When William Mann of The Times, Andrew Porter of the Financial Times, Martin Cooper of the Daily Telegraph, Desmond Shawe-Taylor of the Sunday Times, Gerald Larner and Philip Hope-Wallace of The Guardian, and Peter Heyworth of The Observer used to arrive in Edinburgh for the Festival, you knew they were here. All were deservedly established professional voices of British music criticism, staff writers on their papers, with prominent, allotted spaces to fill. If you wanted to read their reviews, you knew exactly which page to find them on, because their editors valued them and were proud to employ them.
Today, when British newspapers no longer have staff critics, reviews are demoted, no longer essential reading, often hard to find, and lacking the old authority. Quite a lot of events this year seem to have gone unreviewed or been inadequately reviewed. How aware were you that John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique were in town at the start of the Festival to perform Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique along with Lelio, its still little-known sequel? Presented as a unity they had been heard as an unity in the 1960s but never since then. They deserved a detailed, thoroughly perceptive review, but from whom did they get it?
As a boy, I used to compile my annual Festival scrapbook of clippings I wanted to keep, vaguely hoping but not yet realising that one day I myself would be writing about the same events. Newspapers were smaller then, but their editors knew what mattered. Christopher Grier, my predecessor on The Scotsman, used to speak of what he called, perhaps somewhat pretentiously, the Corps Critical de Londres filling Edinburgh’s small supply of first-class hotels - just three in those days. Every night a taxi would arrive at the George to deliver Percy Cater’s (now unremembered) reviews to the Daily Mail’s Edinburgh office at Tanfield.
Whenever Kenneth Tynan, who famously claimed that to have a play staged at the Edinburgh Festival was the kiss of death, deigned to write a scathing report on the experience, his words were unmissable. Martin Cooper and his fellow music critics (particularly the Viennese-born Peter Stadlen) on the Telegraph - for in those days leading newspapers fielded a whole team of staff music critics - developed their loathing of Mahler into what somebody called a heavy industry.
Well, Mahler’s position now stands unquestioned - who is given space to question it? - but Cooper stated a formidable and memorable case for the opposition.
Peter Heyworth’s reviews were perhaps the most authoritative and penetrating - he was sound, too, on the subject of food, and once stormed out of an Italian restaurant in central Edinburgh declaring the place to be ridiculous - and I missed him a lot when he died suddenly in Athens. But all these critics, one or two of whom were to become among my closest, most learned friends, set the city alight in a way impossible now, seeming as vital to the Festival as many of the events they wrote about.
28 August 2015
Today, when British newspapers no longer have staff critics, reviews are demoted, no longer essential reading, often hard to find, and lacking the old authority. Quite a lot of events this year seem to have gone unreviewed or been inadequately reviewed. How aware were you that John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique were in town at the start of the Festival to perform Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique along with Lelio, its still little-known sequel? Presented as a unity they had been heard as an unity in the 1960s but never since then. They deserved a detailed, thoroughly perceptive review, but from whom did they get it?
As a boy, I used to compile my annual Festival scrapbook of clippings I wanted to keep, vaguely hoping but not yet realising that one day I myself would be writing about the same events. Newspapers were smaller then, but their editors knew what mattered. Christopher Grier, my predecessor on The Scotsman, used to speak of what he called, perhaps somewhat pretentiously, the Corps Critical de Londres filling Edinburgh’s small supply of first-class hotels - just three in those days. Every night a taxi would arrive at the George to deliver Percy Cater’s (now unremembered) reviews to the Daily Mail’s Edinburgh office at Tanfield.
Whenever Kenneth Tynan, who famously claimed that to have a play staged at the Edinburgh Festival was the kiss of death, deigned to write a scathing report on the experience, his words were unmissable. Martin Cooper and his fellow music critics (particularly the Viennese-born Peter Stadlen) on the Telegraph - for in those days leading newspapers fielded a whole team of staff music critics - developed their loathing of Mahler into what somebody called a heavy industry.
Well, Mahler’s position now stands unquestioned - who is given space to question it? - but Cooper stated a formidable and memorable case for the opposition.
Peter Heyworth’s reviews were perhaps the most authoritative and penetrating - he was sound, too, on the subject of food, and once stormed out of an Italian restaurant in central Edinburgh declaring the place to be ridiculous - and I missed him a lot when he died suddenly in Athens. But all these critics, one or two of whom were to become among my closest, most learned friends, set the city alight in a way impossible now, seeming as vital to the Festival as many of the events they wrote about.
28 August 2015
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