Musical Times

John Duffus, whose responses to my blog are among the pleasures of writing it, has been back home in Scotland this week en route  to a busy spell on the Continent, where he is attending the Leipzig Bach Festival among other things.

Lunching with him on Monday - Contini’s ristorante  in George Street was our chosen spot  - we inevitably talked about music and about Scottish Opera, for which John once worked before heading for a new life in what we used to call the Far East. There, in Hong Kong and now in Bangkok, along with the odd moment in Bali and detours to North and South America -  even Fitzcarraldo’s Peruvian opera house has been on his itinerary -  he has spent the rest of his career as a high-flying musical events manager, arranging concert appearances for the likes of Pavarotti (ten times), Jessye Norman, Renee Fleming,  Yo Yo Ma, Isaac Stern and many other star names.

While sipping Contini’s house Pinot Grigio, the only Pinot Grigio in Edinburgh to taste (along with Valvona and Crolla’s) as it should, he had much to tell us, including the fact that, at the age of 67, he is writing his memoirs and would like me to read them privately while he is at work on them.  Since they already amount to some 200,000 words, he will clearly need to trim them to a marketable length.

Meanwhile I am looking forward to seeing them and giving him my thoughts. That they will be full of good things - some of which he has already touched upon in his responses to my blog - I have no doubt whatsoever. Vivid musical memoirs are always worth reading, and the fact that John has spent so much time in Asia, while touring the rest of the world, should make his ones very special.

Rudolf Bing’s memoirs of the New York Metropolitan, 5000 Nights at the Opera, which he wrote after leaving the Edinburgh Festival, of which he was the founder, is a classic of its kind, which I find myself returning to periodically. But Scotland was not their particular subject whereas it is in Aberdeen, his hometown, that John’s will begin.

This, at least for  me, should give them an added attraction. What he says about Scottish Opera in the old days, and of its more recent misadventures, is sure to carry a sense of regret - only a few of us now remember what the company was like when its hopes were high - but if John sets it down as prelude to his foreign experiences he will have performed a fascinating service.
9 June 2015