The Immortal Andrew

Among my mentors as a music critic, Andrew Porter, who has died at 86, stood high. Writing assiduously to the end, he had always seemed immortal.  His thorough, substantial, enthralling reviews in the Financial Times half a century ago (which could only be cut with his personal permission) were always the first I turned to, and constantly savoured, from one day to the next. Britten’s Curlew River in the 1960s? He caught it to perfection. Death in Venice a decade later? Nobody else surpassed what he wrote about it.

As editor of the Musical Times from 1960 until 1967, he encouraged me to write about Sottish events and to contribute profiles of Scottish musicians who mattered to him and to me. The quietest and most diffident, as well as the most knowledgeable, of critics, he first crossed my path in the foyer of the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, in the early days of Scottish Opera. I had just become music critic of The Scotsman. The much more assertive William Mann of The Times introduced us.  Andrew smiled shyly and said we must have a talk in the bar across the road. There he asked me if I would like to review a Holland Festival production of the Shostakovich version of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov for him. “If you dislike it, I would expect you to say so,” he murmured.

I disliked it and said so, and he printed precisely what I wrote.  In that way a firm though often long-distance friendship began. I told him of Scottish Opera’s future projects.  More often than not he was excited,  especially by the prospect of Janet Baker singing Dorabella in Cosi Fan Tutte, though occasionally - as when I spoke of a (not  fulfilled) plan to cast Peter Glossop as Eugene Onegin - he raised an eyebrow.

When he moved to the New Yorker magazine I saw less of him, though invariably, if I was over there, he would invite me for a meal in his penthouse apartment near the Metropolitan Opera before attending a performance. The tales about how he lived in a total world of books, and of how we would have to eat on the floor, proved not unfounded.

Yet his reviews were the most meticulous imaginable. A clumsy new production of The Marriage of Figaro which I saw with him at the Met failed to win his approval. “Come,” he said at the interval. “Let’s freshen up with some Ezio Pinza drinking water” and he led me to a fountain in the foyer which had been installed in memory of the great Italian bass whose Figaro was one of the 56 roles in his repertoire at the Met in the old days.

Once, sitting behind Andrew at a concert performance of Verdi’s earliest opera, Oberto, at the Edinburgh Festival, I noticed he was following the music with a  rare first edition of the score.  At the interval, he left the score on his seat when he went to the bar for a drink with me. When he returned, it was not there. Amid much personal consternation and agitated grovelling  he found it to his relief  in the space beneath the arm rest, where it had slipped unnoticed while  he was away. Though seemingly the calmest of critics, Andrew had his flustered moments.
8 April 2015