Lunch with the FT - the weekly column in which the Financial Times interviews business, political, and cultural celebrities in restaurants of their choice at the paper's expense - yesterday turned its focus on the statuesque Jessye Norman, the Edinburgh Festival’s star singer of the nineteen-seventies.
Now in her own seventies, she is inevitably no longer the soprano she was when, under Scotsman auspices, I had lunch with her at Raffaelli’s Edinburgh restaurant, an occasion to which I have alluded once before in this blog.
Now in the twilight of her career, if so dim a word can be applied to so huge a personality, she is still a star in her firmament, even if the Financial Times, in its review of her most recent New York recital, fearlessly tore her apart. The fact that her interviewer in yesterday’s paper was not the reviewer of her recital, was clearly an advantage for the interviewer. Neither of them, in the course of lunch in Oxford where the singer was attending a book launch, referred to the review - one of the notorious Martin Bernheimer’s most supreme hatchet jobs - though the interviewer could not resist quoting from it in her resultant article.
But evidence that Norman is still the indomitable presence she used to be was not lost in what appears to have been an almost placid conversation. Though her choice of food seemed modest by her standards - battered oysters followed by crab salad and camomile tea - the occasional flashing riposte made its point. Clearly, she has not been tamed by time, and the woman who arrived at Raffaelli’s all those years ago with her own unexpected retinue was still recognisable.
Those were the days when she could alarm the Scottish National Orchestra by disappearing in the middle of a Scottish concert tour until a search party located her chauffeur-driven car in the grounds of a hotel in Aberdeenshire.
Trains and aircraft were never her scene. Rather than cram herself into a sleeper, she once took a taxi from Edinburgh to London. Rather than risk the perilous staircase down to the platform of Glasgow City Hall for a concert performance of Act One of Die Walkure under Alexander Gibson (a conductor whose finesse she always admired and with whom she once recorded a disc of her favourite spirituals) she insisted on special stairs being built to the stage from the level of the stalls. The Edinburgh Festival was lucky enough to programme her - in songs by Schubert, Brahms, and Strauss - in her prime.
As for that Raffaelli lunch, it was not an occasion to interview her but simply to say thank-you and to bask in her glory, as did all the restaurant’s eavesdropping customers that day. It cost the usually parsimonious Scotsman a bomb, but in the opinion of this critic it was worth every penny.
19 April 2015
Now in her own seventies, she is inevitably no longer the soprano she was when, under Scotsman auspices, I had lunch with her at Raffaelli’s Edinburgh restaurant, an occasion to which I have alluded once before in this blog.
Now in the twilight of her career, if so dim a word can be applied to so huge a personality, she is still a star in her firmament, even if the Financial Times, in its review of her most recent New York recital, fearlessly tore her apart. The fact that her interviewer in yesterday’s paper was not the reviewer of her recital, was clearly an advantage for the interviewer. Neither of them, in the course of lunch in Oxford where the singer was attending a book launch, referred to the review - one of the notorious Martin Bernheimer’s most supreme hatchet jobs - though the interviewer could not resist quoting from it in her resultant article.
But evidence that Norman is still the indomitable presence she used to be was not lost in what appears to have been an almost placid conversation. Though her choice of food seemed modest by her standards - battered oysters followed by crab salad and camomile tea - the occasional flashing riposte made its point. Clearly, she has not been tamed by time, and the woman who arrived at Raffaelli’s all those years ago with her own unexpected retinue was still recognisable.
Those were the days when she could alarm the Scottish National Orchestra by disappearing in the middle of a Scottish concert tour until a search party located her chauffeur-driven car in the grounds of a hotel in Aberdeenshire.
Trains and aircraft were never her scene. Rather than cram herself into a sleeper, she once took a taxi from Edinburgh to London. Rather than risk the perilous staircase down to the platform of Glasgow City Hall for a concert performance of Act One of Die Walkure under Alexander Gibson (a conductor whose finesse she always admired and with whom she once recorded a disc of her favourite spirituals) she insisted on special stairs being built to the stage from the level of the stalls. The Edinburgh Festival was lucky enough to programme her - in songs by Schubert, Brahms, and Strauss - in her prime.
As for that Raffaelli lunch, it was not an occasion to interview her but simply to say thank-you and to bask in her glory, as did all the restaurant’s eavesdropping customers that day. It cost the usually parsimonious Scotsman a bomb, but in the opinion of this critic it was worth every penny.
19 April 2015
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