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

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

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

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

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

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

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