One out of nine

Of the Edinburgh Festival’s nine directors since its founding in 1947, only one, the ninth, Jonathan Mills, has been a composer. Until yesterday he refrained from employing the festival as a vehicle for his own music, but the theme of his final festival - the response to war by those with creative gifts - proved an irresistible opportunity for a performance of his  own Sandakan Threnody, a lament for the victims of the Japanese in the prison camp of that name in Borneo, some seventy years ago.

First heard at the Sydney Opera House in 2004,  it reached the Usher Hall last night in a performance by  the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Edinburgh Festival Chorus under Ilan Volkov’s lucid conductorship.  Coupled with what could be called its startling obverse, Janacek’s great, exultant  Glagolitic Mass, it formed the first part of an evening which certainly required the explosiveness of Janacek to bring the final concert of the festival to a resounding close.

Described by Mills as an oratorio, the Sandakan Threnody was conspicuously  more severe, with the singers  (somewhat underused in oratorio terms) supplying a sort of wailing wall, while  the orchestra provided more vivid sounds of its own, filled with sudden, striking  flashes of instrumental detail in the atmospheric manner of other Australian composers whose music has come to Britain.

In a work whose other effects seemed more drab - the closing lullaby had none of the balm poured on the closing pages of Britten's War Requiem - this was welcome and interesting. But the score as a whole did not quite hang together. It was certainly a threnody, but was it an essential one?

The exuberant outburst of the Glagolitic Mass after the interval, complete with a splendidly declamatory quartet of soloists and Thomas Trotter bringing bright shafts of colour from the renovated Usher Hall organ (never has that gargantuan instrument sounded better) it was the glorious resolution the concert needed.

Orchestra and chorus flung themselves into the splintery, marvellously compressed music with impressive abandon. The BBC SSO sounded like what it is now becoming:  a great orchestra. But what will happen to it if the referendum result is a yes? That was the ominous question which hung over the entire performance.
31 August2014

Nights at the Trojans

The opera critic of the Daily Telegraph, reviewing the Edinburgh Festival production of Berlioz’s The Trojans from the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, found little to write in its favour - the Guardian, giving the whole show only two stars, found even less. The man  sitting  in the next  seat to the Telegraph critic in the Festival Theatre, sharing the critical opinion, muttered during the interval his own form of deprecation.  ”If this was Scottish  Opera,” he said,  “you’d think it was pretty good. But for this festival you expect something  better.”

In fact there was a time when Scottish Opera did things quite as well as, and quite often better than, other companies appearing at the festival. Its first production of The Trojans, in Peter Diamand’s sterling years as director, was an impressive success. So was its second, staged outwith the festival. Its festival presentations of Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers, Berg’s Wozzeck, Gluck’s Alceste, Janacek’s Cunning Little Vixen,   Wagner’s Die Walkure, Beethoven’s Fidelio, Britten’s Peter Grimes (in a Colin Graham production supervised by the composer himself), an unnerving Turn of the Screw, and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin were all world-class events  in the company’s earlier history.

Its  festival debut in 1967 with an imaginative production of The Rake’s Progress during  Peter Diamand’s Stravinsky year, won the recognition it deserved. Lord Harewood, in his introduction to a book I wrote about the company,  said that Scottish Opera  had speedily attained festival standard. You could say, he added, where it was not yet perhaps quite as good as another company appearing at the festival, and you could say where it was better, but it was unquestionably of international class.  

At that time the company’s  attainments spoke for themselves. Its aspirations were  never in doubt. The London critics, dissatisfied with much of what they saw down south, came north and raved. This was a company that was going places, and we all knew it.
30 August 2014

Operatic reputations

To say whether Jonathan Mills  has been an operatically successful director of the Edinburgh Festival is as difficult as to say if he has been a failure. What is easier to assert is  that - in comparison with the festival’s great operatic  years - those of Lord Harewood and Peter Diamand - he has not staged nearly enough opera - which is, after all,  the mainstay of every great international festival, and has  not always  chosen carefully enough.

Strauss’s Capriccio, hideously transferred to the Nazi years, was a total disaster, but Die Frau ohne Schatten, staged by Valery Gergiev and his Mariinsky company, was deservedly a hit. Too many other things - not that there have been that many of them - have fallen between these extremes.

Both Harewood and Diamand ensured that, of the festival’s 21 nights, eighteen were filled by opera, Mills’s tally, even with a proper opera house at his disposal, has been nothing like that.

But the deciding factor - success or otherwise - will surely be Berlioz’s the Trojans. Scottish Opera did it thrillingly in the days when our national company was a real feature of the festival, which it no longer is. But The Trojans presented by the Mariinsky augurs well. Mills’s operatic reputation hangs in the balance.
28 August 2013

Sensational strings

The Scottish Ensemble’s Edinburgh Festival concert at the Queen’s Hall, to be repeated in Inverness, Dundee, and the Maltings at Aldeburgh, was  a sensational success.

To hear Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro, Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia, and Tippett’s vibrant Double Concerto in a single programme was not only a revelation, but to hear them so adoringly and eloquently played made the event all the more rewarding.  Popular though they deservedly are, these three milestones of British music for strings are seldom heard as an entity, made all the more  of a treat on this occasion by the inclusion of two masterly scores from the southern hemisphere as perfectly chosen and thoroughly appropriate interludes.

The presence of a group of young players identified as Commonwealth Strings, admirably partnering the Scottish ones,  added to the excellence, making the concert seem all the more unified. This was beautifully attuned playing, with the SE’s infinitely responsive Jonathan Morton as principal violin, swaying to every fluctuation of the music.

 Peter Sculthorpe's String Sonata No 3, filled with the fierce sounds and atmospheres of the Austrian Outback, and the premiere of the New Zealand composer Gareth Farr’s Relict Furies, held their place to perfection amid their British counterparts.

For Sculthorpe, who died a few weeks ago, the sonata  was the most  seering of tributes. But Farr’s elegiac cantata, which began like an exquisite extension of the Vaughan Williams fantasy which had preceded it, before moving into a more Mahlerish world of melancholy intensity, was no less fine.
27 August 2014
  

The editors in my life (13)

My first assignment as London cultural correspondent of The Scotsman in the 1960s was to review a comedy starring Iain Carmichael about an American  drama critic who carried scraps of paper, each of them containing a scribbled quip, around in his pockets.

It was not very funny but it was a portent because, as things turned out, I was not yet in a position to write reviews of London music in the paper. The Scotsman’s long-established London music critic, the lofty but affable John Amis, had decided not yet to withdraw from writing reviews  in order to concentrate on learning to become a Wagnerian heldentenor in Germany  - despite distinguished teachers he never succeeded - and had been privately pleading with the The Scotsman’s editor Alistair Dunnett to let him go on writing a bit longer.  John was  a good critic and Dunnett, a kindly man, relented. Moreover John was a wit whose reviews I had first read and enjoyed when I was living in Amsterdam, where the paper was readily available in Dutch shops.

Those -  thanks to Dunnett’s enterprise  - were the days when The Scotsman had developed its great  air mail edition and you could buy it in Paris, Marseille, Brussels, Rome, Germany, New York, Ottawa, or - so it seemed-wherever you happened to be. This is, of course, no longer the case.

John’s reviews were printed in the first edition and, with luck, in later ones also. I still remember the first time he wrote about a programme of music by Vivaldi, a composer far less familiar at that time than he is now. John was introducing him to readers with an opening paragraph which,  as I remember, opened as follows:  “One Vivaldi concerto in a concert. Compelling.  Two Vivaldi concertos. Attention retained.   Three Vivaldi concertos. Boredom. Four Vivaldi concertos. Sleep.”

What an achievement to be the first to say it! (It did not matter if he was wrong).   No wonder he held on to his job! In fact, Dunnett had correctly surmised that in my prentice period on The Scotsman I would have quite enough to do writing musical features and profiles, drama reviews (there was no London drama critic on the paper at the time), art reviews, think pieces, and attending press conferences, as well as a spot of foreign travel.  Concert reviews would come, but not yet.

 In the circumstances, though inevitably disappointed, I was not unhappy.   I was attending first nights of all major plays. I was interviewing actors, painters, instrumentalists, singers, and conductors. I had press tickets for concerts even if I was not reviewing them. I met Judy Garland at a press line-up in the Savoy Hotel. I lunched with Alec Guinness at Wheeler's - and it was Guinness who paid. I dined with Pierre Monteux in the Normandie hotel in Knightsbridge and when I asked him what it was like to have conducted the first performance of The Rite of Spring in 1913, he collapsed and had to be carried out. I spent a morning with Muriel Spark in Peckham, long before she moved to Italy,  and noticed how daintily she walked and how obliquely she spoke.

Writing reviews of plays - all the latest Peter Hall productions with the Shakespeare company, at one of which Harold Pinter, sitting in the stalls, shouted at someone in the circle to shut up - and heard from Tom Fleming, walking along the banks of the Avon at Stratford, of his unfulfilled plan to build a Scottish National Theatre on Cramond Island. Every day produced something new and I wrote about it in The Scotsman in a Saturday column that had been created for me.

Once in a while, Dunnett got cross, especially if I wrote about an artist who claimed that Scotland had made him an outcast but that his talents were recognised in London.  Dunnett would have none of that, and I was told where my responsibilities lay. But otherwise he looked benignly on what I wrote, not least if it was about Stanley Baxter at the Comedy Theatre, or the hair-raising scat singer Annie Ross (Jimmy Logan’s sister) or the droll comedian Ivor Cutler lying on a sofa in his dressing room at the Royal Court and singing, just for me, his poker-faced ditty, “Get away from the wall. It’s my wall.”

For the moment, the absence of concert reviewing did not distress me - or not too much. Its time would come, though I had to leave London to make it happen
25 August 2014

Strings worth hearing

To hear three of Britain’s most masterly works for strings - Elgar's Introduction and Allegro, Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia,and Tippett’s Double Concerto - at the Queen’s Hall onTuesday morning will be a special treat. No doubt it has been done before, though I cannot think that I  have ever experienced it, and the combined Scottish and Commonwealth forces who are sharing the programme will be in themselves enough to make  this concert an unique event.

Moreover the posthumous tribute to the great Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe -who died in his eighties a week or two ago - will add to this morning concert’s value, as also, let us hope, will the premiere  of something from New Zealand, Gareth Farr’s Relict Furies for mezzo-soprano and strings, commissioned by the Edinburgh Festival.

All that’s missing, it seems to me, is the tenderness of Elgar’s early Serenade - as well as the crackle of Britten’s Frank Bridge Variations -  though the inclusion of these would result in a concert of improbable length.

The performances,we can be sure, will be technically streamlined and will carry a powerful emotional charge, with Sculthorpe's sonata No 3 as a fiery rarity to remember him by. In other words, don’t miss it.
24 August 2014

Haddo days

June Gordon, as Lady Aberdeen insisted on calling herself when conducting her choir, orchestra, and opera company, was one of Scotland’s most stalwart musicians, determined to present works - Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, Bach’s B minor Mass, Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, Delius’s Mass of Life - others were intimidated by.

 Haddo House Opera and Haddo House Choral Society, her two great Aberdeenshire creations, both flourished in her hands. Though her conducting technique had a certain rigidity, she tackled problems head-on. Whatever the challenge, she knew how to meet it. As a critic I admired her enormously, though well aware that she could be difficult.

 The Haddo Hall, where most of her performances took place, was essentially a large wooden chalet, its walls hung with sledges, a sort of Aldeburgh Festival auditorium of the north. It was no surprise that Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears liked performing there - I heard them do Schumann’s Dichterliebe - but so did many other stars from farther south.  Janet Baker sang there regularly. The conductor Andrew Davis, like June a dedicated Elgarian, was in early days a chorister in her performances of The Kingdom and The Apostles, done in a single weekend.
Leon Goossens was principal oboe in her orchestra. Experienced brass players took the train from London to act as reinforcements. Her husband, Lord Haddo, sang in the choir.

Haddo House, in rural Aberdeenshire, was not exactly easy to reach but the trip was invariably worth the effort. The first time I went there she had recruited Alexander Gibson to conduct Britten’s still new-minted War Requiem in the 1960s, though she felt, I suspected, that she could have done it just as well, if not better, herself.

 Performers and critics in those days, including  William Mann from The Times,  were invited to stay at Haddo House - this was before it had become a National Trust property - and there were invariably interesting visitors, among them the Queen Mother on one occasion.  Young Prince Charles came over from Gordonstoun  to play in the cello section, and once left his royal toothbrush behind, as I myself did a pair of cherished silk socks, which were sent home to me in a plain brown envelope.

The night before a performance there was whisky in the library and on the day itself a sumptuous buffet lunch. As a critic I faced the problem of finding a phone from which to dictate my review without being eavesdropped upon.  Performers congregated in  the breakfast room the following morning, where with luck you might run into Britten and Pears, as I did the day after Dichterliebe, though talking to Janet Baker was no less welcome.


What has brought all this back to mind is the Edinburgh Festival’s forthcoming concert performance of Rossini’s last operatic masterpiece, William Tell, which the Turin Opera is presenting under Giananfrea Noseda’s expert conductorship at the Usher Hall next week.  It will be a very special Festival event, though of course June Gordon did it in a full staging at Haddo years ago.

Though she was never an avant-gardist - Stockhausen and Nono were not for her - she was always prepared to conduct difficult classical rarities, as William Tell was and still is. So she did that vast four-hour masterpiece, as I remember, more or less uncut and made it work. Her taste in opera was admirable, but in terms of production she went by the book.  A composer’s stage directions were there to be observed, not cast aside, and when Verdi wanted a horse in Macbeth she gave him one.  At Haddo House this  was not a difficult demand to fulfil.

Gloriana, which Scottish Opera has never staged , was her first big  Britten production, with the splendid Judith Pearce as Queen Elizabeth. and her first Puccini was Turandot, with a row of severed heads as decor.  June was one of Scottish Opera’s official advisers, and  chided the company when it got out of hand, as it did when Alexander Gibson and Peter Hemmings were replaced by controversial successors. Though Haddo’s forces continue to flourish, June died in 2009. Her memory lives on.
22 August 2014

Exciting or exasperating?

Apart from West Side Story, which was his masterpiece, most of Leonard Bernstein’s music was mediocre and often pretentious - not unlike his qualities as a conductor. Whether the RSNO manages to galvanise his sprawling Kaddish Symphony at the Usher Hall on Sunday remains to be seen. In his recording of it, he failed  to do so himself. But ever since he first appeared at the Edinburgh Festival, conducting one of the French orchestras in the 1940s and standing on what looked like a table, he often seemed too big for his boots.

When he reappeared in Edinburgh in Peter Diamand’s period as director, he was accompanied from the Waverley Station by bagpipes but was unfortunately marched to the wrong hotel. Though his two performances of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony were impressive, his subsequent appearance conducting his own Chichester Psalms, for which he demanded to replace the Edinburgh Festival Chorus with a choir of his own choice, was not.  Nor did his decision to add Ravel’s Bolero as an encore directly after La Valse seem anything more than an extravagant mistake

But that was Bernstein - the  superb musical  educator who  in Vienna transformed Tchaikovsky’s Symphonie Pathetique into a sixty-minute trudge, who notoriously distorted Elgar’s Enigma Variations almost out of recognition, who could make Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony the most tedious  of experiences  and announced to the audience, before conducting the same composer’s quiet and haunting Symphony No 14 that listeners would find it  sleep-inducing (I’m glad it was Carlo Maria Giulini who conducted it in Edinburgh).

Bernstein performances were examples of brilliant conductorial miming. But if you closed your eyes to them, what did you hear?  Rather less, I would say, than you saw. Some heard this and some heard that. If you were lucky, or receptive, you got the full Bernstein thrill.  If not, not. I must admit that I was not always lucky.

As for the Kaddish Symphony, if you are going to hear the RSNO perform it,  let me wish you luck.  He obviously will not be there to  conduct it. But whether that is to the work’s benefit all we can do is hope for the best.
21 August 2014

The editors in my life (12)

The chance to become The Scotsman’s first cultural correspondent in London came swiftly in the form of a letter from Tom Dawson, the paper’s new London editor. Talk of such an appointment had been much in the air, he said, and he wondered if I would like to have a talk with him.

I must not delude myself into saying, at this point,  that I thought  the appointment had been created specially for me.  In fact, as I was to discover later, it had been “in the air” for some time, and had originally been offered to Sir John Betjeman, who turned it down because the pay  was not high enough. The Scotsman was a distinguished newspaper, but it was also a canny one. In the end, Betjeman’s loss was my gain. My talk with Tom Dawson proved fruitful. The job would involve a weekly interview, along with reviews of major London musical events.

A starting date was agreed, and I returned to the BBC news room to deliver my resignation to the senior news editor, a man called Rumsom, whom I had previously met only once in the course of a year at Broadcasting House. Rumsom (nicknamed Rummy) smiled and reminded me that I had a contract. This, I was aware, was on its borderline, and Rumsom smiled again when I said so. He was not sure, he said, that he could release me. People did not just leave the BBC.  For a minute, he continued to be obstructive, pointing out the BBC’s need for me and the desirability that I continue. There was also the money element to be considered. Altogether things seemed to be growing ominous. Then he smiled again  and agreed that I could leave.

Broadcasting House in central London, for all its fame and architectural handsomeness, was not a place I would miss. The Scotsman’s cramped and cluttered little office on the edge of Fleet  Street, was much more my sort of scene.  Built like a lighthouse, with one smallish room on every floor (but at least, unlike the original Edinburgh office on North Bridge; with a lift to take us up and down) it was immediately appealing.

 My salary had dropped but my status had risen. The newsroom, housing the editorial staff, was near the top, with cubicles for the editor and two two women writers. There were desks for Richard Kershaw, the diplomatic correspondent, Michael Lake, the industrial correspondent, Michael Leapman, who had become the new commonwealth correspondent, Richard Jerman, who ran a sort of cottage industry as features writer, and other specialists.

Hermione, the secretary, sat in the midst of us.  Anita Christophersen, the fashion writer, had the privacy of a cubicle. The desk I was allotted was in the window. Political writers were on the floor above.  We were a team, though most of us would move on before long.  There was a spare desk for Edinburgh colleagues on London  assignments, which happened less often than I expected.  This  would be my life for the next three years.
20 August 3014

Hit or miss?

I was sorry to miss Ute Lemper’s Edinburgh Festival programme in the Usher Hall last week. Though the auditorium is a bit big for this singer and  the things she sings, Olympia in Paris -
one-time home of Edith Piaf - is not exactly bijou either.

I should have considered the concert a must for another reason also,  because it brought back Lawrence Foster - a conductor bafflingly dismissed by one critic as “drab” - who is an old friend of the Edinburgh Festival though more recently connected with the Monte Carlo Opera. Marseille, Monpellier, Barcelona and other Mediterranean places.

I recall a dapper performance by Foster and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of Tippett’s First  Symphony in the Usher Hall in Peter Diamand’s time, and he was once one of the RSNO’s most welcome and adventurous  guest conductors during its winter season.

In Foster’s hands last week, in a concert featuring a rich portion of the Lemper repertoire, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra was surely much more than the mere “backing group” some critics described it as. The fact that the scrupulously compiled items started with Kurt Weill’s Kleine Dreigroschenoper and later included a scintillating dash of Stravinsky surely spoke for  itself, as Lemper’s authentic selection of songs - even if she is now past her prime - must also have done.

Perhaps I am wrong and the evening did not work out to perfection. But Lemper remains an impressive talent, and so does the now septuagenarian Foster. Let us hope he comes back soon.
19 August 201

Another cup of coffee

“And  what do  you think of Nescafe?”  The question is inevitable, and simply answered. It’s better, I say, than a bad cup of coffee. My reply implies that it’s a different drink, but perfectly drinkable on its own terms, which is pretty much my attitude to it.

Stale, thin coffee, however real, is horrible. Nescafe is preferable to that. Yet somehow I seldom drink it.  Proper coffee is not  difficult to make, though it can be fiddly and time-consuming.  If I want something quick I drink filtered Rombout (which, I understand, should be pronounced Rombowt, not Romboo, because its manufacturers, based in Belgium,  are Flemish and not French).

Though it’s expensive - almost  £3 for a ten-cup  package - it’s readily available in large supermarkets, and can be bought in various flavours - the Italian is good.   The problem is that it’s not very strong, though you can improve it by using less water, and making it is simplicity itself.

Big supermarkets also sell their own brands of filter coffee for filtering straight into the cup.  These are perfectly adequate - the Tesco French coffee is indeed quite startlingly strong.  If you fancy a quick pick-me-up, this is one way to do it.
18 August 2014

Coffee dependence

The Swedes, as The Guardian informed us yesterday, call it “fiska,: which is a more interesting name than “coffee break” and, by the sound of things, a more interesting communal office activity.

But the interest, I suspect, lies more in the conversation than in the coffee itself. This aspect is underplayed in The Guardian’s article, though it’s something I myself would rank very high. Swedish coffee, in my experience, is not the most enticing in the world, and although it might not mar a coffee break it would not necessarily improve it either. At any rate, I would want to know more than The Guardian divulges.

In Edinburgh I no longer work in an office - where I used to take pleasure in making coffee for colleagues, including the occasional editor - I have a few favourite cafes where I like to drink a coffee with family or friends. At home my breaks are more often solitary - they tend to be screen breaks from my computer - but they may also be with friends or family if  anyone is around.

The conversation is important but so, in my view, is the coffee. If I am making it myself, it’s likely to involve good fresh beans and a French-style cafetiere of appropriate size. I prefer this, on the whole, to a stove-top espresso pot - which  is something I also like (and prefer to small domestic espresso machines, which are too often disappointing, I find).

But my appliance of choice is at present the very clever plastic Aero-press, which can be bought through Amazon in the form of a coffee-making kit, complete with an accompanying measuring spoon, stirrer, filter papers and a packet of good ground coffee.

It’s an amplification of the German Melitta method, whereby you traditionally pour hot water through finely-ground  coffee in a conical filter and flask. Instead, with an Aero-press, you press the hot water through a sort of vacuum tube (at the bottom of which the coffee is waiting) directly into  a cup. It’s simple to operate and the result is genuinely flavourful. If used in conjunction with a good-quality milk frother - I employ an admittedly quite expensive  but beautifully designed and efficient Severin, also available through Amazon - it gives you a superb cappuccino and, as my wife confirms, an equally desirable latte.

 Good conversation is dependent on the quality of the accompanying coffee. Good coffee is enhanced by good conversation. For the moment, I think I have my answer to the fiska challenge.
17 August 2014

Dutch perfectionist

The Edinburgh Festival, during the past month or so, has lost some of its great old stars.  The immaculate Lorin Maazel is destined never to return.  Now, at the age of 79, Frans Bruggen has also died.

First glimpsed as a spry young recorder player, darting on to the platform of the Freemasons’ Hall for a morning recital in the 1960s, during Peter Diamand’s period as Festival director,  he developed into one of the great Dutch conductors, far less flamboyant than Maazel, but impeccable in his ability to bring a classical purity of line and balance to everything he touched.

Recorder players are seldom sensationalists, though Bruggen did perform miracles with the encore piece, requiring two alto recorders to be played simultaneously, which his fellow Dutchman, Louis Andriessen, composed for him. He also inspired the vanguard Italian Luciano Berio to produce one  of the triumphs of modern recorder music in his masterly Geste in 1966.

But at that time Bruggen had still to show his skills as a conductor, which he later revealed in various concerts with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in Edinburgh and Glasgow. By then he looked gaunt and fragile, even spectral, conducting from a stool on the podium with a minimum of gesture.

 Yet, as in his recordings with his own Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, created  from young specialist players, about sixty of them in all, these were performances of the utmost finesse. The pristine beauty of tone he obtained in the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, his three great loves, will live on in our memories, as will the way he conducted Mozart;s Clarinet Concerto, fortunately preserved on disc.

Bruggen's was a career that went several ways, because he was also a great academic and baroque scholar, in Europe and America.  In his quiet way, he will be hugely missed.
16 August 2014

The editors in my life (11)

On informing Alastair Dunnett, editor of The Scotsman, of my  dissatisfaction with life as a sub-editor in the BBC’s London newsroom in the 1960s, I received an instant response.  Though he knew that music was my metier, and that I wished to get back to it in some way, he offered me what he hoped would be a desirable alternative. The post of commonwealth correspondent had fallen vacant in the paper’s London office. Would I be interested? As bait, he said he could offer some attractive foreign jaunts.

Dunnett, the most artful of newspaper editors,  believed that if you could do one job as a journalist you might be attracted to another.  The Scotsman’s Edinburgh-based music critic, Christopher Grier, could be a perfect diplomatic correspondent - or so Dunnett said to me, though he never actually tried to tempt Christopher in that direction.  The trouble, as he realised, might lie in convincing Christopher that it was a possibility.

Though I knew little about the commonwealth, or had any special interest in it, I accepted his suggestion that it would be worth my while visiting the paper’s London office, impressively positioned on the corner of Fleet Street and Bouverie Street, and having a talk with the London editor, Eric Mackay. I’d never met him before, but feeling that I had nothing to lose I made an  appointment to see him.

Our encounter was potentially momentous, because Mackay  - though nobody knew it at the time - was destined to become editor of The Scotsman in succession to Dunnett.  Tall, sombre, black-haired, with a conspicuous limp, he was an intimidating  presence, but he listened calmly to my nervous prattle about why I wanted the job.  Staring penetratingly at me as I spoke, he reminded me of the actor John Le Mesurier playing the role of a weary High Court judge.

Asked by him for my philosophy on the commonwealth, I could think of nothing original or  constructive to say. But suddenly he grinned - and Mackay’s Aberdonian grin was, as I was to discover, one of hist most likeable features.  “Well,” he said, “Mr Dunnett has assured me that you would be suitable for the job, so it’s yours for the asking.” Then he mused for a moment, while torrential rain poured down his window overlooking the Daily Express and Daily Telegraph offices across the road. “But,” he added, “I can’t help getting the impression that you don’t really want it.”

Both of us then relaxed and began talking about music and the cultural scene in London. He counselled patience. A more appropriate job for me might be in prospect.  He assured me that he would get back in touch.

 Christmas was coming and I wished him a merry one. He did not look very merry. Indeed, as I left the room he gave me another of his lingering stares and I resigned myself to hearing no more from him.   The letter, when it came, was from someone else, for by then Mackay had been moved to Edinburgh as Dunnett’s assistant editor and I was to become, to my surprise, the paper’s London-based cultural correspondent. In the most harmonious circumstances, I had joined the firm.
15 August 2014

A revolutionary orchestra

Though Ivan Fischer and his great Budapest Festival Orchestra will not be in Edinburgh this year, they are giving two concerts at the London Proms. The broadcasts of these, on August 25 and 26, will unfortunately clash with Andras Schiff’s piano recital and the concert performance of Rossini’s William Tell at the Usher Hall, but if you are free either night I would advise you to tune into
Radio 3.

The Budapesters, it’s true, are players you have to see as well as hear. Their long line of double basses, stretched across the back of the platform, is a visual glory as well as a grand groundswell of tone. Even when grouped in small clusters on the fringes of the orchestra, as they were for Mozart’s Requiem one year in the organ gallery of the Usher Hall, they make a memorable impression.

The flexible platform positioning of this orchestra is one of its special elements. Fischer has recently begun  to invite members of the public to start sitting amid the players in order to gain  different perspectives of the music. When. also recently, he announced that the days of conventional symphony orchestras  were numbered unless they agreed to change. you felt inclined to believe him.

So how will Brahms’s third and fourth symphonies sound when he conducts them side by side at the Royal Albert Hall  on August 26? Not like you ever heard them before, that's for sure. He conducted the SCO many times, and appeared at the Edinburgh Festival.  Schoenberg considered Brahms a genuinely revolutionary composer. Ivan Fischer should help us to see why.
13 August 2014

Death of a maverick

With death of Peter Sculthorpe at the age of 85, Australia has lost its greatest, most progressive composer. By chance his Sonatina No 3 for strings, a minor work in a vast output, is due to be heard at the Queen’s Hall on August 25 in an Edinburgh Festival  concert by the Scottish Ensemble and Commonwealth Strings, but here in Britain he remains an elusive genius, his finest works still an unknown quantity.

Yet it was at the Usher Hall in 1974, during Peter Diamand’s regime as Festival director, that the Sydney Symphony Orchestra made its first visit to Scotland with Sir Charles Mackerras as conductor and Sculthorpe’s scorching Sun Music IV  as the centrepiece of its opening programme.

The title Sun Music - also the  name of his absorbing autobiography - came to personify him as a composer, without making him much better known here, despite the fact that Faber became his publisher.  What went  wrong?  Not necessarily his Australian braggadocio, which led him to claim that the future of music lay in the Southern Hemisphere rather than in Europe, just as its past, he asserted, had its foundations in Australia.

His  struggles to  compose at the age of seven resulted in his Tasmanian piano teacher smacking him because she considered them irrelevant to music as she recognised it. His use of ancient Australian instruments, including the 1000-year-old didgeridoo, in his orchestration  has inevitably limited the performance of some of his works outside Australia.

The bizarre sonorities of his eighteen string quartets - major works in his output - have likewise proved problematic, with one critic comparing the sound of his sixth quartet to that of an elephant dragging barbed wire across a corrugated iron roof.

But the premiere of his opera Rites of Passage, commissioned for the opening of the Sydney Opera House in 1973, was delayed for a year for other reasons. The simple answer was that Sculthorpe had not completed it. The precise facts were that he had fallen out with his librettist, the great Australian novelist Patrick White, in a dinner-table brawl that resulted in a valuable Sidney Nolan painting being spattered with food.

In the end, the work was performed with Sculthorpe’s  own libretto. It  still awaits its Covent Garden premiere. Too much of Sculthorpe’s music has yet to prove exportable. Seize your chance, then, and listen to his Sonatina for Strings in Edinburgh.
12 August 2014

Bonjour Conrad!

From Marie, proprietress of Marie Delices, has come this response to my blog about her Edinburgh creperie yesterday. In it, she outlines some of her plans for what she is cooking for her Comiston customers. All the more reason, I would say, for lunching there and savouring this authentic taste of France.


Bonjour Conrad!

Oh thank you so much again for this review! Really, it is sooo encouraging and I’m so glad to see that you enjoy coming to Marie Delices. I’m still working on my new menus, trying to add constantly new things. Yesterday for example I’ve made a savoury cake made with smoked salmon, cheese and chives, served with some rocket leaves. I also made little cakes which I called gateaux incroyables because they’re gluten free, dairy free, and sugar free, and they were delicious! It took me a lot of time to create such cakes as it was a very big challenge for me, but I’m so happy because they’re really good and I didn't even use any sugar substitutes. I try to satisfy a lot of customers with allergies or intolerances. So I keep trying to offer new things!

Many thanks again and looking forward to see you and your family again in Marie Delices.

A tres bientot!

Kind regards,

Marie

The editors in my life (10)

As I soon realised, my job as a BBC newsroom sub-editor in London in the nineteen-sixties could be no more than a dimly interesting stop-gap.

Basically the work, though carried out by people of considerable intelligence and experience, was little more than secretarial. A senior editor would bring me a printed news-agency news story and read out, in his own words, the bits he wanted  to incorporate in the next radio news bulletin. I would then dictate his words, as accurately as I could remember them, to a typist, who would pass them back to the editor.

If the result differed in any way from what he had said to me in the first place, it would be returned to me for correction. Then I would pass it back to him. It was a tedious process, with no scope for creativity, and it continued on a punishing time schedule involving three-day stints lasting from ten in the morning until ten at night. As  your reward you were then given three days off, followed by an even more soul-destroying three-day stint from ten at night until ten in the morning, with a further three days off in compensation.

The night shift, which was spent assembling the early morning news bulletin, was even drearier than the day one. If you were lucky you could rest your head on your desk for a few minutes and snatch some sleep, but this tended to be interrupted by the crotchety night editor, a man called Beevers who accused you of slacking.

The one break in the monotony was the opportunity each morning to hand the bulletin, story by story, to the news reader. If the reader happened to be the famously jovial Frank Phillips - who would remind you never to refer to the chief constable of Kent in case he tripped over the pronunciation - all was well. But the icily aloof Alvar Lidell’s rebukes were less harmonious. Hating it if a sub-editor stood directly behind him as he read, he would ominously switch off the microphone and order you to  shift position to where he could see you. For me the best moment of the morning came when, at 10am, I was released from Broadcasting House and could stroll down to Piccadilly for coffee and croissants at Fortnum and Mason before heading home to bed.

Yet I made friends during these endless months in the galleys, as Verdi described his early life as an opera composer, and one of them was a quiet Irishman called Brian Parker, an associate of the novelist JP Donleavy, author of The Ginger Man, and a fascinating source of information about Dublin’s literary life.

But it was not enough.  Dreams of returning to Holland began to obsess me, and so did the lure of working more creatively in the London office of The Scotsman which, on the corner of Bouverie Street, fulfilled my ambition, now stronger than ever, to become a Fleet Street journalist. Though I was aware that it would mean a drop in salary - the BBC at least paid rather well -  I decided to approach Alastair Dunnett, by then The Scotsman’s flamboyant impresario of an editor, to see what he could offer.
10 August 2014

A gothic tale

Having sampled the two free chapters of Silkworm, JK Rowling’s second mystery story written under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith, I am now devouring the rest of the book, which seems just as good as, indeed even better than, its predecessor.

It’s a big read, twice as long as the traditional English detective stories by Agatha Christie and others which in some ways it resembles, but it is brilliantly sustained and thoroughly up to date in its procedures. Its crippled hero, the arrestingly named Cormoran Strike, is a match for Poirot and the rest, and the drive to Devon through foul weather, which forms the book’s centrepiece, is hair-raisingly evoked.

The murder around which the story is built takes a while to come to light, but is all the better for that. Be warned that it is gothically nasty, and how  Rowling resolves it must have demanded all her ingenuity.

The result is a good read as well as a long one. It’s also a meticulous observation of modern London, where most of the action takes place, and of what Rowling presents as the distinctly creepy world of modern publishing. It has been receiving mostly good reviews, and a year - if that’s the likely amount of time - will seem  very long to wait for the next.
10 August 2014

Encore Marie

Reopened after its summer holiday, Marie Delices, Morningside’s charming French creperie, seems set to go from strength to strength. Bubbling with fresh ideas, its young proprietress has extended the menu to include new crepes and galettes, still more enticing cakes with emphasis on gluten-free ingredients and, if you fancy a Proustian madeleine to go with your coffee, it’s there for the asking. This has become quite our favourite place within easy reach of Fairmilehead, where we live.

Back from our own holidays, we celebrated our return with a sampling of the new things on the menu - in my case the immaculate, spicy buckwheat galette of anchovies, capers, cheese and large thin slices of tomato, folded into an enticing plate-sized brown envelope.  My wife’s choice, also a newcomer to the menu, incorporated ham, cheese, sauteed onions and mustard, with sweet crepes of stewed apples, caramel, and creme chantilly for our daughters. As an assembly of flavours, they formed a veritable feast, augmented for me by a glass of Kronenbourg beer as an alternative to the juicy house cider imported from Britanny. .

Will a house wine be added to the menu? A cool  glass of Muscadet would be just right, as would a genuine French cafe creme in addition to the other coffees  - and not only during the Edinburgh Festival. Places such as Marie Delices - small yet comfortably roomy, with its  big stove in the kitchen at the rear, where Marie visibly works, and its  deft French decor - are just what are needed in Edinburgh.

When we arrived for lunch yesterday, a French couple were sitting in the window, a solitary traveller was  scanning the menu, two families had merged in the middle of the room,  and a large tray of galettes was being carried to a customer on the other side of Comiston Road. What sight could be more inviting? Even Marcel Proust, in his Parisian privacy, would get just what he wanted as he listened to Faure’s latest violin sonata.

Marie Delices is at 125 Comiston Road, on the left-hand side going up.
8 August  2014

Malaysian whispers

Edinburgh’s Chinese restaurants and takeaways tend to be humdrum and too MSG-dependent.  Its Indian places are rather better, without quite matching the flair of the best  of Glasgow’s. But what falls in between can be sometimes really interesting.

Such is Kampong Ah Lee, housed in that productive stretch of the South Side which also contains the long-established Kalpna, with its authentic vegetarian menu and, in a side street, the Cafe India, which, with its  array of small dishes, combines Indian cuisine with the .charms of Spanish tapas.

Kampong Ah Lee is Malaysian, with Chinese leanings, and thus something of a rarity to encounter in Edinburgh.Though its premises at 28 Clerk Street look plain and simple, the food impressively brightens the atmosphere, not only because it is so authentic but because it rings so vividly true.  The effect is a bit like eating an Indonesian meal in Amsterdam, where the food is irresistibly inviting   Not everything, perhaps, is perfect but it scores more hits than misses - enough for anyone’s first Edinburgh encounter with the cuisine of Kuala Lumpur.

What we ate was certainly nothing to do with  standard Edinburgh Chinese.  For a start, the rice, with tiny shreds of carrot, had its own specific individuality. The roast duck, served in chunks, had been cleavered through the bone, not sliced or shredded. The beef with black bean sauce looked  wonderfully dark and gloopy, and was conspicuously tender. Noodles were slimline, but best of all were the the large prawns in their shells, served with a fiery, sticky red sauce.

These were  fascinating twists on familiar ingredients, from a menu that took time to decipher. It was something special - though by Malaysian standards probably quite routine - and we shall be back to explore it in more detail, either in Clerk Street or what is evidently a branch in Fountainbridge.
7 August2013

The editors in my life (9)

With the collapse of The Star newspaper in London just before I started working there I seized my opportunity to continue as sleeve-note editor  for Philips in Holland a while longer, even though I had begun to tire of the job. But my eyes remained fixed on Fleet Street, and I was tempted in particular by an offer from Charles Fenby, director of the Westminster Press, whose chain of local newspapers included an opening that might suit me. We met a few times,and got on, but what he was offering meant living in Oxford as chief reporter of the Oxford Mail. Interesting though that might have proved, I turned it down and we amicably parted with the agreement that if anything more suitable turned up he would let me know. It never did.

Next came the chance to work as a sub-editor in the BBC’s newsroom at Broadcasting House. This, though hardly my scene, looked more promising. I was interviewed by a panel led by Geoffrey Hollingsworth, the newsroom’s deputy head - “what do you think of the new Forth Road Bridge?” I was asked -  and got the job.

Meanwhile, over in Holland, Philips had begun advertising for a new sleeve-note editor. My idea. which needed my boss Wim Zalsman’s endorsement, was that each candidate should be asked  to write a sleeve-note on the subject of a popular classic such as Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. My task would be to assess the results in terms of accuracy, liveliness, and originality. Zalsman agreed and we went ahead, even though I was aware, even then, of the risks involved in having a hand in the appointment of your own successor. Once a short list of possibilities had been selected from the hundreds of people - all men - who had applied for the job, Zalsman and I would fly to London to interview them.

At this repetition of my own interview nearly three years earlier, our choice was Bernard Jacobson, a young Oxford graduate who followed in my footsteps for two years before becoming a music critic in the United States, where he still lives. Our choice agreed upon, Zalsman  jovially dragged me to the cartoons cinema at Piccadilly Circus to see the latest Walt Disney before flying back to Holland to arrange my sleeve-note editor’s farewell, culminating in a lethal game of Dutch shove-halfpenny in the basement of his house.
6 August 2014

A benchmark burgundy

The best wine we drank on holiday in Galloway was not bought there but brought there by a friend who was spending a day with us.   A  2009 Pouilly Fuisse recently added - briefly it seems -  to the Waitrose list, it was perhaps no great rarity among French whites. But certainly, at its best, Pouilly Fuisse is a benchmark burgundy, very different from the Loire’s rival Pouilly Fume, and  ours was a good one, the perfect accompaniment to our salmon supper.

Pouilly Fuisse, it’s true,  can be a fleshy wine but this one had all the structure it should have had. With its hint of steel, it was a model of its kind. 

The wine authority Hugh Johnson has written with pleasure of drinking a “nutty” 2000 Pouilly Fuisse on a square in France  “amid merry broad-beamed grey-heads” eating  a vinaigrette of twelve different fresh vegetables, but ours was fine with fish, courgettes, and roasted baby peppers prepared by my wife in our rented chalet. Our Pouilly Fuisse was younger than Hugh Johnson’s, not so nutty but with that  tension which I prefer in a white burgundy (above all in the best Chablis) and quite delicious.

Wines we bought locally which we enjoyed included a  lovely red Louis Jadot Fleurie from the village shop and, from the Castle Douglas Tesco, a frisky Macon-Villages, a bargain at less than £7. 

5 August 2014

In the South

Grey Galloway is the title of a symphonic poem composed by the academic  Hawick-born John Blackwood McEwen in 1908, shortly before his (slightly) more famous Symphony No 5 in C sharp minor, known as the Solway.

But Galloway, where I have been spending the past fortnight, is today far from grey. It  is a  place of lush pastures, grand forests, scrupulously white-washed cottages, grazing cattle, tree-lined roads often quite French in their symmetry. The Solway is not necessarily a matter of mud, rocks, and smelly seaweed, as is popularly supposed, but of vast sandscapes, distant seascapes, and neat waterfront villages, such as Kippford, which again could be as French, or Cornish, as they are Scottish.

Kippford, indeed, is a delight, with its Anchor Hotel, facing the marina, serving seafood lunches and suppers on its sunny outdoor terrace, with cask ale to rival the wine. Dogs - we have two King Charles spaniels - are as welcome as they seem to be in most of Galloway, and as they also are in the enclosed garden of the sweet little cafe-restaurant at New Abbey, where you can eat fresh or smoked salmon, scrambled free-range eggs, chicken liver pate with oatcakes and where, without charge, you can  drink your own wine. The ice-cream, of course, is Cream of Galloway. as good as it gets.

While admittedly touristic, New Abbey, south of Dumfries, is a place of sublime grace and holiness, its cafe sitting in the shadow of the ruined Sweetheart Abbey itself.

Such is modern Galloway, which we have visited two summers running and have come to adore.
5 August 2014