21 Encountering Bernard Levin

My first Edinburgh Festival as The Scotsman’s music critic showed me how much had changed in my absence. With Lord Harewood as director, programmes had become more focused  and padding had been swept away. Janacek, previously little more than a name, was composer of the year.  A flop in London, he was transformed by the Prague National Theatre into one of the poets of the operatic stage, his Katya Kabanova hauntingly performed by singers wholly inside their roles, the action - one scene beneath a beautiful big tree stays rooted in the memory - perfectly matched to the haunting and touching  realism  of  the plot.  When Chekhov first gained his foothold in Britain in the 1920s, with John Gielgud among his exponents, the effect  must have been a bit like that.

As Katya’s obverse, in a fiercer, more abstract production, there was From the House of the Dead, again masterfully sung. Having the chance to write about these performances was one of my first great operatic moments as a serious newspaper critic. And Alastair Dunnett, one of the most dedicated of festival-goers, gave me full editorial support, with lots of space,  attentively reading what I had written and never interfering.

As a total believer in the Festival, Dunnett  backed Lord Harewood in various ways, delighting in John Calder’s literary conferences and proposing to me  that I write a full-scale profile of Harewood,  giving me all the time I wanted - he did the same when Harewood was succeeded by Peter Diamand - to produce it. I needed no second bidding.  And in the background Dunnett also did the things an enlightened editor should have done, initiating the board room lunches when, six times each festival, he introduced his staff critics to major festival performers, enabling us all  to converse while he, sitting at one end of the long table with his deputy Eric MacKay at the other, presided over the flow of talk.

Sometimes he sought help, and I recall one occasion being asked if I could collect the guitarist Julian Bream, whose morning recital I had been reviewing at Leith Town Hall, in a taxi and whisk him to The Scotsman. Though this clearly went beyond a critic’s normal duties, Dunnett was such an ingratiating person I did not mind, and neither, for that matter, did Bream.

That was the time when, arriving late in the board room, I slipped on the polished floor and fell flat on my back at the feet of the aloof Bernard Levin who, doubtless assuming me to be some  drunken Scottish mediocrity, stared disdainfully down at me and immediately turned his back. Not all Dunnett’s guests were gracious - though the conductor Sir John Barbirolli, asking quietly  if I could sneak him another glass of whisky, certainly was.
3 December 2014