22 Lunches

The Scotsman’s Edinburgh Festival lunches continued throughout my entire career on the paper, but the best of them were the formal ones presided over by Alastair Dunnett, the originator of the idea and the editor best equipped to make it blossom.

 Though formal, they were not stiff. Guests, interwoven with critics, were astutely positioned along both sides of the board room table. Dunnett sat at the top and his assistant editor Eric Mackay, who was less enthusiastic about these events, opposite him at the other end. Dunnett, rightly, got the principal guest to sit beside him, but discussions were impressively democratic, with everyone joining in.

Only once do I remember someone grabbing the limelight and that was the violinist Isaac Stern, who addressed us all non-stop. Dunnet liked him a lot, for his ability to sustain conversation but I thought him a bit of a loudmouth. The people I liked best were the quieter ones, such as the conductors  Sir John Barbirolli and Carlo Maria Giulini, whose tears flowed as we discussed the beauty of Monteverdi’s madrigals and whose first music teacher looked “just like Brahms”. I had the good luck to be seated next to each of them.

On another occasion, sitting opposite the Festival director Lord Harewood, I discovered that we had a mutual interest in the  Peebles-born music critic Cecil Gray, long since dead. Gray, a composer of lofty Berliozian operas on Virgilian subjects, was a vituperative critic of most other composers, with the exception of Bartok and the mysterious sinister Bernard van Dieren, and who wrote  a destructive book called Contingencies - worth tracking down - in which he demolished Tchaikovsky as  a composer of mincing waltzes.

I never met him - he was slightly before my time - but Harewood had once gone on a river trip with him and recalled him as a rather fat, perpetually sweating man - “wonderfully outspoken but basically sad.”

Perhaps the best moment of all came when I found myself sitting opposite Leila Gencer, the Turkish soprano whom Peter Diamand, Harewood’s successor, had invited to sing Mary Queen of Scots, and whose threadbare performance I had  reviewed in the paper that morning. She chatted politely to me, but Diamand, who was also at the lunch, came up to me afterwards with his Cheshire cat smile saying he had been greatly entertained by the fact that Gencer and I each pretended that we did not know who the other person was.
17 December 2014