Remembering Tertia

Hailing the fiftieth anniversary of Edinburgh’s New Town Concerts the other day, I wrote of their precursor, the Freemasons’  Hall concerts organised by Ruth d’Arcy Thompson in the years after the Second World War.

These, too, were notable events - especially at a time when good chamber music in Edinburgh was sparse and the Festival, founded in 1947 was said to represent three weeks of life in a sea of inactivity.

But Ruth, at the time, was not Edinburgh’s only indomitable woman of music. There was another, even more vigilant, who from her home at 34  Regent Terrace organised the weekly National Gallery Lunch-hour Concerts which featured performers of the quality of John Ogdon, Thea Musgrave and Wolfgang Sawallisch (a pianist before he became an international conductor) in Edinburgh for the first time. This was the great, and memorably named, Tertia Liebenthal, daughter of a nautical German, who grew up here and became leader of the university’s Reid Orchestra under Sir Donald Tovey.

As a schoolboy, and junior critic, I was one of her ardent admirers. Her concerts ran year after year through the winter season, bringing good pianists, string players, singers and others to the relaxing surroundings of the National Gallery, where she was permitted to store  her beloved Steinway grand for the use of her performers, whom she would treat to afternoon tea at Crawford’s on Princes Street after the concert.

In a   sense, though not a pianist herself, she was Edinburgh’s Myra Hess, the pianist whose National Gallery concerts in London won massive support during the Second World War.

She imposed a strict regime on her performers. The centrepiece of her concerts, she ruled, should  as far as possible be something modern, and the closing work should be something  familiar, so that audiences could leave with music they knew ringing in their ears.

The system worked. The audience grew. Performers who failed to comply to her satisfaction were not invited back. As a cub critic, I learnt a lot of my business going to her concerts and writing about them. They were a weekly beacon in a by no means well lit  musical environment.

Gradually we got to know each other and to consult each other. If I was critical of one of her events - such as the time she invited John Ogdon’s wife Brenda Lucas to give a piano recital in his place - she telephoned me in an attempt to reason with me. Sometimes this involved lunch, either at her home, with its view of Arthur’s Seat, or else at her favourite Cafe Royal, where she ate mussels bercy (i.e. with  a wine, shallot and marrow sauce) washed down with a bottle of soothing Barsac (if she wanted a red it would be Valpolicella).

 Before long we began to lunch together regularly, whether or not I had enjoyed the concert. She liked hearing my views, as I did hers. Occasionally, at home, she would invite me to join her in a private performance of a Mozart or Schubert violin sonata on her other piano, because she liked to keep up her violin playing.

She was devoted to the Edinburgh Festival, went often  to Aldeburgh, spent Christmas at the Braid Hills Hotel and summered at Aviemore.  Her vintage Festival  was 1965, because Boulez was there, followed by 1968, which was built around Britten. During the latter festival, she chided me for disliking his Piano Concerto. She had reached a point in her life, she said, when she had “had” Beethoven and was contemplating dropping his music from her concerts.

Then suddenly, in the middle of her 699th concert, this tall, striking, impressive  impresario dropped dead. She had just announced her 700th programme, which was to be given by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. Eventually they gave it in her memory, and it included the premiere of a new Britten song cycle, Who Are These Children?, to  words by William Soutar. An era was over. Though there was talk of continuing the concerts, it never happened.

Her piano was sold. Ronald Mavor, by then director of the Scottish Arts Council, said that it was characteristic that Tertia died at her 699th concert, because she would never have done anything to mar her 700th.
18 September 2014