A wee memoir

“And how did you become a music critic?” was a question  I was continually asked in earlier days.  “By intransigence” was the answer I should have given, if only I had thought of it.


The ambition went back to boyhood, when I wrote reviews of the first few Edinburgh festivals for my school magazine and was singled out by my headmaster for the trenchancy of my style. Charles Munch and the Concertgebouw Orchestra performing Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique  at the Usher Hall in 1948 was my turning point. Transfixed, I watched Munch, who appeared to be conducting himself to death,  from a seat in the organ gallery, just behind the kettledrums, and thereafter  kept scrapbooks of cuttings by all the London critics, though Christopher Grier of The Scotsman was my hero. I vowed that one day I would succeed him. I was nevertheless amazed when I did so.

Having passed through my pop vocalism phase - though it was by no means gone for good - I had found my path into the classics by way of Tchaikovsky’s B flat minor Piano Concerto, whose first movement I could not hear often enough, Schubert’s Unfinished, Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro, Walt Disney’s Fantasia, and as much Sibelius as I could find.  My grandmother bought me a piano, and my parents chose a teacher.  I played all day, though with no great aspirations, sat and  passed Higher Music, listened to the Third Programme, which had been recently launched by the BBC, and spent all my pocket money on shellac gramophone records, which I bought in four Edinburgh shops - Clifton’s and Methven Simpson on Princes Street, Rae Mackintosh and Paterson’s in George Street, all of which had listening booths with glass windows where I passed entire afternoons.

Methven Simpson was the best and sold catalogues (HMV’s for some reason being particularly hard to get) over which I would pore. Rae Mackintosh was the first to recognise the virtues of Decca’s FFRR (full frequency range recordings) through which I discovered The Rite of Spring and Ravel’s La Valse, neither of which featured in Scotland’s concert halls at that time, nor even, if I remember rightly, down  in London.

At home I compiled my own concerts for performance on my parents’ polished wood radiogram, before saving up to buy my own table-top Deccalian, with its distinctive white speaker grid, though I could never afford what was known as automatic coupling, whereby records were stacked on a long spindle and dropped, disc by disc, on to the turntable.  Nor did I invest in thorn needles and sandpaper sharpeners, which struck me as somewhat fussy compared with golden metal (though they were almost certainly better).

In the days before there was a recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, I compiled gramophone concerts and  wrote my own programme notes for them, inviting like-minded friends to attend these  domestic evenings complete with coffee during the interval.  Beethoven’s Ninth, conducted by Herbert von Karajan on a heavy pile of Columbia discs, became my pride and joy.  Though these boyhood events developed in adolescence to the founding of an Intimate Music Circle (“how intimate?” asked one potential member - “will there be girls?”) which hired a room each week at  the Adelphi Hotel in Cockburn Street.

At home, though never in public, I played duets with pianist friends - Haydn symphonies, Moszkowski dances - but concert-going was largely dependent on the presence of Walter Susskind as conductor of the SNO (Elgar’s Violin Concerto and Mahler’s First Symphony in a single programme in the 1940s). Carl Rosa Opera brought its repertoire of touring productions.  The Beatrice Miranda company, a bunch of local amateurs, annually sang operatic excerpts, often excruciatingly. But there was enough for The Scotsman to employ a full-time music critic, the only one in Scotland. In anticipation of this responsibility, I wrote my own private reviews of every performance, good or bad, which I attended and circulated them among friends. Thus did I become a music critic.
27 January 2015