The editors in my life 23 - Travels

The big benefit of my budget for foreign travel as music critic of The Scotsman was that I never had to justify it. It was enough to get me to three or more festivals a year, especially if the festival was willing to pay a portion of the expense - usually the hotel bill, sometimes the flight.

In this respect the Holland Festival was the most generous, as also were Savonlina in Finland and Bergen in Norway. You could always assume that, wherever you went, tickets would be free - something especially useful if Bayreuth was your choice. Salzburg was notoriously ungenerous, at least in my day, and so, according to colleagues from elsewhere, was Edinburgh - the belief being that festivals which did not need to subsidise critics seldom did so.

In general I succeeded in getting to the festivals I wanted to attend each year - which firstly meant Holland, particularly in Peter Diamand’s time, when it seemed the nicest festival of them all, and specially inviting to critics because the performances were so good and so worth writing about.

In Amsterdam, critics were invited out to meals in small groups - Peter did the same when he became director in Edinburgh - but it never seemed like bribery.  Critics are invariably happy to bite the hand that feeds them. My first Scotsman editor, Alastair Dunnett,  was always appreciative if I  chose to attend a festival which was sending one of its events to Edinburgh, thus enabling me to write about it in advance.

Only once do I remember the Holland Festival blundering in this respect, when a new production of Don Giovanni, wonderfully conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini, had been booked to come to the King’s in Edinburgh after its Dutch premiere. But in Amsterdam, as I felt bound to report, it was a disaster - an early example of new-wave opera production so distorted in every respect that Giulini refused to conduct it a second time - i.e. in Edinburgh - unless it was completely changed.

Lord Harewood, who was Edinburgh’s director at the time, had two months in which to do something about it. He was up against his old foe, Lord Provost Duncan Weatherstone, who, after reading my review, demanded instant action.

By this time the Dutch production team had washed their hands of the entire performance, so Harewood placated Giulini by hiring an ad hoc team from Covent Garden, who designed a replacement backcloth at short notice and placed the most routine production, still with the original cast, in front of it.

Atrocity was transformed into nonentity, but Giulini conducted it in the form of a semi-staged performance and the Lord provost was reputedly pleased. I was not.
10 January 2015