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

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

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