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
Much has been written recently about Isaac Stern’s influence over the music industry, and especially over the careers of artists, both positive and unfortunately negative. I met him several times in my role as a small-time impresario. When the Hong Kong Cultural Centre opened with a month-long Festival in November 1989, I presented three chamber music evenings with Stern and four superb younger artists – Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax, Nobuko Imai and Young-Uk Kim. On the last day I took them all to lunch as a small mark of my gratitude. When it came time to pay the bill, I was informed that Mr. Stern had already paid it, an act of typical generosity.
ReplyDeleteIf, however, artists crossed Stern for any reason, such was his influence in the industry worldwide it was generally well-known he could do untold damage to careers. A word here, a phone call there and previously open doors were slammed shut. In my first season in Hong Kong we had an exhilarating couple of concerts with the violinist Aaron Rosand. I wondered why I had never heard of him earlier. He was on Stern’s black-list, I was informed. And for the rest of his career, Rosand never had anything like the career his talent deserved.
Another artist with whom I had the joy of working on three separate occasions was the great virtuoso pianist Earl Wild. Not much known outside his native America (although his still acclaimed recordings of the Rachmaninov concerti were made at London’s Kingsway Hall with Jascha Horenstein and the RPO), in the early 1980s the doyen of US critics, Harold Schoenberg, had written a long article for the New York Times about the dying art of the virtuoso pianist. Only three then remained, he claimed – Horowitz, Cherkassky and Wild.
In his hugely entertaining, anecdote-filled autobiography “A Walk on the Wild Side”, Wild makes his contempt for Stern’s political wheelings and dealings in the music industry abundantly clear. He admires Stern for the zeal he put into saving Carnegie Hall from the wreckers ball but adds, as soon as Stern started his association with that famous hall, it “became a vehicle for the promotion of Stern and his ego, along with the obvious large dose of rabid politics!” Along with Rosand and Wild, he ensured other major artists would not be invited by Carnegie Hall to appear in any of its own presentations. These included Mischa Elman, Oscar Shumsky, Ruggiero Ricci - even Jascha Heifetz. They could thereafter only appear if booked as soloists by visiting orchestras or paid to rent it for their own recitals.
As Stern’s influence in the industry waxed, so his playing over the last 25 years of his career waned. As his own manager remarked, “He just won’t practise any more!” The slow drip-drip of publicity now being given to his behind-the-scenes machinations is gradually tarnishing the legacy of what was at one time, without question, a superb talent.