The editors in my life (2)

It was Jack Miller, with whom the Thomson Organisation replaced the poetic Albert Mackie as editor of the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, who brought a touch of Fleet Strret into my life. He had worked, it was said, for the Daily Sketch and other tabloids, nobody quite knew which, and since the Dispatch itself was a tabloid - albeit a discreetly intellectual one - he was deemed for reasons unspecified  to be a suitable man for the job. 

Roy Thomson had already done his reconnaissance of the paper, arriving by tram from the house he had bought in Murrayfield and padding quietly through the corridors of the lofty North Bridge building with his henchman, the menacingly-named Ben Floyd,  and had decided that the Dispatch needed to change into something more aggressive if it was to defeat its sedate local rival, the Evening News. Miller, it was said, had been selected after being sent on a Mediterranean freebie by one of the papers he worked for.  Failing to return to his office, he received a telegram telling him not to bother going back. That, we understood, was how Fleet Street operated.  Whether it was true or false, Miller was evidently available and the Thomson Organisation agreed to employ him.

The day he arrived, the Dispatch newsroom awaited him, if not with open arms, at least with a newsroom redesigned along London lines, with a large central table at which Miller would work, shunning a chair and standing upright in polished shoes to preside over his staff. He was an imposing figure, tall, jowly, unsmiling, sharp-nosed, short-sighted (he wore big glasses with black rims),  invariably dressed in a black pin-striped suit, the jacket of which he peeled off when matters became stringent.

When he first walked in I don’t recall him being introduced to anybody, but we knew who he was.  He suddenly appeared in our midst, dropping his black overcoat and homburg on the floor for a secretary to pick up. Strolling over to his table, he was ready for action. A blank copy of the day’s front page lay awaiting his attention, with samples of new and sensational type faces. He sketched a few quick squiggles and diagrams. The Dispatch was certainly going to bear his imprint.. 

A muttered editorial dialogue took place around the table but Miller already knew what he wanted. The paper had been planned ahead, Local news had to look important, even when  it wasn’t. Big headings were placed above very small stories. Miller’s assistant, the amiable Gregory Clayton, also from Fleet Street, worked from a smaller adjoining table. He also operated standing up and his job was to keep things flowing while his boss barked orders. 

Miller, once he got to know us,  gave us all nicknames. Mine was, simply, “Music Man.”  Every so often I would hear the words “Hey, Music Man” being yelled from across the room, so I always knew when he wanted me, which was surprisingly often. Even Miller, it seemed, saw the point in those days of a classical music critic, even if it was only as a sort of necessary evil. 

But it was with the news reporters and sub-editors, and with the dashing young Irish racing correspondent Cornelius Curran, that he had his most productive dialogues. Time passed.  He petrified us, but we got used to him. Circulation fell. Edinburgh did not fancy a London-style tabloid and detested the new typography.   

After a few months I was recruited  for national service in the RAF.  Miller, it seems, had not been informed of this. The day I left, it is said, he looked across the room and shouted “Where’s Music Man?”  When given the answer, he blustered that he was going to get me released. But he never did. When I returned two years later, Miller was gone. 

20 June 2014  

The trials of Pinot Grigio

Pinot Grigio used to be considered quite a good Italian white wine, and by many people it still is.  You drank it as an aperitif, and took a second glass.  It went well with shellfish or chicken, with olives, artichokes and, of course, pizza.  It was the perfect accompaniment for spaghetti alle vongole, and for mussels.  Then something happened.  Wine critics began to dismiss it as boring. It grew cheaper. a convenient bottle-party wine so long as you did not ask what it was you were drinking, or add that you really liked it.  In supermarkets it was always being marked down from £10.99 to £5.99, or briefly being marked up from £5.99 to £10.99, at which price people were sometimes careless enough to buy it. Today, at £5.99, it has established its price level and has won plenty of friends.  Sold by the glass it’s a safe-ish pub wine, so long as the bottle has been newly opened, but don’t expect it to be more than that.

The same sort of thing  once happened to Beaujolais which, when it was freshly bottled, people used to dash across France to buy. But Beaujolais is recovering, however slowly, and a good Beaujolais is properly recognised as a delicious drink. So, for that matter, is a good Pinot Grigio. But what is a good one? You’ll find out if you lunch in Edinburgh at Valvona & Crolla, where there are always a few such bottles - obtainable by the glass - on the wine list.  

Valvona & Crolla know about Pinot Grigio, which - since they are Edinburgh’s best-established sellers of Italian wine - they should do. So does Centro Tre, the excellent  Valvona & Crolla breakaway at 103 George Street. Once you have sipped a Pinot Grigio in one or other of these places, you will inevitably find most supermarket Pinot Grigio disappointing. But don’t expect Valvona & Crolla’s to be cheap. This is Pinot Grigio in the upper price bracket, where it rightly belongs, but at least you’ll remember drinking it. The shop price for Valvona & Crolla’s house Pinot Grigio, from the Veneto region, is currently £8.99.

The basic rule  about this wine is that most of it - and usually the most nondescript of it - comes from the vast Veneto region outside Venice. If you notice the word Veneto on the label, you have to be be careful. It won’t necessarily be drab.  Indeed it can be extremely nice, as Valvona & Crolla’s is,  so long as you know what you are buying. But a very much  safer bet is if the wine comes from the Alto Adige/Trentino region, above Lake Garda, which - while also north Italian -  is not the same as the Veneto and is, in my view, often more reliable. 

Nor should supermarket Pinot Grigio be automatically shunned. There are good ones as well as dull ones and Waitrose at present are selling a couple of good ones, first a minerally 2013 LaVis Vigneti Montagna Pinot Grigio from Trentino/Alto Adige  in the foothills of the Dolomites,  costing £9.99, the other a lushly fruity 2013 St Michael-Eppan Pinot Grigio from the same area, also known as Sudtirol. This at present costs £11.99.  

19 June 2014

Reading Atkinson

For a few years I lived on the same street as the novelist Kate Atkinson on Edinburgh’s south side, without actually reading anything she had written.  It was only after moving a mile or two away that I discovered what I had been missing.  Partly it’s her private eye Jackson Brodie who has brought this about,  though even he, I must confess, is someone I’ve approached obliquely by way of the TV series based on his exploits.

These, with their Edinburgh settings,  struck me as impressively action-packed, though at times excessively busy and intricate. Moreover, as I have discovered, what is quite often Atkinson’s originsl English setting for a book is brusquely swept aside in the TV version.  This, presumably, is meant to make the novels more attractive to a Scottish audience, but is it necessarily so?  Too often I have found my eyes ditracted by some familiar piece of local scenery which I can’t quite identify, and for a crucial moment I have lost track of the often quite complex story line.

In the books themselves this does not happen. I am able to concentrate on the text, and to savour Atkinson’s often idiosyncratic humour as well, which comes across more effectively in book form. So I’m happy now to be able to call myself an Atkinson reader rather than viewer, despite the fact that Jason Isaacs, who plays the role of Brodie, seems so conspicuously well cast. But the books themselves ring truer, I think, even if the plot of one of them, about a missing mother, does seem to run away with the author towards the end. 

But the book entitled Case Histories, which broods about bereavement - in this case the unconnected deaths of a young girl, a young woman, a man axed by his young wife (and we need to remember that Brodie’s own older sister has been strangled before the story starts) - strikes me as not only superbly stuctured but very moving.  

The Jackson Brodie series, however, is by no means all that Kate Atkinson has written. Her range is wider than  that, and I, for one, still have some catching up to do.  Now that the incentive is there, I look forward to doing it. Case Histories can be bought in peperback from Amazon for £5.51, or in its Kindle version for £3.99.

18 June 2014

The novel as guidebook

As someone who spent twenty years as a semi-resident of Italy, I am sometimes given a book with an Italian setting in the hope that I will find it interesting.  Though that is not necessarily so, my most recent acquisiton of this kind - Jonathan Buckley’s Nostalgia - was clearly chosen with the knowledge that I no longer have my apartment there and must grieve over the loss of it.  Irrespective of this, it’s a novel I have liked very much, particularly for its structure, which embeds the story - that of an English painter who lives in a small Tuscan town, partly for inspiration but also to escape from relatives back home with whom he has fallen out - in a scrupulously assembled selection of Italian anecdotage inserted in the course of the 434 pages of the book. 

These serve as intermezzi dealing with the history of the place where the painter lives, the people (going back centuries) who have lived there, the local buildings, the animal or insect life (bees, bats, porcupines, wild boars) that might be encountered. As author of the Rough Guide to Tuscany and Umbria, Buckley knows all about the area between Siena and Volterra where his fictional, or semi-fictional, town is positioned. Whether you find these chapter-length interludes gripping, or simply a tease that tends to hold up the action (obviously a risk in a novel such as this), they add their own special flavour to what could come to be described as a novel as guidebook.

Yet the tale of Gideon Westfall and his young assistant Robert Bancourt, one of whose duties is to deter visitors, is perfectly strong in its own right. When Gideon’s stubborn, somewhat querulous niece Claire comes calling from London one summer, complications ensue. If you are lucky, or sufficiently patient, you will enjoy the book both for the story and the interludes (the one on Italian bees, added after the niece has suffered a dangerous sting, struck me as particularly arresting). In any case you can always skip, as I occasionally did, even if it made me feel a bit guilty to do so. 

In Buckley’s hands, a novel such as this becomes a new experience and he has made it work, even though he has needed a sympathetic publisher, aptly called Sort of Books, to encourage him.  It comes with an introductory  quotation from Arnold Schoenberg:  “There is still plenty of good music to be written in C major,” which also strikes me as apt, One of the characters is a vanguard Danish composer to whose works, described with a perception not always supplied by other novelists whose books touch on the subject of music, a local concert is hilariously devoted.

The shop price of Buckley’s Nostalgia is £12.99, though Amazon sell it for £8.96 and the easy-to-handle Kindle version costs £3.90.

17 June 2014

Death in Venice

In theory, Deborah Warner’s production of Britten’s Death in Venice for English National Opera, now issued on DVD, should be the best the opera has yet received. It possesses all, or most of, the qualities the work requires. By Edward Gardner it is vividly conducted. But by John Graham-Hall as Aschenbach it is not quite the best sung, for all the intensity he brings to his portrayal. It’s a shortcoimng from which the dapper Andrew Shore in the multiple baritone role - the closest the opera gets to having a villain - also suffers. 

Nor does the predominantly sepia-tinted lighting, often showing the characters in silhouette, quite live up to the colours of the orchestral part, even if it does  convey something of the opera’s special armosphere.  Warner, as her Peter Grimes for Opera North made clear, is a Britten exponent of the most perceptive sort. But Death in Venice, Britten’s last and perhaps most articulate opera, needs more than perception. It needs, in every way,  to be one hundred per cent right, which is something you sense but know that nobody has yet achieved it.

The very first production of it, Colin Graham’s at Aldeburgh, was often wrong.  First seen in 1973 it emphasised the sometimes irritating mannerisms of the piece at the expense of the reality. Though Peter Pears, as Aschenbach, voiced the words to perfection, his style was so English that the character failed to ring true. Robert Tear, at Glyndebourne came close to getting it right - something Ian Bostridge has also done -  but the production seemed somewhat cramped. 

Scottish Opera’s 1982 co-production with the Geneva Opera, superbly conducted by Roderick Brydon with Anthony Rolfe Johnson as  Aschenbach  and with  a seascape that looked like an oil painting, was highly regarded, quite rightly, but in recent years has never been revived. Tony Palmer’s film of the opera, photographed in Venice itself, was too self-indulgent.  Luchino Visconti’s more famous film with Dirk Bogarde, which had nothing to do with the opera, was marvellously photographed with the adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony as its haunting background music,  but it belonged to an entirely different medium.

So, though certainly not unflawed, the Deborah Warner version, with its expressive close-ups, looks like being first choice. But I still await a production that makes me exclaim, ”This is it.”  It has been a long time coming.

16 June 2014 

The Dove and the Smoking Dog

Two of my favourite nightspots in Paris, when I was sent there for two years by the RAF, were called La Colombe (The Dove) and Au Chien Qui Fume (At the Smoking Dog). La Colombe was a restaurant in an ancient alley on the Ile de la Cite, near Notre Dame. Le Chien Qui Fume was just across the Seine on the edge of Les Halles, the great Paris central market which in 1971 moved to the suburb of Rungis.  Both of them, after sixty years, still thrive, even if they now lack the special ambience they possessed in the past. For me they were great places to pause in if I missed my last bus from Etoile back to camp at one o’clock in the morning and had to wait for the next bus  at 6.30am. As a senior aircraftsman (the RAF equivalent of a lance-corporal) I could seldom afford a cab.

The attraction  of La Colombe was not so much the food, which was good but on the dear side, as the fact that its bar allowed you to sit down for a drink from midnight onwards. The attraction of the bar was that Guy Beart, in his early days, sang there, with a guitar on his knee. Though he later became internationally famous, with many fine recordings to his name, there was no charge to listen to him at La Colombe  with a cognac in your hand. The restaurant’s bearded proprietor, whose name I forget, also sang. I listened for hours, unaware of how well known Beart was going to become.

Eventually, with cash running low, I would walk over to Chatelet and from there to Les Halles, for onion soup at the Smoking Dog. By then the market was in full swing, and the soup, very cheap, always seemed to summarise the night’s experience. It was, of course, the real thing, full of onions, with a thick slab of toasted baguette, sprinkled with grated emmenthal, on top. This substantial dish lasted me until it was time for the long walk to Etoile and the bus on which I would slumber my way back to base.

Today, La Colombe still stands on the corner of the Rue de la Colombe. You can visit it for yourself, though Guy Beart won’t be there. Dating back to the year 1297, it claims to be one of the oldest restaurants in Paris. As for the Chien qui Fume, it’s still there, too, at 33 Rue du Pont Neuf, though whether it still stays open all night, or whether it still serves onion soup, I cannot say. Since Les Halles has departed, and the restaurant appears to have gone somewhat up in the world, I would think not.  But since there is now more than one restaurant of this name in Paris, make sure you choose the right one.

If Paris is not on your itinerary, make do with a Waitrose carton of onion soup, which you can improve with a baguette and grated cheese, and is a lot better than you might expect. 

15 June 2014

Cormoran Strikes Again

Robert Galbraith, otherwise known as JK Rowling, will be back on track next week with a substantial new novel featuring the private investigator  Cormoran Strike, the immense, hairy, one-legged, ex-army  hero of The Cuckoo’s Calling.  Fearing - though surely not - that readers perhaps need to be reminded who Galbraith is,  Kindle have released two chapters, without charge, ahead of the official publication date. 

As a Kindle (and Rowling) reader I find this not only appetite-whetting - as it is bound to be -   but also surprising. One of Kindle’s calculated little generosities has long been to let us see the opening section of all its publications before committing ourselves to buying them. But since the opening section may be an introduction, or part of an introduction, written by someone other than the author of the book, this is not always quite as generous as it may seem. What is sent to us, indeed, may sometimes consist of little more than a list of contents or of illustrations.  

But access to two chapters of the latest Rowling, albeit written once again under a now not very concealing nom de plume, seems a good way to generate enthusiasm, and unless you are one of those twitterers who are currently clamouring furiously about Rowling’s defence of everybody’s right to say no to the prospect of an independent Scotland,  it’s an opportunity worth grabbing.   I’ve read them and, as someone who greatly enjoyed the previous Cormoran Strike adventure, I shall certainly be buying the new book, entitled The Silkworm. 

14 June 2014 

Someone special

With the death this week of the conductor Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos, the Edirburgh Festival has lost the services of a superbly skilled but sadly infrequent visitor. The last time I heard him was during Frank Dunlop’s reign as director, when he took charge, rather late in the day, of what  had threatened to be a controversial closing concert  for which no conductor had been chosen and the orchestra had been changed. Since the concert was a Berlioz night featuring the Festival Chorus,  it was an important event.  Someone special to conduct it needed to be found.

Fruhbeck - as he was always known - was the man. A renowned exponent of nineteenth-century choral works, who in the1960s had brought Mendelssohn’s Elijah back into circulation with a sensational London performance and recording featuring the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus, he was a noted champion of Berlioz who could be relied upon to bring the festival to an impressive end, as he certainly did.

Previously he had brought the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, of which he had just been appointed music director, to Edinburgh for another concert of expert musicianship, though the omens had not been good.  Invited to hear the orchestra in Canada beforehand, I interviewed him in a snowstorm when he disclosed that his choice of a US instrumentalist for a key position in the orchestra  had been opposed by the rest of the players, who wanted to increase the number of French-Canadian personnel. 

Are we likely to encounter similar disputes here in Scotland if the yes vote succeeds in the autumn?  At any rate a Canadian  press conference, attended by the local critics along with the orchestra’s Scottish guest,  grew extremely heated. Questions steeped in ambiguity were asked, which the Spanish-German conductor, unused to such tactics, found hard to handle.

The relationsip remained prickly. Fruhbeck resigned within a year to continue his career quite successfully elsewhere. When he died at the age of 80 he was conductor emeritus of the Spanish National Orchestra and music director of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra. But when illness suddenly struck him while conducting recently in Washington, he felt it was only fair, he said, to vacate both these posts before finding himself forced to start cancelling concerts.

13 June 2014

Coffee sour

Complaining here recently about the deterring bitterness of the coffee in so many Edinburgh restaurants and cafes, I found myself trying to pin down its cause.  It wasn’t that it was too strong.  I expect an espresso to be strong. Nor was it a matter of weakness. If you ask for a latte, you should know by now that you will be served something that is more milk than coffee. It’s the modern British  espresso, or double espresso, that seems to be the root of the trouble, principally because of its sheer nastiness. Big bright modern  espresso machines, I suspected, are possibly hard to operate, no matter how expert the barista, and small domestic ones are clearly no safer. It’s all a question of quality control. 

But the people in charge of the machines, it now seems, are not to be blamed any more than are the machines themselves. According to Jay Rayner, restaurant critic of the Observer, the problem lies in the actual coffee. It’s a thought, of course, that had occurred to me, too.  I still remember the time an Edinburgh headwaiter dragged a sack of coffee beans to my table to prove how fresh and flavoursome he considered the house coffee to be.   

True enough, perhaps. But in an article last Sunday, Rayner pointed an accusing finger at a different aspect of coffee beans.  He started by saying how he had been sitting in a restaurant at King’sCross, looking glumly at his espresso. What was wrong  with it? The colour was right. The crema, as they call  the copper-coloured froth on the coffee’s surface, was right. But the taste, which he describd as fiercely, lip-puckeringly acidic, was utterly wrong, It was more reminiscent of lemon juice than coffee. He repeated the experience again and again across London. . “I order coffee. I am served a cup of something sharp and unpleasant.”

It all began, he says, two years ago. Fast forwarding to today, he says that he is sitting in different premises which are bang on trend. With him is Salvatore Malatesta, a name I would associate with an opera buffa baritone but who is in fact a coffee guru from Melbourne. They sip their sour espresso, which Rayner’s companion declares to be “serious” coffee, going on to explain that it’s all  to do with shorter roasting times providing access to all the “fruitier, fresher flavours.”  Rayner stares at him. “You mean,” he asks, “it’s actually meant to taste like this?”  The answer seems to be that yes it’s deliberate. Sour espresso, it appears, is a symptom of a British - and presumably Australian - coffee business which is booming.

So now we know. Meanwhile I’ll stick to the Edinburgh cafes that continue to serve the sort of coffee I can rely upon amd not the sort, as a friend told me yesterday, had just ruined an excellent meal.  To the short  list I included in a previous blog, I’ll now add Marie Delices on the slopes of Comiston Road.   Its cappuccino comes in what is perhaps too large a cup, but it’s a beautifully decorated Breton cup and what it contains tastes exactly how it should.

12 June 2014

Time to reappraise

“Find a good song and then build an opera around it.”  Umberto Giordano’s prescription for operatic success paid off more than once. Even Britten, who professed to despise the Puccini school of compositon,  realised that it had its uses.  He found a good song - a haunting ballad -  for his television opera  Owen Wingrave and placed it, with Peter Pears as singer, at the start of Act Two, from where it seemed to radiate in all directions over the entire opera. 

It’s what I remember best about the original BBC performance in 1971, and it’s what helped to persuade me at the time that the work was a masterpiece. Yet. though it won immediate friends, Owen Wingrave proved a failure in the long run. People showed no desire to see it again. What went wrong? Its subject - the fate of a young pacifist who is a member of a brazenly militaristic family - was thoroughly Brittenish. Its ghostly atmosphere harked nack to The Turn of the Screw, based on a novella by he same author, Henry James.  

Coming from a composer whose favourite game was Happy Families, a card-game that, when played by Britten, could end on what seemed like the brink of violence, its portrait of a family in ferocious disarray suited him to pefection. Yet Owen’s exquisite Peace aria, one of its highlights,  was not enough to save it. Its ending was pronounced weak. Scottish Opera, when the possibility came to add it to the Britten cycle that was one of its early glories, declined the opportunity.  

Yet, like other admirers, I continued to believe that there was something there. Not for nothing, it seemed to me, did those who had praised it decided to do so.  Gloriana, Britten’s royal opera, is no longer the dud it was once deemed to be. Is Owen Wingrave not similarly retrievable? When Britten’s hundredth birthday was celebrated last year, his reputation was on an international roll. Owen Wingrace was ready and waiting for the reappraisal which will come  later this month when it is staged at the Aldeburgh Festival before coming north to Edinburgh.

Neil Bartlett, who has been invited to direct it, asserts that the time is right to give it another chance. But it’s the music I am longing to hear again in a production that fully understands what the work is about. So let’s hope that Bartlett gets it right.

11 June 2014

Cosi fan Haneke

The rise and rise of Cosi fan tutte, from a work despised for its triviality by Beethoven and Wagner to its present position as the Mozart masterpiece of masterpieces, has been one of the operatic achievements of the past fifty years. When Glyndebourne staged it at the 1948 Edinburgh Festival, with a marvellous international cast, it still seemed the most frivolous of comedies, Mozart at his slightest. A production I saw at the 1965 Aix-n-Provence Festival, even with Teresa Berganza in the cast, was just a send-up. . A Sadler’s Wells production around the same time omitted the work’s greatest and most eloquent aria, Fiordiligi’s Per Pieta in Act 2, presumably because it was thought not  to “fit in.” 

Yet by 1967  the tide was turning and, in Britain, Scottish Opera led the way. With Elizabeth Harwood and Janet Baker to star in it,  the new young company decided that the opera was not just a joke but emotionally serious. Since then, most other companies have followed suit, to the extent that Cosi is now often regarded as not a comedy at all.   True, there have been lapses, as English National Opera’s current prouction - lamentably staged, it would seem, as a sort of seaside entertainment - has demonstrated. 

But when the great Austrian film director Michael Haneke - whose films have been growing increasingly sombre to the point of morbidity - was invited by Gerard Mortier, the opera world’s most progressive impresario, to stage it in Madrid we could guess what was coming. For Haneke, whose most recent films have included Amour (about love, old age, and death) and The White Ribbon (about the bleakness and cruelty of German village life just before the First World War), frivolity was not an option. And though Madrid is not the handiest of places for opera, a DVD of his production, available from Amazon, shows in vivid cinematic close-up just how unfrivolous Cosi fan tutte can be made to look. 

It’s not, however, that it’s utterly cheerless.  There are token  trickles of merriment to offset the high seriousness of the rest of the production. Since the singers possess not only exqusite voices but film-star good looks, their portrayals carry exceptional credibility. We see them grovelling on the floor and clinging to each other’s legs in misery as the story of love gone wrong inexorably unfolds. The maidservant Despina at the start of the performance is wan, bewildered, and emerging, though only just, from what appears to have been - perhaps  still is - an unhappy relationship with the grimly manipulative Don Alfonso. It’s only when he brings her into his satanic plot against the lovers that she cheers up. 

Alfonso himself, no rascally contriver, is unsmiling, lip-curling, solemnly watchful. The young men, prodded by him into trying to swap partners, grow more and more furious the more they succeed. The crucial closing scene is frantic in its torment and hatred. Despina slaps Don Alfonso. Don Alfonso viciously slaps her back. It is evident that, in Haneke’s hands, the young men have more to lose than their sweethearts. Does it ring true?  Though Mozart, as a product of the enlightenment, clearly intended a moral to be pointed, he equally clearly visualised a happy ending, complete with bright music in the work’s home key of C major.

True or false to Mozart’s intentions, Haneke’s production could hardly fail to work strongly. And when you see him, greeted by cheers, taking his somewhat whimsical, quizzical bow at the end, you can tell that he is not displeased with how it has turned out.  Sylvain Cambreling conducts unobtrusively and unhurriedly. The singers, none of them  (apart from William Shimell as Alfonso) yet a famous star, do well. Though the DVDs are not conspicuously cheap, they are a lot cheaper than an unsatisfactory international night at the opera. 

10 June 2014  

The Smillie style

My old friend Thomson Smillie, Scottish Opera’s head of publicity in its wonder years, died recently in the United States, where he had spent most of his time after his departure from his native Glasgow almost forty years ago. For those of us who had been unable to attend his funeral in Kentucky, there  was an opportunity today to meet and, at a small gathering in a Glasgow hotel,  exchange reminiscences and watch a video of two of Thomson’s four offspring - Jono and Julia - delivering funeral orations in the ornate surroundings of Louisville’s cathedral. 

Above all we were able to talk to Marilyn, whom Thomson married nine years ago after the death of his first wife, Anne;  she had flown here specially for the occasion, which had been planned by Thomson’s brother Campbell.   Sue and I had met her once before, when she and Thomson were on one of their lengthy cruises on which Thomson gave operatic lectures. By then he had retired from the Kentucky Opera, which he had run for fifteen years;  but he had by no means forsaken the stage and, between lectures, was directing opera - mostly comedies, for which he had a distinctive flair -  in a freelance capacity around America. 

Before leaving Scottish Opera he had cherished a private hope that one day he would run the Glasgow-based company. But at that point in his career, just after the acquisition of the Theatre Royal,  he was still too young and inexperienced to succeed Peter Hemmings, the company’s original administrator who by then had left for Australia. So instead he ran the adventurous and delightful Wexford Festival in Ireland.  Then he ran the Boston Opera for the ambitious but churlish conductor Sarah Caldwell. 

But it was in Kentucky that he found the conditions he really wanted to raise his children and create an American equivalent of Scottish Opera.  Maintaining contact with his former company,  he bought David Pountney’s sensational production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Golden Cockerel, invited  Sir Alexander Gibson to conduct a high-profile Verdi cycle and had just embarked on a Puccini cycle with him at the time of Gibson’s sudden death.

When, as a critic, I flew over to see Thomson’s company at work under Gibson’s conductorship, it felt like old times. But more often it was Thomson who came to Europe, talent-scouting, fixing schedules, or meeting  friends. A year or two ago, before illness struck him,  he and Marilyn arrived briefly in Edinburgh en route to Copenhagen. Sue and I invited them to a convivial lunch at our home on the south side. Inevitably it overran. Their boat, they realised, was about to sail. But Sue, a resourceful driver,  got them to Leith Docks on time. As - last on board -  they dashed up the gangplank, Thomson’s flamboyant bow tie seemed only just to stay in place. We did not know that it would be the last time we would ever see him. It was good today that Marilyn agreed to replace him as godfather of our middle daughter, Cosima. 

9 June 2014

The editors in my life (1)

As a staffer - meaning staff writer or, in my case, staff music critic - I worked in my time for seven editors, three of them on the fine old but now long defunct Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, where I did my journalistic training, the others on the Scotsman.   Joining the Scotsman in the days when the distinguished  J Murray Watson was editor had been my original aim, and he was willing to take me on.  But my inability to ride a bike - I suffered from a fear of falling - meant that I could not do night duty and  cycle home afterwards. “Can you not learn?”  asked Murray Watson, pointing out that night duty was essenetial for a trainee on a morning paper.  “No,” I replied. We had reached, as we agreed, an impasse.

The alternative was to join the Scotsman’s sister paper, which was what I did.  As an evening paper printing its first edition at 11am, the Dispatch had more congenial hours.  I could catch the first bus to work in the morning  and be on the Waverley Bridge before 7.30, which was the earliest I would start. My editor was Albert Mackie, author of a book about whisky and a humorous poet and playwright who set himself the daily task of writing a topical editorial poem on the leader page  under the nom de plume of Macnib. This had to be sent downstairs for setting  shortly after 10am, but sometimes he forgot or was too busy - King George VI died one morning just before the paper went to press - and he would receive an urgent call at the last moment, which meant that he had immediately to scribble some lines or get someone he trusted to do it for him. On one occasion the task came my way.  It was the only time I wrote a poem for a newspaper and the only time Macnib’s style resembled William McGonagall’s.

Albert Mackie was an amiable editor, running a bit to weight, with red hair and a red moustache. Like the rest of us he worked without ill-will on Christmas Day, and got the paper off to press. Together we once wrote a revue for performance by the Gateway Theatre company, which in those days included Lennox Milne and Edith McArthur, with Rikki Fulton as guest star.  Mackie wrote the words and I the music, and Jack House came over from Glasgow to review it, not altogether favourably, though otherwise it did well and extended its run.

Perhaps Mackie was too good-natured to continue editing the Dispatch when, at the same time as the Scotsman, it was suddenly sold to the Thomson Organisation from Canada, but he worked hard to survive.  One of the first actions of the new owners was to install a lift, something the lofty building on the North Bridge had lacked, because its previous proprietors - one of them a tall, elegant, disdainful dilettante who strolled through the corridors with a whippet on a leash - did not want to make life too easy for the staff. Until then we had all had to climb the paper’s  multiplicity of stairs.  Even Roy Thomson,  when he came into the building (like the rest of us) via the rear door off the Fleshmarket Close, had to pad his way to the posher portion of the paper before mounting a formal marble staircase which was banned to everyone else. I never saw any other person use it, other than Festival celebrities,  until Magnus Linklater became editor of the Scotsman forty years later, by which time the rest of the staff used the lift.  

One of Albert Mackie’s special virtues was that he was a literary man who made the Dispatch a genuinely literary newspaper, filled with reviews as well as sports news and obligatory local stories and reports of business dinners, which we  took our turn reporting. Though everyone started work in the early morning we did not finish until our final tasks of the day were complete. But as music critic I did not, at that time, have to return to the office after a concert in order to write my review. I could write it at home and take it in the following morning. Nevertheless these were long days for which nobody was paid overtime.

As well as carrying lengthy reviews - I had more space than most newspaper critics now get  - the Dispatch also had its weekly radio page, for which, before TV had properly got going, I wrote a regular column, along with quite lavish book pages including a centre spread on paperbacks.  The first book I ever reviewed was Edward Sackville-West and Desmond Shawe-Taylor’s pioneering Record Guide, for which I was allotted 750 words.  For an apprentice critic, the paper was a pleasure.  Every idea I came up with was accepted and when the revamped Bavarian State Opera visited Covent Garden in the 1950s, I was sent there to write about Richard Strauss’s Arabella, Die Liebe der Danae, and Capriccio. Edinburgh Festival coverage was, of course, comprehensive, and my annual preview filled a page. The first year Sibelius was omitted from the festival, my rebuke to the festival director was delivered below a picture of the composer with the heading, in heavy type, ABSENT.

But the good times suddenly ended.  Mackie, who had been having to supply the Thomson Organisation with a list of each member of his staff’s daily output in column inches, realised that we were all under threat and was himself one of the first to go to the wall. Until then I had never witnessed a sacking. He was succeeded by Jack Miller, a tyrannical news editor from Fleet Street. Life under Miller, which ended for me when I was conscripted into the RAF, will be described in a future reminiscence.
8 June 2014

Sushi in the Supermarket

The Guardian’s decision to start a monthly column on supermarket grub got off to a spirited start this week with a survey of sushi. The subject, admittedly, is a contradiction in terms. By Japanese standards of rawness, freshness, and precision, supermarket sushi does not exist. At best it’s a compromise, edible or inedible depending on your attitude to what you are offered, what it costs,  what it looks like, and what it contains. 

 At worst, well, let’s say that the chosen  £4 pack from M&S fared surprisingly badly with a score of only four out of ten, though Tesco did worse with a score of two for a pack costing £3.30.  Only Waitrose came through the test-run with what could be called flying colours. Yet its score of eight for a pack priced the same as M&S’s (though its weight, which was surely a consideration, was not made clear) did not mean that their product was much closer to being Japanese. It was, however, deemed genuinely tasty in its own right. Personally, as a Waitrose customer, I thought it looked better (classier as the Guardian put it) than most of the others, and marginally more reminiscent perhaps of the real thing. 

But what added up to the real thing clearly perplexed many readers, and the Guardian’s judgment process did seem maybe over-dependent on where it was approaching the subject from.  Although package weight must have been taken into account,  how much of this was, in fact, simply bread? Glancing at supermarket shelves as the day wears on, I find that sushi packs look less and less inviting, so much so that the answer seems to be to walk straight on.

Interestingly enough, the Co-op scored remarkably well (six out of ten) for what was the cheapest (and, it must be admitted, the lightest in weight) of all the packs.  All such surveys, of course, tend to be led by one person’s opinion, which is fine if you agree with its basic philosophy.  In the case of sushi, I would say, appearance is not unimportant (the Boots pack, as pictured by the Guardian, looks particularly unattractive . 

Perhaps the answer to the problem is simply this:  steer clear of supermarket sushi and opt instead, if you have the time and money, for a proper sushi restaurant. The Edinburgh recommendation at present is the place in Grindlay Street, near the Lyceum Theatre, though my daughters and their friends, when they have the cash, favour Harvey Nichols.  Email me at wilson.conrad@ymail.com and give me your opinion.

7 June 2014

(Conrad would like his blog to become more interactive but we are not sure how easy it is for readers to post comments. A few people have told us they have been unable to leave comments. Please try and  if you are successful, tell us how you did it.  SW)

More on Mahler

Mahler’s Eighth Symphony came and went in Scotland last week, winning just enough attention from the press to suggest that music criticism is not yet dead in Britain  The RSNO’s performances in Edinburgh and Glasgow, with their grand array of Scottish choirs, clearly merited as much acclaim as they received.  But was it enough?  This, after all, was the work which, at one time, reviewers travelled across Europe to hear, ready to weep at the sound of it, because the music was so rare and so special that newspapers wanted their reviews passionately delivered from the hands of star writers.     

Today it’s still special, though perhaps no longer quite such a rarity that every performance is automatically written about. On this occasion, the Herald and Scotsman were present, as they should have been, but The Scotsman sent a freelance contributor and only one London paper appears to have sent someone north  at a time when the London press plays, or thinks it does, a dominant role in Scotland. But the Sundays have yet to give voice, so there may be more to come.   

When the RSNO first performed Mahler’s Eighth at the 1965 Edinburgh Festival. the performance rightly won international attention. The work had not been heard in Scotland before. It was the first time the RSNO had been invited to give the opening concert, and it marked the debut of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus. The final rehearsal was thrown open to the public. Predictably, the finished product was comprehensively reviewed. 

In celebration, the performance was repeated by the same forces the following year, when one London critic wrote that he had timed it and had found, to its disadvantage, that it ran slightly shorter than the previous one, which is perhaps why every performance it receives is somehow slightly less sensational, and perhaps slightly less newsworthy, than the one before. 

And more than ever, perhaps, the performance of a work - any work - has to be newsworthy, or it risks being ignored. Music criticism, they say, is a dying art which, in America, is already as good as dead. All the signs are that death throes are evident here also.  I’m glad I was most  active as a critic in the second half of the twentieth century, when we were all having what now looks like our last fling.  It was not that classical music mattered more at that time, though it mattered a lot;   but classical music criticism, as it now has to be called to differentiate it from everything else, certainly did. 

6 June 2014

  

Dutch Days

Discovering from the internet this week that the old Dutch headquarters of Philips’ Phonographische Industrie - or simply Philips Records as the company was known in Britain - is still up and running filled me with happy nostalgia. It was there, in Holland, that I worked for the best part of three years before joining The Scotsman, and the low-slung building depicted on the website was the old Koetshuis, or Coach House, the very place I worked in, and the big ground-floor window in the middle of the picture was that of the room I shared with others involved in the production of Philips record sleeves.

I was the organisation’s Hoezentekstenschrijver  -  meaning, merely, staff writer, though Dutch was such an invitingly lip-smacking language that the word sounded more impressive when spoken their way.  It signified that I was the company’s sleeve-note editor, writing endlessly about Beethoven symphonies on what were described as the backsides of record covers, while my colleagues designed the fronts, which looked so much more attractive in the days of twelve-inch LPs than the designs of today’s CDs.    

We were a small Philips family, who either lived on-site in a sort of Philips village, or in the rural Dutch town of Baarn of which it formed part,  or else a trainride away in Amsterdam. As a group - Carli van Emde Boas, Margreet Korsman, Gaston Richter, Walter Cohen, Cor Pul, Jan Huisinga, Annemieke Helms, Harry van Ramshorst and I - we were very much more together than our managers, either in Holland or London, the latter being in some cases such poisonous people that it was prudent to hide if you saw them arriving on a visit.  

But the real Dutch - meaning the ones I worked with - were a delight, funny and entertaining and speaking such good English that I wondered at times why they actually needed to employ me. If it was someone’s birthday, or someone’s wife had had a baby, all work stopped, while cigars and ice creams were passed round.  

Though evenings in Baarn were not exactly thrilling - the place, on the far side of radio city Hilversum, was nicknamed the Green Grave - Amsterdam was where I lived, appropriately in the Beethovenstraat near the Concertgebouw, the local Chinese and Indonesian restaurants as constant a pleasure as the concerts.  Amsterdam, it has to be said, was not quite  like it is now. It had its formalities, and if you sat down in the Vondelpark to eat a broodje, you were sternly rebuked by a park-keeper and told to clear off. 

Drugs in those days were still almost unheard of. Even to drink an oude - a shot of genever, Holland’s potent juniper-based spirit - could seem a bit daring, depending on the company you kept. But the repetitiveness of popular sleeve-note writing was what finally deterred me, more so than even the most routine aspects of music reviewing in Scotland would ever do.   So - regretfully - I left, though there would be times when I wished I hadn’t, and once when I nearly rejoined the old firm.   It’s good to know that the Koetshuis still flourishes, even if Philips no longer runs it. 

5 June 2014

Not just another Edinburgh cafe

Good South Indian crepes led this week to even better northern French ones, cooked and served with real Gallic elan in a recently-opened creperie in that lengthy Edinbugh boulevard which stretches all the way from Bruntsfield to Fairmilehead and beyond, and which is gradually filling up with pit-stops, some of them well worth lingering in. 

This one, a few paces up from Henderson’s wine shop in Comiston Road, has the taste of real French authenticity and though its name, Marie Delices, and its mildly pinko-mauve decor may carry a faint whiff of Morningside tweeness, it sidesteps this with ease through its obvious expertise and the personality of Marie-Claire Lafont, the young French woman who, with one helper,  runs it all with such delicious flair. 

In theory, the place could be just another Edinburgh cafe or Morningside tearoom for local ladies but, although it clearly performs the latter task quite effectively,  it’s not otherwise like that at all, for it cooks its own fresh crepes and galettes while you wait (quite briefly) for them to arrive on your table. Moreover it bakes its own cakes in the spacious, well-equipped and visible kitchen at the rear, and serves genuinely cool, dry cider imported from Finistere, which you drink from those giant imported bowl-like cups, known as bolees, so traditionally popular in France. 

In other words, despite its Morningside overtones, the place could hardly be more French, even if the coffee is (admirably) Italian. Though the atmosphere is relaxing, it is thoroughy alive, and today, on my first visit, I loved every aspect of it.  The only snag is that, perhaps because it is where it is, it’s a strictly daytime establishment - though France has its daytime places also. Perhaps Marie-Claire will eventually  be persuaded to stay open longer, but that would make it a bigger and not necessarily better operation. Meanwhile it’s at your disposal for lunch and snacks every day from Tuesday to Saturday, which seems in the circumstances quite adequate.

My lunch, let me add, was all it needed to be, and Susie, the eldest and most food-conscious of my four daughters (though the youngest one, it must be said, is catching up on her), joined me in a selection of dishes that gave a good impression of Marie Delices’s possibilities.  My savoury buckwheat galette, made with imported strong French flour, was a sort of glorified croque monsieur called an Incontournable - a splendid word meaning "must have" - with a softly fried egg peeping out from the middle of the cheese and ham, the whole thing neatly folded into an enticingly crispy envelope. 

The sweeter crepes, delectably light, range from a basic one with sugar, salted butter and, if you wish, some blobs of fresh creme chantilly, right up to a full-scale Suzette, with fresh orange and Cointreau. The prettily painted crockery comes from Quimper. The furnishings come from relatives back home. Everything, in fact, is sublimely French, and even although Marie-Claire herself is actually from Bordeaux, she has worked in Brest and it is Brittany that colours the whole of this gallant little restaurant. 

Why has she settled, at least for now, in Edinburgh?  Because, she says, she simply fancied the idea of opening up in Scotland, and the menu includes a Scottish smoked salmon galette to confirm the fact. In a way, she has given us a genuine Scottish offshoot of Montmartre’s famous Moulin de la Galette, which from the seventeenth century milled its own flour and made its own bread.  Marie Delices is at 125 Comiston Road, Edinburgh. 

4 June 2014

www.mariedelices.co.uk

Piece work

For a trainee music critic in Scotland, the days between May and October in the 1950s were dull ones, without much happening apart from the three weeks of the Edinburgh Festival,  a beacon of light that recharged your batteries before the 49 weeks of darkness, as the newspapers were prone to  put it, descended again all too soon.  

Before that time, things were worse.  The Scottish Orchestra (later to become the Scottish National Orchestra and eventually the Royal Scottish National Orchestra) used to be disbanded each summer, which left the poorly-paid players “free” to seek part-time jobs in bands and seaside orchestras around Britain.  The Scottish Chamber Orchstra, Scottish (Baroque) Ensemble, and Scottish Opera did not yet exist, and the BBC Scottish (now the BBC SSO)  was strictly a Glasgow studio outfit living in fear of being laid off. 

Music was supplied mostly by touring groups and opera companies, and by  wandering recitalists with names like Waldo Channon, a celebrated violinist of the day,  or the pianist Kendal Taylor, famed exponent of Grieg, who passed through each year with a dossier of sonatas and popular trifles. There would also be the occasional international star, including Baniamino Gigli, who would sing Santa Lucia in a packed Usher Hall before being slotted into Glasgow’s now much-missed St Andrew’s Hall amid its summer schedule of boxing natches.

Not until the founding of Scottish Opera in 1962 did the gap begin to be filled. with short but exhilarating annual seasons in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen, providing much-needed work for the SNO in the pit. In the end, when these events began to include Wagner, with the orchestra sprawling into the body of the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, the players lost patience with it, despite the splendour of what they were performing, and chose to opt out of the operatic commitments which earlier had seemed so sorely needed.

It was, I thought, a hasty decision which many of them came seriously to regret, wishing that the relationship could be restored. But too late!  The opera company had begun to have other ideas in the form of the new-minted  Scottish Chamber Orchestra, which in the end also opted out of its obligations.  But in the meantime the symphonic expertise of the RSNO was no longer essential. 

Yet in its operatic heyday, in works such as Tristan and Isolde and Der Rosenkavalier, the SNO  had been a glorious sight as well as sound, prompting Desmond Shawe-Taylor of the Sunday Times, gazing down from the front row of the circle, to nudge me and say, “Whaur’s your Covent Garden noo?”

Could these days return? Many German opera companies still employ symphony orchestras in the pit, and the Vienna Philharmonic continues famously to divide its time between concert-hall and theatre. When, in the 1970s, Sir Alexander Gibson, conductor of both Scottish Opera and the SNO,  proposed enlarging the orchestra to make the same thing    happen here, the SNO would have none of it. Yet it was a thoroughly practical plan, which could have solved many later problems.

3 June 2014

Good Indian Cheer

As a city for Indian restaurants, Edinburgh traditionally trails behind Glasgow. It is not that there is a lack of places to try;  there are more and more of them. It is just that so many are mediocre. So when Tanjore opened in that fertile stretch of Clerk Street in Newington which also contains the illustrious, well-established Kalpna, all one could do was hope for the best.   

Its credentials certainly looked excellent. The promise of South Indian cooking, properly vegetarian with a minmum of meat dishes, could only be good news.  The presence of a nice, friendly, attentive, knowledgeable proprietress seemed another plus point, and although, at lunchtime, the decor looked a bit par for the course - the place had evidently had previous existences - the beige tiles, the touches of yellow, the soft-grained pictures, the well-placed screens and wall coverings all suggested that by night it would lose its somewhat utilitarian feel and gain a warm, cheerful glow that would enhance the atmosphere. 

With all these potential assets, then, what was there to complain about, apart from the possibility of the food?  Alas, Joanna Blythman, doyenne of Scottish restaurant reviewers, found plenty to irk her when she lunched there soon after it opened. More recently, however, friends of mine, experienced eaters-out, have reported that they like it, and have gone back quite often. It seemed time, clearly, to give it a go.

So today I joined one of my friends to see how we might fare. Joanna Blythman’s big complaint, that the service was insufferably sleepy, had at least been rectified. The three smart young waiters were up to speed, and lively enough to give the place what seemed almost an Italian family bustle - though whether it is actually a family operation I could not tell. 

Main dishes - including large crispy crepes, or dosais, made from fermented lentil batter and including, in my case, a fiery filling with an array of warm dips, one of them temptingly green and minty -  were explained in detail by the owner.  A lush mango lassi  (there are also drinks more astringent)  made up for the absence of wine or beer, though you can bring your own bottle. A squelchy carrot halwa, shot through with nuts, was a pleasing pudding.  

So it seems that some of Joanna’s initial complaints about clumsy cooking have been answered. The place, perhaps, still has some way to go but it is getting there. And the menu is certainly fascinating enough to make you want to return, as I intend to do.                                                                                2 June 2014

    

Brazil scores a hit

The first time I tasted a Brazilian wine was in Paris where, as a national serviceman in the RAF a long time ago, I was lucky enough to spend almost two years and sometimes to eat in a bustling left-bank Brazilian restaurant called La Venta. Their wine was served in wicker-covered bottles, in the old Italian way, and it went memorably well with the steaks and  casseroles  that were on the menu. Vibrantly atmospheric music was played. It was a good place to visit,  either alone or with friends.

The second place in which I tasted Brazilian wine was here in Edinburgh more than half a century later - last night, in fact - at the charmingly rustic Ellersly House Hotel in Murrayfield where it was served at a family wedding dinner, a merry celebration that had been launched two months ago in Mexico, where Andy, son of one of my wife’s cousins, was marrying Brenda, a Mexican he had met and fallen in love with in Italy. A large portion of the Scottish side of the family and their friends were at the Ellersly to join them   and to receive, as a gift, a designer Mexican tile and a buttonhole consisting of a red ceramic pimento intertwined with a thistle.  

And it was here in Edinburgh that the red Alisios, made from Spanish Tempranillo and Portuguese Touriga Nacional  grapes, was copiously poured, perhaps because the hotel rated it highly or simply because it was the closest they could get to serving something Mexican.    

But in fact, as I found out, red Alisios is a newcomer to the Ellersly list, Brazilian wines having only recently begun to establish themselves  in Britain. This one fully justified its arrival.   With its savoury, somewhat peppery yet mellow taste, it suited the lively occasion. For me, it was like going back to the vivacity  of La Venta. 

Reviews of Brazilian wines are beginning to creep into the British broadsheet newspapers. This was an example not only worth drinking but locally available, both at the Ellersly and,  as I have discovered, through  M&S (I shan’t quote the price, which is not inconsiderable), where  it can be bought either by the bottle or, with a slight reduction, by the half-case. 

1 June 2014

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