaled auditorium under the conductorship of Franz Welser-Most, whom Private Eye once nicknamed Worse Than Most but who is now becoming conspicuously Better Than Some.
Though I do not lack DVDs of Peter Grimes, this one was new to me. Switzerland is not a country in which I would expect to encounter a truly illuminating performance of the first great modern British opera, but here it is in all its glory. The cast, admittedly, is English-speaking, and the director is the ever-progressive David Pountney, Scottish Opera’s, one-time director of productions, who gave us a Macbeth with green blood, a brilliantly minimalist Magic Flute and a romantic Seraglio, as well as the company’s great Janacek cycle and Kurt Weill’s Street Scene.
For the Swiss company he devised, aptly enough, a Peter Grimes without much sea. Whatever shock value lies in its shunning of the more recognisable aspects of a Suffolk fishing village - and which Britten himself had insisted on being included in Colin Graham’s Scottish Opera production presented at the1968 Edinburgh Festival under the composer’s own attentive aegis - Pountney’s mind was clearly on Britten’s adolescent desire to become a pupil of Alban Berg in Vienna but from which he was forced to refrain by the British musical establishment, which raised its eyebrows at such things as atonality and Viennese expressionism infecting an English composer.
Yet just beneath the surface of Britten’s first operatic masterpiece lies the world of Berg’s Wozzeck and of the downtrodden soldier who ends up stabbing his mistress.
The outsiderish elements of Peter Grimes, and the contempt of the villagers for him, are fundmaental, of course, to Britten’s opera as we know it. But by stripping it to its essentials, in this unusually abstract and surrealist production, Pountney has highlighted, as surely never before, its Bergian roots. The principal characters - Christopher Ventris’s Grimes, Alfred Muff’s Balstrode and Emily Magee’s piercing Ellen Orford - are vividly observed, but so, quite lacerating in their effect, are the minor ones. The whole cast is enthralling, as is Welser-Most’s lean and sharp-bladed conducting, with its shrill Swiss woodwind. The DVD, from EMI Classics, is on two disc,
23 June 2016
Though I do not lack DVDs of Peter Grimes, this one was new to me. Switzerland is not a country in which I would expect to encounter a truly illuminating performance of the first great modern British opera, but here it is in all its glory. The cast, admittedly, is English-speaking, and the director is the ever-progressive David Pountney, Scottish Opera’s, one-time director of productions, who gave us a Macbeth with green blood, a brilliantly minimalist Magic Flute and a romantic Seraglio, as well as the company’s great Janacek cycle and Kurt Weill’s Street Scene.
For the Swiss company he devised, aptly enough, a Peter Grimes without much sea. Whatever shock value lies in its shunning of the more recognisable aspects of a Suffolk fishing village - and which Britten himself had insisted on being included in Colin Graham’s Scottish Opera production presented at the1968 Edinburgh Festival under the composer’s own attentive aegis - Pountney’s mind was clearly on Britten’s adolescent desire to become a pupil of Alban Berg in Vienna but from which he was forced to refrain by the British musical establishment, which raised its eyebrows at such things as atonality and Viennese expressionism infecting an English composer.
Yet just beneath the surface of Britten’s first operatic masterpiece lies the world of Berg’s Wozzeck and of the downtrodden soldier who ends up stabbing his mistress.
The outsiderish elements of Peter Grimes, and the contempt of the villagers for him, are fundmaental, of course, to Britten’s opera as we know it. But by stripping it to its essentials, in this unusually abstract and surrealist production, Pountney has highlighted, as surely never before, its Bergian roots. The principal characters - Christopher Ventris’s Grimes, Alfred Muff’s Balstrode and Emily Magee’s piercing Ellen Orford - are vividly observed, but so, quite lacerating in their effect, are the minor ones. The whole cast is enthralling, as is Welser-Most’s lean and sharp-bladed conducting, with its shrill Swiss woodwind. The DVD, from EMI Classics, is on two disc,
23 June 2016
Thursday 16 June 2016
A Timely Honour
In 1953 a young Scottish composer, still in his teens, made one of his first visits to Covent Garden for the controversial premiere of Benjamin Britten’s coronation opera Gloriana. The performances, attended by the poshest and least appreciative of audiences, were a famous fiasco, from which the work - a masterpiece - took years to recover, but John McLeod, for one, never forgot the music.
Two years ago, around the time of of his eightieth birthday, he was in the process of producing a fascinating bundle of works, in which his inspiration was showing notable new developments. One of them was a substantial Guitar Fantasy on themes from Gloriana, written for the gifted young guitarist Ian Watt to play at the Aldeburgh Festival, over which Britten had presided for most of his career.
For McLeod this has been a creative period, marked last week by the award of the CBE in the Queen’s ninetieth birthday honours. The thought of a forthcoming trip to Buckingham Palace to meet Her Majesty is pleasing him greatly. Though the award, he admits, has come as a surprise, he has encountered the Queen twice before, first at her coronation itself when he was Clarinettist No 25 in the RAF band which marched seventeen miles to pay tribute to her, and then in 1983 when she visited Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh on its 150th anniversary and he, as music teacher, composed an anthem for her.
By that time, as a music critic and friend, I had got to know him and was aware of his high ambitions on behalf of Scottish music and musicians in general. He had conducted the Perth Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in a celebrated performance of Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in Chabrier’s glittering Marche Joyeuse in Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall Proms. As conductor of the Edinburgh Royal Choral Union (the only conductor I have ever heard who stripped the orchestral accompaniment from And With His Stripes in the annual performance of Messiah) and, in John Currie’s absence, of the progressive John Currie Singers, he might have developed a career in quite different directions. But composing music was his challenge and that, after Peter Donohoe played his Piano Concerto at the Perth Festival (he wishes Perth would repeat it sometime), that was the way he went.
In recent years his music has gone in strikingly new directions, making it more and more interesting to listen to. He is not a composer to rest on his laurels. His Edinburgh home, which he shares with his wife Margaret, a distinguished piano adjudicator and examiner, resounds with to the strains of her Steinway and his Bechstein, though he remains a clarinettist at heart. But vitality his Fifth Piano Sonata, another product of his eighties, has gleamed around the world in performances by Murray McLachlan, its Scottish exponent (hear it on You Tube).
What next? From the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, after his recent tribute to Carl Nielsen entitled Out of the Silence, has come a commission for a viola concerto for their principal viola, Jane Atkins. Viola concertos, among which Walton’s stand high, though McLeod has an affectionate memory of Edmund Rubbra’s, long dead and gone, are rare and special compositions. McLeod says he sees the instrument as a source of energy in the middle of the orchestral strings, just as his beloved clarinet holds a similar place amid the woodwind (Brahms’s two poignant clarinet sonatas can also be played by viola).
Not for nothing was it Purcell’s, Bach’s, Mozart’s, Dvorak’s and Britten’s personal instrument of choice. So McLeod’s concerto will be a work to look forward to. He has time, two years yet, in which to write it, which will leave him space for other surprises. Meanwhile I send him, as Scotland’s senior composer, my congratulations on becoming a CBE.
16 June 2016
Two years ago, around the time of of his eightieth birthday, he was in the process of producing a fascinating bundle of works, in which his inspiration was showing notable new developments. One of them was a substantial Guitar Fantasy on themes from Gloriana, written for the gifted young guitarist Ian Watt to play at the Aldeburgh Festival, over which Britten had presided for most of his career.
For McLeod this has been a creative period, marked last week by the award of the CBE in the Queen’s ninetieth birthday honours. The thought of a forthcoming trip to Buckingham Palace to meet Her Majesty is pleasing him greatly. Though the award, he admits, has come as a surprise, he has encountered the Queen twice before, first at her coronation itself when he was Clarinettist No 25 in the RAF band which marched seventeen miles to pay tribute to her, and then in 1983 when she visited Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh on its 150th anniversary and he, as music teacher, composed an anthem for her.
By that time, as a music critic and friend, I had got to know him and was aware of his high ambitions on behalf of Scottish music and musicians in general. He had conducted the Perth Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in a celebrated performance of Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in Chabrier’s glittering Marche Joyeuse in Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall Proms. As conductor of the Edinburgh Royal Choral Union (the only conductor I have ever heard who stripped the orchestral accompaniment from And With His Stripes in the annual performance of Messiah) and, in John Currie’s absence, of the progressive John Currie Singers, he might have developed a career in quite different directions. But composing music was his challenge and that, after Peter Donohoe played his Piano Concerto at the Perth Festival (he wishes Perth would repeat it sometime), that was the way he went.
In recent years his music has gone in strikingly new directions, making it more and more interesting to listen to. He is not a composer to rest on his laurels. His Edinburgh home, which he shares with his wife Margaret, a distinguished piano adjudicator and examiner, resounds with to the strains of her Steinway and his Bechstein, though he remains a clarinettist at heart. But vitality his Fifth Piano Sonata, another product of his eighties, has gleamed around the world in performances by Murray McLachlan, its Scottish exponent (hear it on You Tube).
What next? From the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, after his recent tribute to Carl Nielsen entitled Out of the Silence, has come a commission for a viola concerto for their principal viola, Jane Atkins. Viola concertos, among which Walton’s stand high, though McLeod has an affectionate memory of Edmund Rubbra’s, long dead and gone, are rare and special compositions. McLeod says he sees the instrument as a source of energy in the middle of the orchestral strings, just as his beloved clarinet holds a similar place amid the woodwind (Brahms’s two poignant clarinet sonatas can also be played by viola).
Not for nothing was it Purcell’s, Bach’s, Mozart’s, Dvorak’s and Britten’s personal instrument of choice. So McLeod’s concerto will be a work to look forward to. He has time, two years yet, in which to write it, which will leave him space for other surprises. Meanwhile I send him, as Scotland’s senior composer, my congratulations on becoming a CBE.
16 June 2016
Tuesday 7 June 2016
Saul in Sussex
Ivor Bolton’s brief spell as the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s principal conductor was one that left no lasting impressions. The players, if I remember rightly, thought of him as one of those conductors who are referred to as visually distracting. He for his part failed to draw from them performances that sounded as interesting as they looked. Interviewing him once in Edinburgh, I found him alert and direct, a conductor with distinct, attractive enthusiasms which for some reason he was perhaps not yet wholly transmitting.
But now, on the international scene, he is certainly doing so - and with a vengeance, especially if the composer happens to be Handel. His Salzburg Festival Theodora with the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, directed by Christof Loy, was more gripping than Peter Sellars’s famous but fussy Glyndebourne production, presented with relentlessly semaphoric gestures from the singers though coolly conducted by William Christie; and last year Bolton himself was at Glyndebourne, conducting, with high intensity, Barry Kosky’s no less irksome staging of Saul, another great Handel oratorio ingeniously, or not wholly persuasively, transformed into an opera.
One of the signals that Glyndebourne’s annual summer season has begun is when one or two of the previous year’s highlights begin appearing on DVD. Saul has now done so, but is it really worth buying? Musically the answer is yes. Bolton’s unfolding of the rich score, filled with glorious choruses and moments of drama, is a triumph. But Kosky’s sumptuous production, much of it eye-challengingly dark and quite meldramatic, is diminshed by being viewed on a domestic screen. Much of it simply looks too crowded. Whatever it was like in the theatre - and it did earn some admiring reviews - is largely lost at home.
But not the music. It’s true that Bolton, seen in close-up in the Glyndebourne pit, looks as jerky, if not more so, than in his Scottish days, but the sounds he draws from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, not least the exquisite oboe tone, are ravishing.
Here is high Hendelian emotion. Even when the stage is over-stuffed with candles, as it is in Part Two, the music shines through. But too many of the singers, particularly Christopher Purves madly articulating the title role, veer frequently into grotesquerie. Saul, after all, is a grand oratorio, which I would like to hear from Bolton on the concert platform, and not a Handelian version precursor Ligeti’s Grand Macabre.
Despite the performance’s many beauties - and Iestyn Davies’s counter-tenor voice is of the sweetest tenderness in the role of David - the production on screen can only be called disconcertingly over the top. A bit more of Bolton at Glyndebourne, however, will not go amiss.
7 June 2016
But now, on the international scene, he is certainly doing so - and with a vengeance, especially if the composer happens to be Handel. His Salzburg Festival Theodora with the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, directed by Christof Loy, was more gripping than Peter Sellars’s famous but fussy Glyndebourne production, presented with relentlessly semaphoric gestures from the singers though coolly conducted by William Christie; and last year Bolton himself was at Glyndebourne, conducting, with high intensity, Barry Kosky’s no less irksome staging of Saul, another great Handel oratorio ingeniously, or not wholly persuasively, transformed into an opera.
One of the signals that Glyndebourne’s annual summer season has begun is when one or two of the previous year’s highlights begin appearing on DVD. Saul has now done so, but is it really worth buying? Musically the answer is yes. Bolton’s unfolding of the rich score, filled with glorious choruses and moments of drama, is a triumph. But Kosky’s sumptuous production, much of it eye-challengingly dark and quite meldramatic, is diminshed by being viewed on a domestic screen. Much of it simply looks too crowded. Whatever it was like in the theatre - and it did earn some admiring reviews - is largely lost at home.
But not the music. It’s true that Bolton, seen in close-up in the Glyndebourne pit, looks as jerky, if not more so, than in his Scottish days, but the sounds he draws from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, not least the exquisite oboe tone, are ravishing.
Here is high Hendelian emotion. Even when the stage is over-stuffed with candles, as it is in Part Two, the music shines through. But too many of the singers, particularly Christopher Purves madly articulating the title role, veer frequently into grotesquerie. Saul, after all, is a grand oratorio, which I would like to hear from Bolton on the concert platform, and not a Handelian version precursor Ligeti’s Grand Macabre.
Despite the performance’s many beauties - and Iestyn Davies’s counter-tenor voice is of the sweetest tenderness in the role of David - the production on screen can only be called disconcertingly over the top. A bit more of Bolton at Glyndebourne, however, will not go amiss.
7 June 2016
Friday 3 June 2016
Cosi again.
With a little patience, I have managed to track down what appears to be the new production of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte which is being brought to the Edinburgh Festival this year. Though somewhat murkily filmed last summer, it at least provides hints of how it may look at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre.
So what is it like? Certainly very different from the first Aix-en-Provence Cosi I ever saw, back in 1965, with Teresa Stich-Randall (looking like Barry Humphries and Tersa Berganza as the sisters.)
The old production was a mostly sunny example of how Cosi used to be staged, with lots of laughs and little despair. But times, as the new production confirms, have changed. The new one is Cosi Fan Tutte as opera seria.
From being a piece of Mozartian frivolity and certainly not his greatest opera - both Wagner and Ernest Newman, we should remember, despised it - it has become the emotional peak of his achievement, quite as good as, if not better than, Figaro and Giovanni, the other comedies to libretti by Lorenzo Da Ponte.
The latest Aix version certainly has no doubt about its status. Staged in semi-darkness and entirely indoors in what seem to be mostly windowless rooms, it is strangely phantasmagoric in effect. The disguises - presumably deliberately - are hidden in darkness. The characters seldom look directly at each other. People not directly involved lurk mysteriously in the background. The nudity promised by the Edinburgh Festival advertising is an idle threat. There are no parasols, no placid seascapes; Vesuvius is invisible.
So, it must be said, is the fun of the piece. Guglielmo’s comic aria is like a dirge. Even Despina, impersonating Dr Mesmer, loses her falsetto voice, though she regains it in time to play the notary in the last act. The ending, which I shall not disclose, is not optimistic.
How it works with cast changes and a different conductor in Edinburgh remains to be seen. But it is not uninteresting, though the jury must remain out on whether it is one Cosi too many.
3 June 2016
So what is it like? Certainly very different from the first Aix-en-Provence Cosi I ever saw, back in 1965, with Teresa Stich-Randall (looking like Barry Humphries and Tersa Berganza as the sisters.)
The old production was a mostly sunny example of how Cosi used to be staged, with lots of laughs and little despair. But times, as the new production confirms, have changed. The new one is Cosi Fan Tutte as opera seria.
From being a piece of Mozartian frivolity and certainly not his greatest opera - both Wagner and Ernest Newman, we should remember, despised it - it has become the emotional peak of his achievement, quite as good as, if not better than, Figaro and Giovanni, the other comedies to libretti by Lorenzo Da Ponte.
The latest Aix version certainly has no doubt about its status. Staged in semi-darkness and entirely indoors in what seem to be mostly windowless rooms, it is strangely phantasmagoric in effect. The disguises - presumably deliberately - are hidden in darkness. The characters seldom look directly at each other. People not directly involved lurk mysteriously in the background. The nudity promised by the Edinburgh Festival advertising is an idle threat. There are no parasols, no placid seascapes; Vesuvius is invisible.
So, it must be said, is the fun of the piece. Guglielmo’s comic aria is like a dirge. Even Despina, impersonating Dr Mesmer, loses her falsetto voice, though she regains it in time to play the notary in the last act. The ending, which I shall not disclose, is not optimistic.
How it works with cast changes and a different conductor in Edinburgh remains to be seen. But it is not uninteresting, though the jury must remain out on whether it is one Cosi too many.
3 June 2016
Friday 20 May 2016
Saints and sinners
Amadeus was Mozart’s middle name, which he liked in its French version, Amedee, and preferred to Wolfgang. It is the title of a famous play by Peter Shaffer, later triumphantly filmed by Milos Forman, and of a Deutsche Grammophon DVD of operatic excerpts, starting with the sight of Wilhelm Furtwangler conducting the overture to Don Giovanni but thereafter degenerating into something of a ragbag.
Amadeus has been the title, moreover, of many a Mozart essay and the occasional book. You cannot escape from it, any more than from a box of Mozart chocolates, but was it Mozart’s fault?
In the case of the 1984 film, it would undoubtedly be the falsest of accusations. Despite the statement on the front of the DVD version that “everything you heard is true,” the film is known for its inaccuracy, and the “director’s cut” - not an abbreviation but a twenty-minute extension - has not improved matters, though this is the version now most readily available on Amazon.
The sight of an open-mouthed Mozart exuberantly conducting The Seraglio - though in fact he would have directed it more modestly from the keyboard - may or may not be an irritation but it is certainly a trivialising element. Films, however, are films, and in order to make an impact - as this one does - they can be, as we say, economical with the truth.
Yet watching Amadeus again, and re-encountering all its extravagances, as I did the other day, I thought that it continues to make at least one valid point. The dialogue may be embarrassingly Americansed. The personalities of Mozart and Salieri, and their relationship, may be distorted. “Known truths” may seem less and less trustworthy - not least because, since the film was first issued, the truth about Mozart has been increasingly clarified.
But one fact, on which Peter Shaffer’s original play depended, is still important, which is that great artists are not always as nice as they seem. Though Shaffer and Forman dressed up their biography in a mantle of glossiness, signifying that too much dramatisation was not nearly enough, their point was nevertheless worth making.
The basic premise, on the one hand, was that Salieri, Vienna’s distinguished court composer and Mozart’s senior rival, was not a great composer but believed his inspiration came from God, whereas, on the other, the raffish Mozart was a self-centred, foul-mouthed, lascivious, whinnying little squirt who happened to be the genius Salieri was not.
But the contrast, while vividly portrayed, fails to convince. The religious Salieri, much respected in his day, was hardly as bad as he is made to seem. Nor, for that matter, was the irksomely irreverent, spendthrift young Mozart, whose fate was a pauper’s grave - a recommended form of burial at the time, as we now know.
So the premise, in this case, is a falsely cinematic one, something we can regard as a theatrical fuss about nothing.
Yet it does, as we have to admit, make a good and very credible story, as it has always done, right down to the composing of the unfinished Requiem, and it certainly resulted in a celebrated - surely over0celebrated - film, winner of forty awards. Seeing it again, I liked it even less. What mattered, however, was the music, and we did hear quite a lot of it, more cherishable than ever, in spite of its dramatised surroundings.
Applied to someone else - Wagner if we must name him but there are plenty of other contenders - the premise could be more satisfactorily made to stick, reminding us that great composers are not necessarily saints.
20 May 2016
Amadeus has been the title, moreover, of many a Mozart essay and the occasional book. You cannot escape from it, any more than from a box of Mozart chocolates, but was it Mozart’s fault?
In the case of the 1984 film, it would undoubtedly be the falsest of accusations. Despite the statement on the front of the DVD version that “everything you heard is true,” the film is known for its inaccuracy, and the “director’s cut” - not an abbreviation but a twenty-minute extension - has not improved matters, though this is the version now most readily available on Amazon.
The sight of an open-mouthed Mozart exuberantly conducting The Seraglio - though in fact he would have directed it more modestly from the keyboard - may or may not be an irritation but it is certainly a trivialising element. Films, however, are films, and in order to make an impact - as this one does - they can be, as we say, economical with the truth.
Yet watching Amadeus again, and re-encountering all its extravagances, as I did the other day, I thought that it continues to make at least one valid point. The dialogue may be embarrassingly Americansed. The personalities of Mozart and Salieri, and their relationship, may be distorted. “Known truths” may seem less and less trustworthy - not least because, since the film was first issued, the truth about Mozart has been increasingly clarified.
But one fact, on which Peter Shaffer’s original play depended, is still important, which is that great artists are not always as nice as they seem. Though Shaffer and Forman dressed up their biography in a mantle of glossiness, signifying that too much dramatisation was not nearly enough, their point was nevertheless worth making.
The basic premise, on the one hand, was that Salieri, Vienna’s distinguished court composer and Mozart’s senior rival, was not a great composer but believed his inspiration came from God, whereas, on the other, the raffish Mozart was a self-centred, foul-mouthed, lascivious, whinnying little squirt who happened to be the genius Salieri was not.
But the contrast, while vividly portrayed, fails to convince. The religious Salieri, much respected in his day, was hardly as bad as he is made to seem. Nor, for that matter, was the irksomely irreverent, spendthrift young Mozart, whose fate was a pauper’s grave - a recommended form of burial at the time, as we now know.
So the premise, in this case, is a falsely cinematic one, something we can regard as a theatrical fuss about nothing.
Yet it does, as we have to admit, make a good and very credible story, as it has always done, right down to the composing of the unfinished Requiem, and it certainly resulted in a celebrated - surely over0celebrated - film, winner of forty awards. Seeing it again, I liked it even less. What mattered, however, was the music, and we did hear quite a lot of it, more cherishable than ever, in spite of its dramatised surroundings.
Applied to someone else - Wagner if we must name him but there are plenty of other contenders - the premise could be more satisfactorily made to stick, reminding us that great composers are not necessarily saints.
20 May 2016
Wednesday 18 May 2016
Better or worse?
With four new main-stage events, four concert performances, and a Mozart revival, a Mozart revival, Scottish Opera’s forthcoming season harks back just enough to whet the appetite and bring back memories of the company’s brave ambitions in the early 1960s.
The new Pelleas and Melisande from Sir David McVicar, with the long-awaited new music director Stuart Stratford as conductor, sets the tone. No work is more redolent of Scottish Opera’s original hopes and designs than Debussy’s masterpiece, staged by the newborn company along with Madama Butterfly at a time when the Scottish National Orchestra was free to play in the pit of the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, and the performance was the most revelatory operatic event in Britain that year.
A new production created by someone of the calibre of McVicar bodes well, and we must cross our fingers that it will bring back a touch of the old magic that existed here in Scotland 54 years ago, when the founding of the company was the highest aspiration in Scottish musical memory.
Though the new Pelleas will not be staged at the Edinburgh Festival - though there is certainly space for it - its performances in Glasgow and Edinburgh next February will be something to look forward to.
A new production of La Boheme by Renaud Doucet inspired by the Parisian jazz age of Josephine Baker, a co-production of Bluebeard’s Castle with a new piece of music theatre, The Eighth Door, by Scottish Opera’s composer-in-residence Liam Paterson, and another co-production - with Music Theatre Wales, Covent Garden, and the Magdeburg Theatre - of Philip Glass’s opera based on Kafka’s The trial are the other highlights.
A small-scale touring production of Donizetti’s Elisir d’Amore, updated to the time of PG Wodehouse, will travel from Stornoway to Newton Stewart, and the Mozart revival, which opens at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, in October, is of Sir Thomas Allen’s racy version of The Marriage of Figaro with Anna Devlin as Susanna and Eleanor Dennis as the Countess.
The concert performances, all at the Theatre Royal, are to be ”curated” - Scottish Opera’s word - by music director Stuart Stratford with a Debussy rarity, L’Enfant Prodigue, and Puccini’s equally uncommon Le Villi as links with the main season. Mascagni’s L’Amico Fritz and Rossini’s La Scala di Seta are the other works, with the Scottish Opera Orchestra accompanying every performance.
So, better or worse? Much better by the look of things. Indeed, if the performances prove fine enough, it will be an inspirational, and very interesting, season.
18 May 2016
The new Pelleas and Melisande from Sir David McVicar, with the long-awaited new music director Stuart Stratford as conductor, sets the tone. No work is more redolent of Scottish Opera’s original hopes and designs than Debussy’s masterpiece, staged by the newborn company along with Madama Butterfly at a time when the Scottish National Orchestra was free to play in the pit of the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, and the performance was the most revelatory operatic event in Britain that year.
A new production created by someone of the calibre of McVicar bodes well, and we must cross our fingers that it will bring back a touch of the old magic that existed here in Scotland 54 years ago, when the founding of the company was the highest aspiration in Scottish musical memory.
Though the new Pelleas will not be staged at the Edinburgh Festival - though there is certainly space for it - its performances in Glasgow and Edinburgh next February will be something to look forward to.
A new production of La Boheme by Renaud Doucet inspired by the Parisian jazz age of Josephine Baker, a co-production of Bluebeard’s Castle with a new piece of music theatre, The Eighth Door, by Scottish Opera’s composer-in-residence Liam Paterson, and another co-production - with Music Theatre Wales, Covent Garden, and the Magdeburg Theatre - of Philip Glass’s opera based on Kafka’s The trial are the other highlights.
A small-scale touring production of Donizetti’s Elisir d’Amore, updated to the time of PG Wodehouse, will travel from Stornoway to Newton Stewart, and the Mozart revival, which opens at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, in October, is of Sir Thomas Allen’s racy version of The Marriage of Figaro with Anna Devlin as Susanna and Eleanor Dennis as the Countess.
The concert performances, all at the Theatre Royal, are to be ”curated” - Scottish Opera’s word - by music director Stuart Stratford with a Debussy rarity, L’Enfant Prodigue, and Puccini’s equally uncommon Le Villi as links with the main season. Mascagni’s L’Amico Fritz and Rossini’s La Scala di Seta are the other works, with the Scottish Opera Orchestra accompanying every performance.
So, better or worse? Much better by the look of things. Indeed, if the performances prove fine enough, it will be an inspirational, and very interesting, season.
18 May 2016
Sunday 15 May 2016
Wine choice: Verdicchio
Verdicchio is a safe, basic white from the northern Adriatic coast of Italy, buyable in most British supermarkets for around £6.99 or £7.99, and all the better if the label calls it Classico or Superiore.
It comes usually, but not necessarily, in an inviting amphora-shaped bottle. Its flavour, slightly astringent, is pleasant and thoroughly Italian. It is the sort of wine - the very taste of Italy - you grab, as I do, when I am shopping speedily in Sainsbury, Tesco, or Morrison’s (whosewine shelves are often more interesting than they are reputed to be).
But Waitrose sells, apart from its standard Verdicchio, a posher one called Monacesca, which customarily costs £10.99 but which, for the moment, has dropped to the basic £7.99. It is the sort of Verdiccio I recognise from meals in Pesaro (Rossini’s birthplace) or Urbino, up in the hills above the sea. The flavour is typically mineral, but more subtle and worth, perhaps, the extra expenditure when it is at full price.
There are other, even dearer versions of Verdiccio, well worth exploring when you are on the northern Adriatic, or what is known as the Marche. They are an ideal match for pasta with clams and other seafood dishes, and restaurants can usually serve at least one of these.
So the Waitrose bargain is worth sampling while it lasts. And, if you are in Italy itself, Pesaro is a delightful seaside spot, home of a fine Rossini festival and a lovely university, to which people cycle, as well as a fashionable resort.
15 May 2016
It comes usually, but not necessarily, in an inviting amphora-shaped bottle. Its flavour, slightly astringent, is pleasant and thoroughly Italian. It is the sort of wine - the very taste of Italy - you grab, as I do, when I am shopping speedily in Sainsbury, Tesco, or Morrison’s (whosewine shelves are often more interesting than they are reputed to be).
But Waitrose sells, apart from its standard Verdicchio, a posher one called Monacesca, which customarily costs £10.99 but which, for the moment, has dropped to the basic £7.99. It is the sort of Verdiccio I recognise from meals in Pesaro (Rossini’s birthplace) or Urbino, up in the hills above the sea. The flavour is typically mineral, but more subtle and worth, perhaps, the extra expenditure when it is at full price.
There are other, even dearer versions of Verdiccio, well worth exploring when you are on the northern Adriatic, or what is known as the Marche. They are an ideal match for pasta with clams and other seafood dishes, and restaurants can usually serve at least one of these.
So the Waitrose bargain is worth sampling while it lasts. And, if you are in Italy itself, Pesaro is a delightful seaside spot, home of a fine Rossini festival and a lovely university, to which people cycle, as well as a fashionable resort.
15 May 2016
Friday 13 May 2016
The name is Rachel Cusk
I have rather liked reading about an English novelist who is disdained in Britain but gives delight abroad, who has been compared (favourably) with Virginia Woolf, who admires DH Lawrence,who has written a book about childbirth that has prompted people to hiss at her from car windows, and who briefly joined a women’s reading group whose members she insulted before rapidly resigning.
She is Rachel Cusk, whose books I have been reading, and greatly enjoying, for some time, while knowing that it is an pleasure many other readers would disapprove of. But I appreciate her detachment, her powers of observation, her keen-edged sense of humour, her vocabulary, her command of figures of speech (even if she is conspicuously prone to overuse, however skilfully, the words “as though”).
I think her novels - including her latest, entitled Outline, about the narrator’s literary adventures in Athens and the people she encounters there - unfold with fascinating precision and with a brilliant, if deliberately subdued, sense of surprise.
Best of all, perhaps, I have savoured her solitary travel book, describing a three-month trip to Italy with her husband and two young daughters, for its pointed responsiveness to whatever she sees and experiences, whether it is high Italian art or basic Italian food.
Yet, when Faber first published it, this book had to be pulped - for which she had to share the cost - because it invaded the privacy of someone she met on her journey and he lodged a complaint about what she said about him (writers, I understand, have to be increasingly wary of this possible predicament, if someone claims he can be recognised by a perhaps indiscreet comment).
By good luck, having bought Cusk’s The Last Supper as soon as it came out, I have been able to read both the original and the reissued versions of the book, so have managed to work out, I think, how she caused offence, though the reasons, to my eyes, would seem somewhat trivial, though admittedly perhaps riskily outspoken.
Nevertheless the episode has endeared her to me rather than the reverse. Yet Britain’s star newspaper interviewer, talking to her afterwards in The Guardian, complained that the book was “slackly written,” a verdict with-which I would wholly disagree.
But Cusk is now inevitably a controversial figure, who can arouse fury through what seems like a mere handful of words. I shall continue reading her with pleasure until the day comes when I, too, am unforgivingly enraged by her. Somehow I do not see that happening.
13 May 2016
Sunday 8 May 2016
Wedding Interlude
The receding of the snow a week ago coincided with a family wedding, which took place on a cool but sunny day in the Fife fishing village of Anstruther. Scott, third son of my wife’s cousin Meg, was marrying Isla in the local town hall, a charming building and an appropriate setting for such an event.
Though weddings are not usually a feature of this blog, the music at the ceremony included Peter Maxwell Davies’s touching little piano piece, Farewell to Stromness, a more northern fishing port, performed during the signing of the register. Davies, whose recent death has been much on my mind, composed it in 1980 for the St Magnus Festival in Orkney, where he lived in a bothy near the Old Man of Hoy, and where it formed an interlude in the Yellow Cake Revue which he wrote for Eleanor Bron (with himself on that occasion as pianist).
The cabaret was a characteristically political attack on Orkney’s new-fangled interest in uranium mining, a big issue at the time, against which Davies led a vigorous campaign - yellow cake was a pejorative nickname for uranium ore. But Farewell to Stromness (Orkney’s second largest township which lay close to the projected uranium site) did not reflect the ferocity of his opposition. It was a quiet and wistful keyboard meditation with a recurring, gently prodding Scotch snap rhythm, musically more to the point than the jollity of his famous Orkney Wedding with Sunrise, the orchestral showpiece he wrote for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, whose success was dependent on its bagpipe climax.
But the bagpipes, it seems to me, have never been a particularly Orcadian instrument - fiddle music is more relevant to the place - and the piano piece, though serving as background music, was more appropriate to last week’s wedding in Anstruther than the rollicking Orkney Wedding with Sunrise would have been.
It was good to hear the music again and to know that, though the Yellow Cake Revue, like Orkney’s uranium plan, is in the past, the eloquent simplicity of Farewell to Stromness lives on.
8 May 2016
Thursday 5 May 2016
The Ustinov Version
In response to my thoughts last week on The Magic Flute - with the evidence of three DVD productions showing how not to stage it - my old friend John Duffus has drawn my attention to a fourth version, in the hope that it might interest me. It can be seen, complete and at no cost, on You Tube, and, though it looks rather the worse for wear, it is good enough to oust many performances that have recently come my way.
Dating from 1971, not necessarily a good time for Magic Flutes, it was clearly a success in its day and there is no problem in seeing why. One of the highlights of the Hamburg State Opera repertoire when the great Rolf Liebermann was the company’s intendant, it reminds us how fast Hamburg recovered from the fire-bombing it received during the Second World War. Emerging like a phoenix (as was said at the time) from the chaos, the company brought six productions to the 1952 Edinburgh Festival, including a valiant Fidelio with Martha Modl, a sterling presentation of Hindemith’s little-known Mathis der Maler, a vanguard Der Freischutz in abstract decor, a Meistersinger and Rosenkavalier the like of which had not been seen in Britain for years, and - last but not least - a merry Magic Flute conducted by the young Georg Solti with the black-voiced Gottlob Frick as Sarastro amd Horst Gunter and his family portraying Papageno, Papagena, and their children (born and growing up by the end of the performance).
Though the city was not yet fully rebuilt, the opera company was alive and kicking. A decade or so later, as The Scotsman’s music critic, I saw a handsome production of Verdi’s Nabucco there, performed in German but with the title-role (thanks to the resourcefulness with which Hamburg faced last-minute casting problems) sung in Italian by an Italian baritone. It was good enough to stick in the memory.
But the Magic Flute filmed by You Tube in 1971 was not the idyllc Solti one. By then it had been replaced by another, staged by Peter Ustinov at a time when he was getting into opera and had already staged Massenet’s Don Quixote, a work that suited him admirably, in Paris. On the evidence of the You Tube film, however, his Hamburg Flute contained little of the whimsicality that was to surface a few years later in his Don Giovanni at the Edinburgh Festival, where an eighteenth-century Sherlock Holmes, complete with magnifying glass, tried to discover what happened to Giovanni at the end of the supper scene.
Ustinov’s Magic Flute, though comic, was straightforward and admirable in a way that few Flutes now tend to be. His Papageno was the Puckish young American baritone William Workman. His Sarastro was the noble Hans Sotin, splendidly secure and serene. Edith Mathis was the predictably sweet and sparkling Pamina, Nicolai Gedda the heroic, but lyrically heroic, Tamino, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau the quietly eloquent Sprecher. Star-casting indeed, showing what sort of performers Rolf Liebermann liked to have at his disposal. The Three Boys (real choirboys) descended by hot-air balloon - nowadays common enough practice but then a touch of Ustinov originality.
Only the Dutch soprano Christine Deutecom - though she would soon be an impressive Amelia in Verdi’s Masked Ball for Scottish Opera - seemed dowdily miscast as the Queen of Night. Horst Stein was the thoroughly alert, adept conductor.
It was a performance that lost none of its impetus as it progressed. Today its flaw lies in the fact that the film involved transferring it from opera house to TV studio and in the obvious lip-synchronisation of the singers.
But the fact that it costs nothing to watch does make some amends for this, and for the murky photography.
5 May 2016
To view the Hamburg Magic Flute key in Magic Flute Ustinov Hamburg 1971 to You Tube.
Dating from 1971, not necessarily a good time for Magic Flutes, it was clearly a success in its day and there is no problem in seeing why. One of the highlights of the Hamburg State Opera repertoire when the great Rolf Liebermann was the company’s intendant, it reminds us how fast Hamburg recovered from the fire-bombing it received during the Second World War. Emerging like a phoenix (as was said at the time) from the chaos, the company brought six productions to the 1952 Edinburgh Festival, including a valiant Fidelio with Martha Modl, a sterling presentation of Hindemith’s little-known Mathis der Maler, a vanguard Der Freischutz in abstract decor, a Meistersinger and Rosenkavalier the like of which had not been seen in Britain for years, and - last but not least - a merry Magic Flute conducted by the young Georg Solti with the black-voiced Gottlob Frick as Sarastro amd Horst Gunter and his family portraying Papageno, Papagena, and their children (born and growing up by the end of the performance).
Though the city was not yet fully rebuilt, the opera company was alive and kicking. A decade or so later, as The Scotsman’s music critic, I saw a handsome production of Verdi’s Nabucco there, performed in German but with the title-role (thanks to the resourcefulness with which Hamburg faced last-minute casting problems) sung in Italian by an Italian baritone. It was good enough to stick in the memory.
But the Magic Flute filmed by You Tube in 1971 was not the idyllc Solti one. By then it had been replaced by another, staged by Peter Ustinov at a time when he was getting into opera and had already staged Massenet’s Don Quixote, a work that suited him admirably, in Paris. On the evidence of the You Tube film, however, his Hamburg Flute contained little of the whimsicality that was to surface a few years later in his Don Giovanni at the Edinburgh Festival, where an eighteenth-century Sherlock Holmes, complete with magnifying glass, tried to discover what happened to Giovanni at the end of the supper scene.
Ustinov’s Magic Flute, though comic, was straightforward and admirable in a way that few Flutes now tend to be. His Papageno was the Puckish young American baritone William Workman. His Sarastro was the noble Hans Sotin, splendidly secure and serene. Edith Mathis was the predictably sweet and sparkling Pamina, Nicolai Gedda the heroic, but lyrically heroic, Tamino, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau the quietly eloquent Sprecher. Star-casting indeed, showing what sort of performers Rolf Liebermann liked to have at his disposal. The Three Boys (real choirboys) descended by hot-air balloon - nowadays common enough practice but then a touch of Ustinov originality.
Only the Dutch soprano Christine Deutecom - though she would soon be an impressive Amelia in Verdi’s Masked Ball for Scottish Opera - seemed dowdily miscast as the Queen of Night. Horst Stein was the thoroughly alert, adept conductor.
It was a performance that lost none of its impetus as it progressed. Today its flaw lies in the fact that the film involved transferring it from opera house to TV studio and in the obvious lip-synchronisation of the singers.
But the fact that it costs nothing to watch does make some amends for this, and for the murky photography.
5 May 2016
To view the Hamburg Magic Flute key in Magic Flute Ustinov Hamburg 1971 to You Tube.
Wednesday 4 May 2016
Wine choice: Gewurztraminer
The best-loved Alsace white is a wine with one drawback: for most people it costs a little too much for everyday drinking.
Apart from that, however, Gewurztraminer is a wine the sight of whose label is always welcome. Its taste of lychees makes it more easily identifiable than almost any other white , yet this is not a shortcoming unless the only Gewurz you have access to is bad Gewurz, which is possible if unlikely, rather than good.
But bad Gewurz is usually a cheap version of the real thing - perhaps from eastern Europe or somewhere in the New World, though the latter source can be very pleasant in its own right and certainly worth buying for a pound or two less than than the real thing if you find one you can trust (think New Zealand).
But the real thing is really what matters, and it always comes from Alsace and will cost you £10 or more a bottle. Even at that price it is not quite invariably delectable. It can be a bit aggressive - or, to put it another way, over-lycheed - a little too sweet (a problem that goes with Alsace wine) and lacking in the back taste that makes it the special wine it is.
That can happen, which is what prevents me from buying it as often as I would like. But Waitrose for the moment (alas a very brief moment) has reduced its standard and excellent Gewurztraminer from £9.99 to £7.99, at which price you can buy the 2015 vintage for a week or two. Produced by the reliable Cave de Turckheim, it is an enjoyably floral springtime drink, not over-assertive, a delight to sip before dinner and a joy with something lightly spicy to eat.
Though many people like to drink Gewurztraminer with a Chinese meal, make sure that it is a good Chinese meal and not a humdrum takeaway. Waitrose do other Gewurztraminers also, at prices up to £14.99. If you are feeling flush, try one of these. But this one does very nicely, so drink it at its currently inviting price while you can.
3 May 2016
Friday 29 April 2016
A Five-star Flute - No such luck
There was a time, in and around the nineteen-sixties, when The Magic Flute, for all the sublime simplicity of its inspiration, seemed the hardest of Mozart’s great operas to bring off. Failed productions of it littered the European operatic scene as depressing evidence of the directorial blunders of which this lovely work, written in the last months of Mozart’s short life, was constantly the unfortunate victim.
Are things any better today? The balance between simple fun and Masonic severity remains a precarious one, which all too easily prompts the more theological aspect of this remarkable yet strangely self-destructive score to topple into inertia. That The Magic Flute is a masterpiece of the choicest sort is indisputable. Why, then, does it so often go wrong?
Three famous DVD recordings of it, which have recently come my way, have provided no answer. Indeed, choosing between David McVicar’s clever and resourceful Covent Garden production, conducted by Sir Colin Davis, the Salzburg Festival’s Mozart birthday production with Karel Appel’s marvellous decor, Pierre Audi’s polished staging and Riccardo Muti’s musical expertise, and Kenneth Branagh’s maverick movie version set amid the trenches of the First World War, has proved in various ways quite dismaying, leaving behind a desire never to see any of them again.
Forced to make a decision I would probably opt for the Covent Garden version, even if Davis’s conducting, after an exquisite Act One and a deeply moving Pamina-Papageno duet, grows increasing slow and stately, and Franz-Joseph Selig’s Sarastro is insufferably ponderous. But at least Simon Keenlyside’s clodhopping Papageno is a pleasure, McVicar’s priests (particularly Thomas Allen’s crabby old Sprecher) are diverting, and Dorothea Roschmann’s Pamina is genuinely touching, even though her Tamino lacks any sort of masculine charm.
But Covent Garden is really too grand a setting for Mozart, and the same must be said for Salzburg’s vast Festspielhaus, where Appel’s Alpine rocks look alluringly climbable and the veneer of the Vienna Philharmonic is as good as it gets (though the Covent Garden orchestra plays more sweetly for Davis).
But impressively though the cast sing, their characterisation amounts to surprisingly little. Papageno’s arrival in a clapped-out Citroen Deux Cheveux is a joke that cannot be sustained, and Christian Gerhaher’s portrayal is an empty vessel - as unfunny as Papageno can be. Diana Damrau’s verve as the Queen of Night is, however, undeniable and Rene Pape’s Sarastro is a grandly sonorous, if not greatly likeable, presence.
Pape, fascinatingly, is also the Sarastro of Branagh’s movie - and a very different one, young, casually dressed, not at all the dignified high priest we are accustomed to seeing. Here he is the man in charge of a field hospital, perhaps also of some sort of Findhorn community around which he rides on horseback. Though by no means ostentatious, he is quite the most watchable character on view.
Filmed at Shepperton studios near London, the action is explosive, rain-swept, muddily entrenched, acoustically divorced from opera as we know it. Yet, irritating though all this can be, including a panoramic vision of war graves, it does not lack ideas. Tamino, smartly uniformed, is a tenor whose voice you initially expect to be that of a counter-tenor in some new-fangled Handel production. Papageno is a cheery trooper whose pigeons are trained to detect poison gas. There is a suicidally crazed Queen of Night, vocalising at virtuoso speed.
Many of the singers, including the pretty Pamina, are novices - lovely to look at if not always to listen to. But the atmosphere of twentieth-century warfare is certainly caught, even if it distorts the story. Where the orchestra is situated is anybody’s guess but the American conductor James Conlon, a fine, firm Mozartian who was once principal guest conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, brings vivacity to the accompaniments.
If asked to supply a star rating, I would confine the Branagh movie to one star (plus half a star for expensive effort), the Salzburg version to two, and the Covent Garden to three. In other words, hardly enough. A five-star Flute is elusive on DVD, though I still have a soft spot for the good old Ingmar Bergman film.
29 April 2016
Are things any better today? The balance between simple fun and Masonic severity remains a precarious one, which all too easily prompts the more theological aspect of this remarkable yet strangely self-destructive score to topple into inertia. That The Magic Flute is a masterpiece of the choicest sort is indisputable. Why, then, does it so often go wrong?
Three famous DVD recordings of it, which have recently come my way, have provided no answer. Indeed, choosing between David McVicar’s clever and resourceful Covent Garden production, conducted by Sir Colin Davis, the Salzburg Festival’s Mozart birthday production with Karel Appel’s marvellous decor, Pierre Audi’s polished staging and Riccardo Muti’s musical expertise, and Kenneth Branagh’s maverick movie version set amid the trenches of the First World War, has proved in various ways quite dismaying, leaving behind a desire never to see any of them again.
Forced to make a decision I would probably opt for the Covent Garden version, even if Davis’s conducting, after an exquisite Act One and a deeply moving Pamina-Papageno duet, grows increasing slow and stately, and Franz-Joseph Selig’s Sarastro is insufferably ponderous. But at least Simon Keenlyside’s clodhopping Papageno is a pleasure, McVicar’s priests (particularly Thomas Allen’s crabby old Sprecher) are diverting, and Dorothea Roschmann’s Pamina is genuinely touching, even though her Tamino lacks any sort of masculine charm.
But Covent Garden is really too grand a setting for Mozart, and the same must be said for Salzburg’s vast Festspielhaus, where Appel’s Alpine rocks look alluringly climbable and the veneer of the Vienna Philharmonic is as good as it gets (though the Covent Garden orchestra plays more sweetly for Davis).
But impressively though the cast sing, their characterisation amounts to surprisingly little. Papageno’s arrival in a clapped-out Citroen Deux Cheveux is a joke that cannot be sustained, and Christian Gerhaher’s portrayal is an empty vessel - as unfunny as Papageno can be. Diana Damrau’s verve as the Queen of Night is, however, undeniable and Rene Pape’s Sarastro is a grandly sonorous, if not greatly likeable, presence.
Pape, fascinatingly, is also the Sarastro of Branagh’s movie - and a very different one, young, casually dressed, not at all the dignified high priest we are accustomed to seeing. Here he is the man in charge of a field hospital, perhaps also of some sort of Findhorn community around which he rides on horseback. Though by no means ostentatious, he is quite the most watchable character on view.
Filmed at Shepperton studios near London, the action is explosive, rain-swept, muddily entrenched, acoustically divorced from opera as we know it. Yet, irritating though all this can be, including a panoramic vision of war graves, it does not lack ideas. Tamino, smartly uniformed, is a tenor whose voice you initially expect to be that of a counter-tenor in some new-fangled Handel production. Papageno is a cheery trooper whose pigeons are trained to detect poison gas. There is a suicidally crazed Queen of Night, vocalising at virtuoso speed.
Many of the singers, including the pretty Pamina, are novices - lovely to look at if not always to listen to. But the atmosphere of twentieth-century warfare is certainly caught, even if it distorts the story. Where the orchestra is situated is anybody’s guess but the American conductor James Conlon, a fine, firm Mozartian who was once principal guest conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, brings vivacity to the accompaniments.
If asked to supply a star rating, I would confine the Branagh movie to one star (plus half a star for expensive effort), the Salzburg version to two, and the Covent Garden to three. In other words, hardly enough. A five-star Flute is elusive on DVD, though I still have a soft spot for the good old Ingmar Bergman film.
29 April 2016
Friday 22 April 2016
The Art of the Interview
Interviewing celebrities, genuine or otherwise, is an art which, in my old age, I have largely discarded, or at any rate lost much of my interest in.
This is not only because life has changed but because the act of interviewing people has grown so utterly different, just as today’s celebrities themselves have done, accepting, as they are said to do, the presence of agents, minders, or timers, who control the confrontation between interviewer and interviewee, monitor every word that is spoken, and decree when the meeting must end.
Thus, as a journalist, you are briefed beforehand about what you are allowed to ask, and what topics you are forbidden to mention. Any encroachment of what is permissible involves instant intervention.
Since I seldom interview people now, I cannot say from experience how true these restrictions actually are, though I am glad to report that I have never been a victim of them and would resent having to be thus hemmed in. But it is easy to feel suspicious about such things. In my time, arranging an interview tended to be the simplest of procedures, though its outcome did depend on luck. Sometimes an interviewee had simply nothing to say, though at least in my experience everybody - with the exception of the playwright Ronald Duncan, librettist of Britten’s Rape of Lucretia, who was memorably rude - welcomed the chance to talk about themselves and were generally generous, sometimes over-generous, not just with their time but with their money, for they would insist on paying for lunch or dinner and rarely complained even if the outcome of our talk was not quite what they expected.
In my day everything was pre-arranged between us, however improvised the written result may sometimes have seemed. I have interviewed Simon Rattle on a train, Vladimir Ashkenazy in an airport arrival hall (I had flown to Heathrow to meet him off a flight, just before he gave a concert), Antal Dorati in a chauffeur-driven car between a recording studio in Watford and his London hotel, Neeme Jarvi while squatting in the aisle of an aircraft in which he was flying first-class to Rome, Anton Mossimann in the kitchen of a Park Lane hotel, Benjamin Britten while strolling in the grounds of Haddo House in Aberdeenshire, Hans Werner Henze while squashed between him and his male partner on a sofa, and Leopold Stokowski on the telephone (I asked him a single question, and his reply in a single sentence lasted half an hour).
Sir Michael Tippett once drove me around the Cotswolds, talking all the way. Sir William Walton smoked in his dressing-room before a London concert, and Alexander Goehr drank a mug of tea while chatting in a Cambridge university canteen, CP Snow lay in bed, his wife (Pamela Hansford Johnson) at his side, with his eyes bandaged after a cataract operation; the young Kingsley Amis merrily eavesdropped on a pair of pompous Cambridge dons who were talking about him in Miller’s Wine Bar, while in our interview we were discussing Mozart piano concertos.
But mostly my interviews have taken place in restaurants, hotels, or the interviewee’s home. In this respect, Sir Alec Guinness stood out as a glorious example of the pre-arranged interview that seemed not to have been planned at all.
He had invited me to lunch with him in Prunier’s more than half a century ago to talk about some of his latest films. Arriving early, and somewhat flustered, I went straight to the toilet to spruce up, and found him standing there alone, beaming at himself in the mirror like Sidney Stratton in The Man in the White Suit or Wormold in Our Man in Havana. I introduced myself and he ushered me to our table for portions of Dover sole and glasses of white burgundy that he paid for with a crisp £10 note (those were the days).
On reporting back to the London editor of The Scotsman afterwards, and telling him what it had cost, he replied, with a sigh of relief, “Thank God we were not paying for it.”
22 April 2016
This is not only because life has changed but because the act of interviewing people has grown so utterly different, just as today’s celebrities themselves have done, accepting, as they are said to do, the presence of agents, minders, or timers, who control the confrontation between interviewer and interviewee, monitor every word that is spoken, and decree when the meeting must end.
Thus, as a journalist, you are briefed beforehand about what you are allowed to ask, and what topics you are forbidden to mention. Any encroachment of what is permissible involves instant intervention.
Since I seldom interview people now, I cannot say from experience how true these restrictions actually are, though I am glad to report that I have never been a victim of them and would resent having to be thus hemmed in. But it is easy to feel suspicious about such things. In my time, arranging an interview tended to be the simplest of procedures, though its outcome did depend on luck. Sometimes an interviewee had simply nothing to say, though at least in my experience everybody - with the exception of the playwright Ronald Duncan, librettist of Britten’s Rape of Lucretia, who was memorably rude - welcomed the chance to talk about themselves and were generally generous, sometimes over-generous, not just with their time but with their money, for they would insist on paying for lunch or dinner and rarely complained even if the outcome of our talk was not quite what they expected.
In my day everything was pre-arranged between us, however improvised the written result may sometimes have seemed. I have interviewed Simon Rattle on a train, Vladimir Ashkenazy in an airport arrival hall (I had flown to Heathrow to meet him off a flight, just before he gave a concert), Antal Dorati in a chauffeur-driven car between a recording studio in Watford and his London hotel, Neeme Jarvi while squatting in the aisle of an aircraft in which he was flying first-class to Rome, Anton Mossimann in the kitchen of a Park Lane hotel, Benjamin Britten while strolling in the grounds of Haddo House in Aberdeenshire, Hans Werner Henze while squashed between him and his male partner on a sofa, and Leopold Stokowski on the telephone (I asked him a single question, and his reply in a single sentence lasted half an hour).
Sir Michael Tippett once drove me around the Cotswolds, talking all the way. Sir William Walton smoked in his dressing-room before a London concert, and Alexander Goehr drank a mug of tea while chatting in a Cambridge university canteen, CP Snow lay in bed, his wife (Pamela Hansford Johnson) at his side, with his eyes bandaged after a cataract operation; the young Kingsley Amis merrily eavesdropped on a pair of pompous Cambridge dons who were talking about him in Miller’s Wine Bar, while in our interview we were discussing Mozart piano concertos.
But mostly my interviews have taken place in restaurants, hotels, or the interviewee’s home. In this respect, Sir Alec Guinness stood out as a glorious example of the pre-arranged interview that seemed not to have been planned at all.
He had invited me to lunch with him in Prunier’s more than half a century ago to talk about some of his latest films. Arriving early, and somewhat flustered, I went straight to the toilet to spruce up, and found him standing there alone, beaming at himself in the mirror like Sidney Stratton in The Man in the White Suit or Wormold in Our Man in Havana. I introduced myself and he ushered me to our table for portions of Dover sole and glasses of white burgundy that he paid for with a crisp £10 note (those were the days).
On reporting back to the London editor of The Scotsman afterwards, and telling him what it had cost, he replied, with a sigh of relief, “Thank God we were not paying for it.”
22 April 2016
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