The interview that wasn't

 I saw Lorin Maazel conduct many times but I met him only once, when he was in Edinburgh with the concert pianist Israela Margalit, who had recently become his second wife. They  were staying at the Caledonian Hotel near the Usher Hall. She was in Scotland to play, if I remember rightly, a Rachmaninov or Saint-Saens concerto with Sir Alexander Gibson and the Scottish National Orchestra, and he was there to listen to her.

Sensing a story, I made an appointment to have afternoon tea with them in the hotel’s relaxing lounge.  Though I was happy to interview her - she’d never been in Edinburgh before - I was even happier to do so in the presence of Maazel who, to be truthful, was the person I really wanted to meet.

Maazel’s death in America  the other day  at the age of 84 brought it all back to me. The interview had started with Margalit, alone, joining me at the tea-table.  We chatted about the standard things -  her career and  what she would be playing - and conversation was flowing.  But where was Maazel?  I glanced around the room. Not a sign.  I was beginning to fear that he had guessed my objective when suddenly I spotted him bounding down the staircase, then sauntering across to join us. I brought him into the conversation and he immediately made his position clear. Though perfectly friendly, he said he was not there to be interviewed, or even to take part in a joint interview with his wife. He did not want it known that he was in Edinburgh. He did not want anything  he said to be quoted in The Scotsman.

My plan was not only scuppered but I realised that he was perhaps  not quite the musical show-off I thought he was. His stick technique may have been famously flashy,  his platform manner brimming with self-esteem, but he had rightly guessed that his presence would detract from my interview with his new wife.  Having made his point, he sat back and beamed, saying next to nothing that could not have gleaned from any publicity sheet. But the edge, I regretted, had been removed from  the interview.

Knowing that as a journalist I could have made the whole thing work, I felt disappointed when it didn’t. After our exchange of pleasantries, he and his wife went back upstairs to prepare for the concert. Attending it as a critic,  I thought the performance unimpressive.  Maazel, I was told, was in the audience, though I failed to spot him.  An opportunity to interview him, alas, never came again.The next time I heard Maazel conduct, he had a different wife and Israela Margalit had started a different career as a writer and playwright.But did he already know, that afternoon in Edinburgh, that her days as a concert pianist were numbered?
14 July 2014

The editors in my life (8)

At the start of the nineteen-sixties, I decided I was getting older - I was almost thirty - and was beginning to experience the first pangs of home thoughts from abroad.   Living in Amsterdam was lovely, but where was it getting me?  Into the most comfortable of musical ruts, it seemed.  Yet the more I thought about it, the less I did to change it.  Philips was a congenial organisation to work for. I wrote freelance articles for a variety of publications. Prudently, however, I set aside a month in which to return to Britain and discuss my future. But instead of doing so,  I set off in the other direction to travel by train through Germany, Austria,and Switzerland and see what I saw. It was a delightfully painless journey, a solitary tour of places most of which were  new to someone who had been primarily a francophile.

So I offered to write about it for The Scotsman, and my idea was accepted. I’d already taken one previous peep at Germany, which was still rebuilding itself after the war. I’d visited Cologne but thought the cathedral  less impressive than Schumann had done. I’d boated up the Rhine, stopping at Koblenz in a thunderstorm, but finding it a disappointingly drab place to hold such a key position on three major rivers.

While the rain continued to pour, I made a spur-of-the-moment change of direction.  Jumping on the first train out of Koblenz, I headed up the River  Mosel and got off at the first place it came to.  It was the small riverside village of Cochem. The rain was still pouring. The night was dark.  I found a hotel, the Germania, on the riverside, and booked in. Dinner  was being served and a rustic dinner dance was in progress. I was given a window table with a view of the rain. But thus began my affection for good German wines which, until then, I had known nothing about. With growing  feelings of contentment, I ate a trout and watched the dancing.

Next morning, when I drew back my curtains, the sun was shining on the river and I continued my journey as far as the ancient town of Trier on the Luxemburg border before returning gradually to Amsterdam. My next trip, I vowed, would be more comprehensive, which was how I came to spend a month en route between Wiesbaden,  Heidelberg, Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, Graz, Innsbruck, and Zurich, when I should have been job-hunting (as per my original plan) in London.

Britain, by then, was a different country from the one I had left. It was the time of mods, rockers, Carnaby Street and winkle-picker shoes, which were nowhere to be seen in Amsterdam.  To me it looked trivial. Could I bear to go back to it? Against the odds, I found what I hoped would be no more than a temporary London  job as a sub-editor on The Star, rival of the Evening Standard, but before I could leave Holland the paper abruptly announced its closure. “God be doomed,”  thundered Wim Zalsman, my boss, adding that it was a blessing I could stay on in Holland a little longer, because a replacement for me had not yet been chosen.
13 July 2014

The long lunch

I was lucky enough to be a staff journalist in the last days of British journalism as it once was.  That was the period of what we liked to call the long lunch, when interviews took place and business was done in a good restaurant with a bottle of wine on the table. Life was interesting, productive, and convivial, because lunch had not yet degenerated to the munching of an apple in front of a computer screen.

Even as a trainee I was expected to go out for lunch.  This, even at its shortest, would be a ninety-minute slot in the middle of the day. You set off and, no matter where you ate, you would see what was happening and come back with a story. Sometimes this derived from talks with other journalists or, in my case, musicians, and sometimes from chance encounters which, even in Edinburgh, could turn out to be be valuable sources of information.

 Instilled in me from the start, it was a part of the day to which I invariably looked forward, even if, in my novice period,  I stepped no further than the Adelphi Hotel at the top of the Fleshmarket Close, where for a time, in addition to munching bar lunches and quaffing a beer or the then popular lager and lime,  I ran a  small classical gramophone society - this was the era of the LP record - meeting weekly in a private room. It ended suddenly on the day I was recruited into the RAF, and several of its more dedicated members came to the Waverley Station to bid me farewell on the grim, dark, crowded overnight train to Bedford, where I was to be kitted out.

By the time I was demobbed two years later, the long lunch seemed an even more established way of journalistic life than it did before. There were, as always, the formal lunches, with speeches it was our duty to report. There was the annual Edinburgh Festival lunch, rather a grand affair at the City Chambers when, if a new director was about to be appointed, this was duly announced or at least hinted at. When Lord Harewood resigned, Ernest Bradbury, music critic of the Yorkshire Post in Leeds, was the guest speaker, who expressed the hope that the next director would turn out to be a jewel in theFestival’s crown. His desire was fulfilled. The next director was Peter Diamand from the enterprising Holland Festival.

A good long journalistic lunch was one from which you returned to the office at five o’clock, ready - it was hoped - to start typing. For me as a music critic (eventually of The Scotsman) there were many of these. Sometimes they formed interviews with musicians.  The conductor Sir Charles Mackerras enjoyed lunching with critics but always took care to ask beforehand who was paying. The wild-eyed Russian emigre conductor Jascha Horenstein preferred afternoon tea at the Caledonian Hotel, where he grew impatient if it was not served quickly. On one occasion while I sat quivering - he was a famously scary man - he stormed through to the kitchen and started hammering on a stainless steel counter as if it were an orchestral tamtam, yelling the words "Booma, booma, booma" at the top of his voice.   The service came instantly.

 Best of all was the great Jessye Norman lunch at Raffaelli’s Italian restaurant in the West End. The soprano had been launching the Scotsman Steps exhibition on the North Bridge and the arrangement was that the arts editor Allen Wright and I would take her to lunch at newspaper expense. She sailed into the restaurant like a magnificent galleon  with a flotilla of personal assistants, advisers, admirers and, we thought, a possible lover or two, demanding lunch for everybody.

A special long table was quickly set. The place startlingly began to look like the climax of Act One of Der Rosenkavalier. At a nearby table sat Harry Reid, the Scotsman features editor, lunching with the political writer Michael Fry, but they could not take their eyes off what was happening across the room. I had been put in charge of the wine list and was sitting beside Jessye herself. Marzemino, a red Italian rarity, caught my eye.  “Ah,” I exclaimed, “shall we drink something  operatic? What about Don Giovanni’s wine?”

With a prominent  thumb, Jessye made a meaningful downward gesture. A good Brunello di Montalcino would be preferable, she said. It was indeed good, and it added impressively to the Scotsman bill.
12 July 2014

The trouble with Alsace

Much as I enjoy a summer glass of Alsace wine, I am less puzzled than I once was by the marketing problems it has to face in Britain.  It’s not just that these wines are hybrids, admittedly delicious ones, which are not quite German and not quite French, from vineyards on land famously fought over by opposing German and French armies  Sipped appreciatively in the hilly villages of the Alsace countryside  itself, or in a good restaurant in the fine old town of Colmar,  they are an almost unfailing delight. It’s when you drink them elsewhere that doubts can arise, which is why our supermarkets have such trouble selling them to the British public.

Waitrose’s latest Alsace wine, a not inexpensive Riesling from the Cave de Beblenheim, puts the problem in perspective.  For me it is simply too sweet, with none, or almost none, of the drier, underlying, fascinating secondary flavours which, according to Alsace specialists,  make these wines the subtle experience they are. There was hardly a dish I could think of with which I would have fancied drinking this wine last night, other perhaps than foie gras, for which there are not many customers in Britain.

Rieslings, it’s true, tend towards sweetness, but it is their complexity of taste that makes good ones interesting. Yet here was one, priced like most Alsace wines above the £10 mark, I simply did not like, though it was surely a good one.  What was the matter with it - or with me?

 Waitrose stock a better range of Alsace wines than most supermarkets, and perhaps I would have done better to choose one of the fashionable Gewurztraminers, with their Chinese taste of lychees, which most people seem to prefer these days, and of which Waitrose sell two examples. The difference between a Gewurztraminer made from genuine Alsace grapes, and a cruder one from, say, somewhere in Eastern Europe is significant in my experience, and shows why Alsace wines are rated so highly by those who admire them.

Raeburn Fine Wines in Stockbridge have long been one of Edinburgh’s most comprehensive Alsace stockists, with an impressive list of Rolly-Gassmann bottles. Before I decide that my enthusiasm for Alsace is waning, I must go down there again - or to Peter Green in Marchmont, also notable for its Alsace selection -  and stock up.  My suspicion is that Alsace is not a supermarket wine, even perhaps at Waitrose.
11 July 2014

The wine club lottery

Wine clubs - Laithwaites, the Sunday Times, Virgin - are tempting to join, usually because of their introductory offers, but easy to get tired of.  I’ve been a fickle member of several, initial enticement often dwindling into boredom and, when I decide to drop out, annoyance that they keep pestering me with new proposals that tend to look like old ones in disguise. 

But I like to keep at least one membership running, the latest being Naked Wines from Norfolk,  who make an effort to encourage promising young wine producers in different countries, demonstrating what good value and how interesting their products  are. Some of them, in my experience, are better than others, but the ones I have grown to like and who have proved exciting enough to attract me, have helped to make me a continuing customer. 

The rules applied by Naked Wines are pretty standard. They email  you a frequent, extending wine-list and you tell them what you want. You order by the twelve-bottle case, which can consist of your own choice of wines or, if you prefer, something pre-packaged. Delivery is prompt and, more often than not, free.  Your account balance grows monthly by direct debit and when,  within two or three months, you have accumulated enough cash, you can place your next order in the expectation that it will be both worthwhile and uncommon.

There are various incentives. In your support of the ambitious  young wine producers you can become an “angel,” which enables you to get price  reductions. Every wine gets a listed percentage valuation of how many customers have bought it and been happy with it.  And every so often, if you order at the right moment, you get a free bottle or two. It’s not a bad system, even if you sometimes carelessly miss a bottle you seriously want to try, and for me it has worked well enough up to now.

It’s in identifying  producers you like, and avoiding those you don’t, that the system grows increasingly useful. Benjamin Darnault of the Languedoc is someone I’ve become more and more impressed with.   He produces a lovely fresh, dry Picpoul de Pinet, with a faint hint of prickle, which I’ve ordered several times and of which, this week, I’ve received the 2013 vintage. His pale pink (in some lights almost colourless) grenache is a deliciously dry summer wine, aptly named Pique Nique, and his red Minervois La-Liviniere I would certainly be happy to drink again. 

Rod Easthope’s New Zealand wines, including a fine fruity Pinot Gris, are also worth sampling. Naked Wines, like other wine clubs, may have their lottery aspects, but they have a good policy about returns and for the moment I’m sticking with them.

10 July 2014

Celebratory oils

In celebration of their eightieth birthday, Valvona & Crolla, Edinburgh’s great Italian foodshop and restaurant, are selling La Palombara, which may sound like something from their sumptuous wine list but is in fact an estate bottled extra virgin olive oil from central Italy made by Cesidio di Ciacca, brother of Mary Contini, one of the Edinburgh firm’s proprietors, on his estate in the Val di Comino.  Costing £9.99 for a quarter-litre bottle, this is an oil that cannot conceal that it belongs in Italian olive oil’s highest bracket, but it’s clearly an oil of the highest intensity,  well worth sampling, as is suggested, on salads and charcoal-grilled fish.

Whether it can rival Poggio Lamentano, which has always been my favourite Valvona & Crolla oil, remains to be seen.  Made by the Zyw family, former residents of the Dean Village in Edinburgh, where Aleksander, the father, was a distinguished Polish artist and a close friend of my own father, this distinguished Italian oil has always caught the eye, thanks to the simple but subtle greenness of its label.

But it’s the flavour that counts, of course. Though Aleksander moved to Castagneto Carducci on theTuscan coast for health reasons, and developed his style in new directions, olive oil soon became a family speciality, produced in sloping olive groves above the sea, where I twice had the good fortune to spend a weekend.  The 2013 vintage costs £24.75 for a standard-sized bottle - again not cheap, but a star oil for a star occasion.

Also on Valvona & Crolla’s latest list, and similarly enticing,  is a Frantoio Galantino oil which comes in a half-litre ceramic flask costing £19.95, strikingly designed with an attractive olive motif.

Correction: the opening concert of the Edinburgh Festival takes place this year on Friday, August 8, not on August 7 as stated in a previous blog.
0 July 2014

The editors in my life (7)

I knew I’d got the job when, arriving home one evening, my next door neighbour told me he’d just had a visit from the police asking for information about me. Was I responsible or irresponsible? Did I have criminal tendencies? Was I drunken or drug addicted? What of my family connections?

Though he was not told why he was being quizzed, my neighbour had worked out for himself that a foreign country, possibly Holland, was interested in me. Amsterdam was not yet the drug capital of Europe, and clearly did not yet want to be.  Indeed, during my period there, it still showed a strong streak of Dutch puritanism, not unlike that of the Scotland in which I grew up. At any rate, I passed the test, or whatever it was, and within a month or two I was working for the second time in my life in another country.

But not in Amsterdam.  Philips Phonographische Industrie - known more simply in Britain as Philips Records - had its headquarters in a handsome old country mansion on the outskirts of Baarn, a sleepy town to which it brought a spot - a very  tiny spot - of life.  Few of the great Philips performers, in my experience, ever visited the place. We were the industrial work force, my section of which operated five and a half days a week on the production of record sleeves for which I, as sleeve-note editor, wae expected to supply the copy.

My boss, in overall charge of the record sleeves, was WL (short for Wim or, more mysteriously, Pim) Zalsman, a noisy, fast-talking, well-upholstered Dutchman, member of a Rotterdam newspaper family, who was constantly in dispute with the London leg of Philips, as well as with some of his own colleagues. I'd met him, and liked him, at my job interview.  On home ground he was prone to prowl around the small annexe, a former gatehouse, in which we worked, periodically snarling “Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.”  But, though he shouted  rather a lot, he was not hard-hearted and in his spare time he was a virtuoso player of Sjoelbak, a traditional Dutch form of shove-halfpenny, which he played with terrifying velocity on a polished wooden  table in the basement of his home.

He was also a virtuoso of old Dutch expletives, not just of the basic ”God be doomed” variety, but of more imaginative an startling wordings. Summoning you to his room, he would stare at you through almost closed eyes and ask you - an artful ruse - what you were staring at. “Have I got green snot coming out of my nostrils?” he would exclaim.  “Have I forgotten to get dressed?  Have I wet my trousers?”

He was nothing if not forthright.  When he returned from official travels, the word would go round: “Zalsman is back.” Though some of us feared his temper, he was more of a barker than a biter.

Mostly he spoke to me in English, and only switched to Dutch if he wanted to gain an advantage. If he said “Dag Meneer Wilson” (Good-day Mr Wilson) in greeting, I knew I’d made some editorial blunder.  But on the whole,  as the company’s resident Scot, I was lucky to find myself encouraged.  We were a young team, most of us in our twenties, Zalsman still in his thirties, and the staff proof reader, Jan Huizinga (no to be confused with the great Dutch historian), for whom I had a special affection,  as an erudite fifty-year-old father figure.

Everyone was eager to speak English and came to me with grammatical questions and rules I’d never heard of, such as the positioning of place before time in the running order of a sentence. Every day there would be requests. Can you let me have - I was asked more than once - a sleeve note on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, by lunchtime if you please?  The work was not yet the popular classic it later became.

Notes on jazz or pop or what Philips  obscurely called Dancers’ Dorado tended already, all those years ago, to take priority over the classics.  I had to remember that photographic transparencies were known as diapositives. The company’s relationship  with Columbia Records in America meant that some sleeve notes were already written over there. German sleeve notes, on the other hand, were written by me in English, then translated into German.

The atmosphere, as I have mentioned in an earlier blog, tended to be convivial, and the sleeve designers with whom I worked were skilled and chatty. Living in Holland was seldom less than fun. For the best part of three years I continued, almost every night being a night out in Amsterdam, 45 minutes away, where I had chosen to reside.

But it was not, as I gradually decided, a job for life (though one of my successors, David Hogarth,  got married there and stayed on).  Sleeve notes and other articles could never be works of criticism. Even the most minor concertos had to be extolled as masterpieces. Philips performers were always  the best, even when they were not. I was already too much of a critic to find this acceptable in the long term.  But my Dutch friends were a joy to spend time with, and  the Amsterdam restaurants, particularly the Chinese and Indonesian ones. were a pleasure also. And even Zalsman’s outsize personality was, I decided, something to savour and certainly remember..
8 July 2014

The darker side of Dyer

Reading, or re-reading, Geoff Dyer’s The Missing of the Somme is as good a way as any, and probably better than most,  of preparing yourself for this year’s Edinburgh Festival, with its emphasis on memories of war that range from the edgy intensity of Britten’s War Requiem at the Usher Hall  to the potential nostalgia of Bal Moderne, a choreographed evocation of the songs and dances of wartime Europe, which will be be presented for three afternoons at the Hub and is described as an “immersive” experience where the audience will be given an opportunity to dress up in period clothes and join the performers in a programme devoted to wartime popular entertainment.

Though the latter seems a long way from the stinking trenches of the Somme,  it perhaps comes closer to the Dyer we know than the beautiful, elegiac, melancholy book he wrote in 1994 about what he prefers to call the Great War rather than (less emotively) the First World War. But the point about Dyer is that he is the sharpest of observers - of anything from Tarkovsky’s gaunt Russian film entitled Stalker, out of which in 2012 he drew his substantial book called Zona, characteristically subtitled A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, to his superb collection  of essays, dating from 2903, about Thailand, France, Libya, and Italy,  subversively entitled Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It.

Dyer is famed for his polished flippancy, beneath which lies something often darker and, at times, quite disturbing. It’s the darker side of Dyer that emerges, without the flippancy, in The Missing of the Somme, but his keen-eyed watchfulness (which can be serious as well as funny)  and interest in relics - ruins, graves and, in this case, the architecture of cenotaphs - are fully evident.

Twenty years on, the book continues to gleam amid the welter of centenary studies of the Great War that publishers have been battering us with, because it is so elegantly as well as movingly written and, like most of Dyer, is an impeccable model of style. Though the comedy - which, in his latest book, derives from two weeks spent on board an oppressive  American aircraft carrier patrolling the Gulf -  is inevitably missing, it is not missed. And even the new book ends with a night of total emptiness - nothing to see, nothing to do, nothing to enjoy - in Bahrain.Its effect is like that of the finale of Vaughan Williams’s otherwise intimidating Symphony No 6.
7 July 2014

Continental Ways

The west end of George Street and its Castle Street crossover are in a state of gastronomic change.   Librizzi’s has been replaced by Mark Greenaway’s. Cosmo’s, the oldest of Edinburgh’s ambitious Italian restaurants, closed down a while ago but it, too, has been replaced.  And what has happened to Centrotre?  It’s now called Contini, but this is no more than a new name, because it’s said that customers have been having difficulties with the old one - a pronunciation problem perhaps? Or, after more than a decade, a different moniker was simply deemed desirable.

 But happily it’s still Victor and Carina who are in charge. The spruce decor inside this former George Street bank, with all its imposing pillars,  remains the same. The wine list looks as good as ever. The menu,  it's true,  has been revamped, but not hugely.  It’s still - perhaps even more so - the place we had grown to love.

Carina has celebrated its relaunch - if that’s the word - by writing a sumptuous seasonal cookbook, beautifully designed and greatly enticing. It’s all in the family, because she is the sister of Mary Contini, of Valvona & Crolla, already an established writer.  But the two sides of the family go separate ways, with separate aims - Victor and Carina having recently taken over the National Gallery of Scotland’s restaurant and cafe in Princes Street Gardens, while Valvona & Crolla continue to run a cafe and shop on the third floor of Jenners, as well as their Vincaffe near Harvey Nichols.

In George Street yesterday afternoon, the newly-named Contini was bridging the gap between lunch and dinner by, as usual, serving coffee and drinks indoors and out on the pavement. That stretch of the street is at present  in a state of interesting upheaval with wooden platforms being built from the kerbside into the roadway. These, as part of what looks like a policy of increasing pedestrianisation, will form cafe terraces in time for the Edinburgh Festival, helping to push George Street in the continental direction in which it has recently been going.

But with yesterday’s weather a little unsettled, we chose to sit inside at one of Contini’s window tables, drinking their excellent coffee and thick hot  Italian  chocolate, augmented with glistening slices of pure gluten-free chocolate cake, a golden honeycomb crunch, and a dollop of creme fraiche. One of Contini’s pleasures is that it’s open all day, serving coffee or breakfast from 7.30.  We did not wait on for dinner, which as before  includes an assortment of fresh, not inexpensive seafood dishes, well-composed pastas.  and some classy pizzas, eked out with irresistible desserts.
6 July 2014

Festival openings

The Edinburgh Festival’s annual opening concert in the traditionally teetotal surroundings of the Usher Hall - consisting so often of a large-scale, mind-cleansing, ecumenically inoffensive choral masterpiece - only once in my experience caused preliminary uproar of a sort which today would  inspire disbelief.   That was when Sir Thomas Beecham announced that he would conduct Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and found his performance banned by the Scottish Kirk as a piece of mischievous popery. Though Beecham was never a man to back down when faced with opposition, he conducted, if I remember rightly, the Ninth Symphony instead.

Today such problems no longer arise. The Usher Hall has for some years served alcohol and the Festival does not need to be unveiled with a religiously impeccable opening Sunday concert  - though I must admit that the only time I myself strongly objected to the content of the opening programme was when Frank Dunlop launched the Festival with the Nazi vulgarity of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana.  “What’s wrong with a spot of vulgarity,” were the words with which Frank countered my opposition.  It wasn’t the vulgarity that was objectionable, I replied. It was the politics of the composer.

Under Sir Jonathan Mills’s aegis, the problem - even if it still existed - has been sidestepped with ease. The Sunday night opening concert is a thing of the past. This year the opening concert will be on Friday, August 7. Though still a vocal event, featuring the Festival Chorus and Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the composers who have been chosen are an arresting mixture of Schoenberg, Scriabin, and Debussy, with the invigorating and amiably subversive Oliver Knussen as conductor.

Schoenberg was a composer chased from Europe by his Nazi foes. The inclusion of  Debussy’s Martyrdom of St Sebastien is clearly a tribute to the Festival’s theme this year, inspired by Albert Camus’s declaration that “it is the destiny of the artist not to serve those who make history, but to serve those who are its victims.”

The point will be underlined the following night when Donald Runnicles and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra perform the young Benjamin Britten’s pacifist Sinfonia da Requiem, commissioned by the Japanese and banned by them before it could be performed.
5 July 2014

Not just another rustic red

I’d been told I should try a red wine with the simple, unpretentious name of Domaine Marie, from the area of Faugeres in the Languedoc, available from Waitrose, my favourite supermarket (and Which? Magazine’s also I note with interest). It was good advice. Though there’s no shortage of southern French Languedoc wines on British shelves these days, here was one which, through the modesty of its label, could be in danger of being overlooked.

From a small estate run by Marie and her husband in the Cevennes, where Stevenson travelled with his donkey, it’s not just another rustic red. Indeed I’d be happy to find it on a restaurant wine list at a price in keeping with  - i.e. not more than twice as much as - the £8.49 Waitrose is asking for the 2011 vintage.  Such a shop price is a bargain for something as silky as this, dark enough to look like one of the black red wines of Cahors, big enough in flavour to confirm its 14 per cent alcohol level, yet not at all overbearing or excessively fruitified, based on a combination of Grenache, Syrah, and Carignan grapes, such as would be favoured in the Rhone. 

Once poured or decanted, it quickly softens in taste. We drank it last night with sirloin steaks and roasted parsnips, to which it seemed admirably suited. Faugeres wines, when you find them, can come at prices much higher than Waitroses’s, but this one, even if it is an introductory offer, is certainly no disappointment. 

Friends whose taste buds you trust are a good way of gaining advice on wines you might not otherwise buy.  Waitrose sell it by the case and half-case as well as in single bottles. I’ll be on the lookout for it again.

4 July 2014

The editors in my life (6)

Can you remember - asks AA Gill in this week’s Sunday Times - how grim and threadbare Britain was in the 1950s?  Rationing, as we are still being reminded,  persisted until 1953 - its presence insidiously suggestive of a Philip Larkin poem - though I can’t remember that it lasted quite as long as it did.   I have a clearer recollection of buying pounds of chocolate on my first trip to Belgium as a schoolboy soon after the war, and the exhilaration of being able to do so. My first sight of a neon-lit city - post-war Brussels, of all places - was part of that experience, as was my first taste of veal and, at the Cite Universitaire where we stayed, my first bowl of edible porridge.

Yet returning to Edinburgh as a trainee journalist in 1956 after two years in Paris was not all gloom and despair.  The streets, it’s true, remained largely devoid of restaurants, but the ones that were there included a few worth eating in, particularly the excellent Cafe Royal with its stained glass windows and wonderful waitresses, the St Giles Grill and the smart Aperitif, the cosy Cramond Inn and the resourceful Ricky’s at Tollcross.

True, the National Gallery seemed puny compared with the Louvre, and Calton Hill with the Butte Montmartre, but completing my newspaper  training, as I was  now on the brink of doing,  felt  like graduating from college.  Working for the Evening Dispatch with Alec Bowman as the most benign of editors, and with the bustling old chief reporter Bobby Leishman as my attentive overseer,  I was for a time blissfully happy,  Along with  the leader writer  Alastair Stuart, I started a monthly two-page spread of paperback book reviews, reputedly the first of its kind in Britain.

Leishman, in a state of constant anxiety, was a rubicund perfectionist, a stickler for good syntax who forbade me to write such ineptitudes as “Following the concert, the conductor fell off the platform.”  The word I needed to use, he huffed and puffed, was  “after.”  The conductor was not following the concert.  It’s a crime, I’m sorry to say, which is still committed by most newspapers today.

Bobby also had a thing about pianos, which were never to be described as bad or out of tune. “It causes pointless trouble,” his voice of experience  would splutter. “You never hear the end  it. Every piano tuner and piano owner  in Edinburgh will want you sacked.”    Though the paper’s  theatre critic was permitted to reprove, if necessary, actors at the King’s or Lyceum, humdrum shows at the Gaiety, Leith, or the Palladium, Fountainbridge, were sacrosanct, no matter how embarrassingly unfunny they were. Bobby was a joy and an education  to work for, once you got to know his quirks.

Nevertheless I sensed that the day was coming when I would need to move
on. Edinburgh, for all its virtues, seemed at the time  no substitute for Paris. While I rejoiced in being simultaneously a music critic, film critic, and art critic, and in making a host of new friends, I still yearned for somewhere else.   Within a few years of coming home, when the dull Karl Rankl was succeeded by the even duller Hans Swarowsky as conductor of the Scottish National Orchestra, a possible exit route suddenly materialised for me  in the form of an advert in the New Statesman announcing a job as sleeve-note editor at the headquarters of an international record company in Holland. The company, I suspected, could only be Philips. I instantly applied, was interviewed in London by three sturdy Dutchmen, and found myself appointed.

My enthusiasm for jazz as well as classical music, for Dave Brubeck as well as Leonard Bernstein (both of them Philips artists), did not go unnoticed by my interviewers.  Nor did  the meagreness of my Edinburgh salary which, as it soon turned out,  was about to be doubled.  Yet kissing the Dispatch goodbye was not easy. I had prospered there and enjoyed my work.  But the paper’s days were numbered. Before long its owners, the Thomson Organisation of Canada, would buy out its Edinburgh rival, the Evening News.  Then, instead of closing down the News, they closed their own less prosperous Dispatch instead.

The News offices at the bottom of Cockburn Street were bought by the district council, and eventually became for some years  the headquarters of the Edinburgh Festival. The News was shifted to the lofty Scotsman building in the North Bridge, though it remained, in my view, a less interesting paper than the Dispatch. Today, despite further changes of premises, that is the arrangement which, for better or worse,  still stands,  though the Thomson Organisation itself moved out some time ago.  Such are the vicissitudes of British newspaper life.
3 July 2014

Make mine Beaujolais

An email from Gerald Larner - good friend, fellow wine  drinker, fine programme-note essayist. and former Guardian music critic - pays tribute to the 2009 vintage of Beaujolais-Villages, which I omitted to mention in my recent Beaujolais blog (“Simply so French,” 21 June). Though there may not be a great deal of it left by now, you can still find it on restaurant wine lists, he says, even if what you are in danger of being served, without apology, turns out to be the less good (though in my view by no means despicable) 2010, 

In shops, however, it has become hard to track down, even though  Beaujolais stocks do seem to be increasing. Waitrose has just added a 2011 Chateau de Chenas Moulin a Vent (a major Beaujolais cru, offering deeply serious drinking) to its list, not cheap at £11.99 but surely a bargain in terms of quality.  Next time Gerald comes visiting I’ll have a bottle ready for him.

He also suggests in his email that the great disaster of Beaujolais Nouveau, which at one time people used to rush across France to buy, was not entirely bad news. Though much of it was admittedly poor stuff, at least it gave you what he describes as a “mouth feel” - something all wine tasters should treat seriously because it provides a hint of what the vintage might turn out to be like when properly produced.  All of which goes to prove that it’s foolish to treat even the worst Beaujolais without at the very least a touch of respect.

2 July 2014

The editors in my life (5)

Having observed two springtimes in the Bois de Boulogne, experienced two fourteenths of July from the top of the Butte Montmartre, spent two Decembers strolling past the Christmas shop windows of the Rue de Faubourg St Honore on a Saturday afternoon en route to browse amid the polished wood bookcases of Galignani’s splendid shop in the Rue de Rivoli followed by coffee and cakes and a spot of reading in my favourite cafe near the Palais Royale, I suddenly found that my demob from the RAF at SHAPE was almost upon me. 

Could I bear it? The question I thought I would never ask myself now loomed over me. I toyed with the idea of signing on for another year - something else I thought I’d never do - and discussed it with my squadron leader but was given no guarantee that I would remain at SHAPE if I did.  Since the great military headquarters, which I had grown to love and where much of the time I did not even have to wear uniform, was the vital factor in my negotiations, I immediately retracted what was surely my foolhardy plan. 

The many good English friends I had made (though surprisingly few Scottish ones) were also on the brink of demob and only one of them, Jim Fox, planned to settle in Paris, where he already had a room in the house of a White Russian landlady near the Parc Monceau and would eventually become a celebrated photographer.  He’s still living there and we correspond from time to time.   His civilian ambitions struck me as enviable, and I’m glad he fulfilled them. 

Would SHAPE, I wondered, be interested in employing what is nowadays known as a writer-in-residence?  Negotiations reopened, but it turned out that there was already such a person,  who operated privately in this capacity and was referred to as a rock of Gibraltar in his immobility. What he wrote, if anything, I no longer recall.   Besides, I reminded myself, I was a music critic, wasn’t I, with a job awaiting me back home.

All the same, I had got to know various British journalists resident in Paris including the film critic Calais Calvert and a delightful Darby and Joan called Frank and Topsy Tole who lived in a tiny attic and worked for one of the London papers. Better an attic in Paris, I thought, than a penthouse in Kensington. They invited me periodically for supper, and it was through them that I had my first taste of Mont Blanc, a concoction of chestnut puree and sour cream to which I soon became addicted.

But it did not lead to a job and in the end my demob preparations prevailed. I cleaned out my locker, on whose top shelf I kept my French cheeses, and every weekend a bucket of oysters which I shared around the billet.    An invitation to the annual Paris pastrycooks’  ball - like a scene from a Massenet opera -  formed my goodbye to the  city I loved, and still love, above all others. The two pretty French secretaries I sometimes worked with, Annie Lambert and Claude Diraison, waved me goodbye. 

Meanwhile in Edinburgh, where it still seemed too cold to wear an open-necked shirt,  a new editor awaited me at the Evening Dispatch. Theoretically, I was still a trainee, but a more confident one than I had been two years previously.  The Thomson Organisation had by now decided that the brash Londoner, Jack Miller. was not the answer to the paper’s problems and had replaced him with the neat, polite, and affable Alec Bowman, a deft, quietly experienced journalist from The Scotsman. He wasn’t the answer either but I thought him an admirable editor while he lasted, intelligent and easy to get on with. 

If he had a quirk it was that he fancied himself as a music critic.  In my absence abroad he had sometimes deputised for me when an event of special importance occurred.  It was not a pleasure he desired to give up. Would I mind, he asked  with his infinite gentleness, if he continued?  It was not for me as a trainee to object, especially as the terms he offered me in return proved conspicuously generous. Since it was a journalistic tradition, nowadays in London sometimes withheld, to supply critics with two tickets for events, Alec artfully proposed that once in a while he would take one ticket and give me the other,  and we would attend the performance together. 

This, as he doubtless knew, could have seemed offensive. Young though I was,  I was the critic. But the operative word was “occasionally” and he did not abuse it. Indeed it happened so seldom that it never caused an embarrassing  predicament. In return he offered me even better terms than I already had. In addition to being music critic - an appointment now to be rather grandly upgraded to “our music critic” - my job was to be expanded, thanks to my Parisian experience, to being film critic as well, and also, though in a smaller way, an art critic. 

Though I felt concerned that my field of authority hardly stretched that wide, he pointed out that I would be the paper’s official cultural correspondent. Perhaps it was no more than an old Scottish way of getting one person to do several jobs, but who was I to refuse?  It was a great offer. Even if it meant working under more than one name with not much of an increase in salary, it suited my youthful journalistic ambitions very well. 

On the subject of music, Bowman took care not to overplay his hand. Only once did we come close to clashing.   That was over a Rosenkavalier at the Edinburgh Festival which we both wanted to review. Bowman reviewed it. I accompanied him, feeling a bit like a plumber’s mate. But he took good care to check his facts with me before committing them to print. 

He was a good editor to work for, never causing trouble and always coming up with ideas which he knew might attract me, like being a general features writer as well as a critic. When Edinburgh rashly decided to get rid of its double-decker trams, I said adieu to them under the heading “A Farewell to Trams,” supplied by Bowman himself. Now that trams have returned, amid a prolonged, painful, and costly dispute with foreign suppliers, I’m happy to know that I still have, somewhere among my files, a yellowed cutting of my nostalgic 1950s article. 

1 July 2014

Le bon Muscadet

As a long-term devotee of cool French Beaujolais, I feel similarly at ease with a glass of what for me has always been its white counterpart, Muscadet. Both wines have had their highs and lows in terms of quality and public appreciation in recent years. But in my days of bracing summer holidays with my two eldest children in Normandy and Brittany, of sojourns in Dieppe (which used to boast the best cheese shop in northern France) and Honfleur,  Muscadet seemed the acme of wines to quaff with a pint of prawns or a rich seafood stew on one or another of the harbour fronts I frequented. 

A simple Muscadet was then the most appetising of wines, before it degenerated into something more often harsh and sharp and the once enticing name on the label was somerhing you passed with a shudder if you spotted it in a wine shop. 

The only safeguard lay in the tag “sur lie” amid  the label information alongside the words “Muscadet Sevre-et-Maine.”  This served as a guarantee  that the wine had rested ”on its lees” for a period and had  thereby gained the tang and petillance which made a good Muscadet the experience it was.  Since 1994, stricter rules have been applied to how long the wine needs to be rested beneficially in this way. 

 I still recall  once trudging through Dieppe carrying a visibly identifiable case of wine with this guarantee,  thus prompting the odd passer-by to exclaim “Ah, le bon Muscadet” as I approached. It always seemed one of the nice things about France that the sight of a simple but admirable wine could arouse such an exclamaition of appreciation from people out shopping. The simplicity, of course, was the thing. Muscadet was not a posh wine, a Pouilly Fume or a Sancerre from the higher reaches of the Loire. It was something cheeringly domestic, very cheap even in its “sur lie” version and well worth drinking.

Today, having regained its popularity in Britain, it is not quite so cheap, yet still enough of a bargain  to buy without feeling that you have been overspending. And a truly good Muscadet - such as the 2013 Fief Guerin, which Waitrose is currently selling for £7.99 - has a firmness of structure along with the slight floral prickle that makes it a fine accompaniment for fish dishes as well as a good aperitif. The cheaper 2013 Champteloup sur lie is certainly a Waitrose bargain at £5.99, and good Muscadets can also be found at present  in other British supermarkets.  

30 June 2014              

Pizza with Miss Brodie

Pizza Expresses inspire strong feelings. They are liked because they are smart, detested because they place style before content, portion control before generosity, meticulousness before spontaneity, small pizzas before large. They provoke familiar complaints, such as the one about anchovies being an almost invisible presence in pizzas that purport to make a feature of them. Their trendiness irritates, like the emphasis on gluten-free dishes, currently high-lighted on the menu - there’s even a gluten-free beer as an alternative to the established ice-cold  Peroni - a development  greatly favoured  by my wife, who is on a gluten-free  diet, but an annoyance to those who are not. 

Personally I have rejoiced in the existence of Pizza Express ever since the first one opened, all  those years ago, off Leicester Square in London, and when a new one opens in Scotland  I feel disposed to try it even if I know what I am going to eat. The way they convert old properties into something new and interesing is invariably resourceful and Edinburgh’s recently opened Morningside Pizza Express  is a case in point. Originally a church on the corner of Nile Grove, it welcomes you through its pillared  portal into a circular interior where the organ pipes have been retained as a visual  element instead of being slung out, as another buyer would instantly have done.

Set back behind trees from the bottom of Morningside Road, it has been fashioned into a pleasant eating space, with honeycomb tiles on the floor and  on the side of the central serving counter, with lofty modern murals inspired by the idiosyncratic Miss Jean Brodie in her prime  (her rcreator, Muriel Spark, was born  and educated just up the hill). On Fridays at lunchtime there is a regular influx of school-children, some of them probably from Spark’s old school, along with parents and grandparents.

The menu is much as usual, which means that it’s a mixture of recent additions and old faithfuls.  The pizzas are of course famously small which I infinitely prefer to gross pizzas with piled-up toppings of  a sort you seldom see in Italy. But there are also good salads  and a few pastas, including a classic lasagna, which is refreshingly not multi-layered but comes piping hot from the oven with a good mix of meat and tomato. Coffee, not particularly good, is served with the option  of a bijou dessert - figs and ricotta being a current novelty - but there is panna cotta or good ice cream, including sorbets, for those who desire something a bit more substantial. Trendy yes, but it works. 

29 June 2014

Trojan triumphs

Trojan triumphs

Opera, it is said, frowns on Scotland in the same way as Scotland frowns on opera. As fine new opera houses are opened on prime sites in Scandinavia, and the Scottish government continues to shrug its shoulders at such  achievements elsewhere, it’s easy to believe that there is truth in this local history of operatic  incompatibility. 

Yet Scotland’s operatic tradition is in fact an impressive one. It was here, a century ago, that the Denhof Opera Company mounted pioneering performances of Wagner’s Ring. and it was here in the nineteen-thirties that Mozart’s Idomeneo and Berlioz’s The Trojans received their British premieres from the Glasgow Grand Opera Society.  

Glasgow’s operatic history has been long and fascoinating, ranging from Jenny Lind’s famous appearance in Bellini’s  La Sonnambula and Donizetti’s Daughter of the Regiment in 1848 to the arrival of Sir Thomas Beecham and his opera company with such exotic splendours as Rimsky-Korsakov’s Golden Cockerel in the early twentieth century. 

All this made it easy for Scottish Opera to plant its roots in Glasgow with Debussy’s Pelleas and Melisande in 1962 and develop quickly into a great national asset, staging a sensational Berlioz centenary production of The Trojans in 1969. This year, at the Edinburgh Festival, The Trojans will be back, though it won’t be Scottish Opera - whose idea of progress nowadays seems to be the touring  of small-scale piano-accompanied productions round Scottish villages and being patted on the back for doing so - that is performing it. 

But the Mariinsky Theatre’s production, like Scottish Opera’s in 1969, will rightly present the work complete  in all its grandeur on a single evening, unlike the later Scottish Opera production which made the mistake of  spreading the work across  two nights. Berlioz’s opera demands no-holds-barred presentation, and Scottish Opera in 1969 even included the dances, as the Mariinsmky will surely also do. 

Conducted three nights running by Valery Gergiev as the climax of this year’s Festival is just what it deserves, making up for the parsimonious treatment - with the music cut to shreds - which Berlioz’s masterpiece  has so often received in its native France.

28 June 2014 

Something we all know about

The joy of making lists - of the ten greatest cities to live in, the fifty finest films, the hundred best novels, the thousand works of art to see before you die  - continues unabated. It’s best savoured, however, without the competitive element that almost invariably creeps into the final choices.  If you are listing the finest films, why does one film - traditionally Citizen Kane, though more  recently this seems to have been displaced by Hitchcock’s Vertigo - have to be superior to all the others? It’s just like calling Beethoven the best composer, or Van Gogh the greatest artist, and it gets you nowhere except for showing how narrow your mind is. 

Just recently, and purely for personal entertainment value, I have been sharing a spot of list-making with my eldest daughter’s father-in-law. We’ve concentrated on films because we are both film buffs, and films are something we all like to think we know about.  But we have avoided placing any film at the head of the list, other than alphabetically. To start with we thought big, compiling rather rambling lists of a hundred films, which extended with ease to 150.  We tended to use words such as “favourite” rather than “finest,” though even favourite, of course, carries implications of quality. 

Nevertheless a favourite film can be a bad film which you happen to love - one of my own favourite bad films being Beat the Devil, John Huston’s gloriously self-indulgent 1954 comedy featuring Humphrey Bogart, Gina Lollobrigida, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre, Jennifer Jones, Edward Underdown, Ivor Barnard and others. It’s certainly not a great film. Why, then, do I adore almost every moment of it and have been able to quote for more than half a century some of the niceties of Truman Capote’s dialogue?

The answer is that the film has stuck ineradicably in my memory and when I recently came upon a DVD of it, I bought it instantly and - because for me it has not faded - have been revelling in it all over again. So perhaps a list of remembered films, or perhaps what EM Forster might have called good bad films, saying why they are memorable, could be more revealing than one more list of the finest.

Whittling down and sub-dividng a list can be another way of beating it into shape. At the  risk of being defeated by our lists of 150 films, Hamish - Susie’s father-in-law - and I have been toying with lists of as few as ten, divided into comedies, thrillers, dramas, westerns worth seeing. The overlaps, where they occur, have interested us, though the divergences are perhaps no less arresting .

 At any rate,  the comedies common to both our lists include M. Hulot’s Holiday, The Ladykillers, Whisky Galore, Sons of the Desert, The Cat and the Canary, Arsenic and Old Lace, Kind Hearts and Coronets, and A Night at the Opera, in no particular order and most of them now (like ourselves) pretty old.   Next will come thrillers, though we have yet to decide what films would count as eligible. Watch this space.

27 June 2014

Acoustic designs

Last year, in return for running the Edinburgh Festival since 2006, Jonathan Mills received a knighthood. This year, in return for his knighthood, he is giving Edinburgh the opportunity to hear his tragic  oratorio, the Sandakan Threnody, in a performance by the Festival Chorus and BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by the zealous Ilan Volkov.

It’s the first time  an Edinburgh Festival director has appeared at the festival as a composer. But then, according to Wikipedia, that is what Mills primarily is -  as a pupil of his fellow Australian, Peter Sculthorpe, he has two operas (he’s working on a third) and a ballet to his credit, as well as his oratorio and his artfully entitled Four First Songs.  No doubt he has also composed other things - a concerto and chamber music have been mentioned -  along with running other festivals. What's more, he successfully studied architecture, specialising in acoustic design and “the role of sound in the built environment.” 

Yet although his second opera  was performed and filmed for television in London, Mills the composer has remained an unknown quantity in Edinburgh. His oratorio, dating from 2001, received its premiere at the Sydney Opera House and is a valediction for the 2345 Australian and Britsh  prisoners of war who were sent by the Japanese on a death march from Sandakan in Borneo, where Sir Jonathan’s father, later to become a distinguished heart surgeon, had been a prisoner.

In a festival which this year is commemorating some of the horrors of war with performances of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, Berlioz’s The Trojans, Britten’s Owen Wingrave, War Requiem  and Sinfonia da Requiem,  Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony and Beethoven's Eroica, the work will be in imposing company. And although we might feel meanly inclined to pontificate on why a festival  should serve  as showcase for its director’s own music, we should perhaps respond on this occasion with the question, “Why not?”  It was something Britten did as a matter of course at Aldeburgh. and with the highest artistic success.  

26 June 2014

Another great book by Geoff Dyer

Coming from Geoff Dyer, the title of his latest book could be sardonic. Indeed, coming from Geoff Dyer,  Another Great Day at Sea could be exactly the opposite of what its title implies,  and what it is about could be just what it is not about. It’s certainly not about the catching of Moby Dick. Its subject is bigger than that. Nor is it a modern author’s  search for Conrad’s Lord Jim.  Yet like the most famous of all Dyer’s books  - Out of Sheer Rage, which was intended to be about DH Lawrence - it is certainly about something that won’t leave him alone.  His Lawrence book, it’s true, was about being unable to write a book about Lawrence, and the first impression you get of his new book is that it might be about the sea, or it might not.  Those who read everything Dyer writes, as I do, must guess what he is likely or unlikely to give them.

Another Great Day at Sea is in fact about the spell Dyer spent as a writer in residence on board the biggest ship in the world, the aircraft carrier USS George Bush, half a mile long, a vast floating pantechnicon on constant patrol of the Gulf, more crowded than a cruise ship, amd where most of its 5000 crew have to squeeze themselves at night  into “six-pack” bunks, separated from each other by curtains, as in the sleeping car containing Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot.

Once on board, Dyer thinks he is within his rights to demand  his own cabin where he can sleep and write in peace. His request is granted, though the only available room is right below the flight deck where the constant howl of jets  landing and taking off throughout the night is the price he must pay for it.   It’s the sort of situation in which he was bound to find himself, and he survives it by wearing a cranium protector, or by visiting the carrier’s chapel, despite his atheistic tendencies,  to hear hauntingly soaring hymns, or by crouching on deck in the expectation that a plane might chop off his head, as happened to someone in Catch 22. He describes the food (inedible) and discovers that there is  a token Starbucks on board, though he knows that this is not the vessel in which he might track down the perfect doughnut and perfect cup of coffee - a topic to which he devotes a wonderfully obsessed essay in a previous book. 

It turns out that the words “Another great day at sea” are a pronouncement by the captain, with modest but fascinating variations, in a daily broadcast to the crew. Dyer found it deeply moving, as I myself did when, during my RAF  days,  General Grunther similarly greeted everybody at SHAPE in Paris. What is it about the Americans, even when they are manning the most formidable man o’ war? 

The question could be the title of another book, but this one is beautifully written and unimprovable, especially in its pristine big-size format, wonderfully illustrated and edited, which puts the much cheaper, if handier, kindle version inevitably in the shade. Yet the book is not dependent on its large-scale design.  The writing is what matters, and the story is as intimate in its way as Alain de Botton’s study of Heathrow,  A Week at the Airport, which in some respects it delightfully resembles.

25 June 2014 

  

The editors in my life (4)

During my spell at SHAPE in Paris, the only regular news letter to be published on site was American, smartly printed but confined largely to social events.  Something else, something more Parisian, seemed needed and, with a fellow British journalist. who was also in the RAF, I started planning Rond-Point - named after the carrefour halfway down the Champs-Elysees - which was to become, albeit briefly, a guide to what was happening in town.

Dick Burmingham (from Stroud in Gloucestershire) and I were to be co-editors, typing out reviews and previews within a sixteen-page format for production once a month. Squadron Leader Goldie, in charge of the SHAPE RAF unit, gave us his blessing with the proviso that we stood on nobody’s toes and did not shirk our normal duties. 

Major Dauphin, my American boss, agreed to let himself be called editor-in-chief so long as his appointment was merely nominal. He already had a Boy Scout publication to deal with, and he did not want to involve himself editorially with something as irrelevant to SHAPE as Rond-Point, which would probably turn out to be a piece of British artifartiness. His deputy, the rotund cigar-chewing Warrant Officer Parznik, agreed to lend a hand if wanted, 

But we were left essentially on our own, which was what we really wanted, and got down to writing the first issue, gaining permission to use SHAPE paper and equipment, and using roneo for an estimated circulation of five hundred. The publication, we were assured by the Americans, would be regarded as a SHAPE asset and we were encouraged to go ahead.

So, side by side smoking Gauloises in an empty office, Dick and I spent several nights assembling it, talking friends into becoming unpaid contributors. Though it was all, I suppose, a bit rough and ready, with no pictures to relieve the columns of typescript, it looked lively and a pre-publication copy, with contributions from film critics, drama critics, art critics, ballet critics and music critics (some of them simply noms de plume for me and Dick) won immediate admiration. 

The five hundred copies were duly run off, and we awaited response. It did not take long to come. The Americans liked it, the French (all of them English-speakers) smiled and said nothing, but officers of the British Army exploded.  That was our mistake. We had not consulted them, let alone sought their permission to publish, which was now instantly refused. A British major said he had himself been planning just such a publication for years, and ours would get in its way. 

Squadron Leader Goldie, ordered to stop us in our tracks. commiserated with us but had no choice. Dick and I duly destroyed the first edition, then went into town and had a good meal.  Whether we wrote about it or not, Paris was still there. As for Major Dauphin, he continued with his Boy Scout activities, relieved, no doubt, never to have become involved. Years later I received a letter from him in America, merrily describing himself as a silly old coot who was now learning to fly. It was nice of him to remember me. 

24 June 2014

The editors in my life (3)

Recruited into the RAF at the age of 22, after four years of deferment, I struck lucky.  Square-bashing in Staffordshire came close to being a pleasure, partly because it was interrupted by the chance to play the piano in a local Gilbert and Sullivan society’s production of The Mikado, in which several senior officers were singing important roles.  This, without being too taxing for a pianist who fumbled more than he accompanied,  enabled me to escape some unpleasant duties, including the dreaded assault course, which formed the climax of two months of basic training.

Then, before the passing out parade, came the offer I felt unable to refuse. Would I like to go to Paris? As a trained journalist, with a virtuoso typing speed, I needed no additional RAF training and lived in the hope of a plum posting.  The offer, when it came,  was for just under two years at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, otherwise known as SHAPE, up the hill from Versailles and a free bus ride from Paris via a route that included St Cloud, the Bois de Boulogne and the Avenue Foche, where the Gestapo had until recently had its headquarters.

If I was interested in the assignment  I was to report to Biggin Hill, where I would be interviewed by an aged wing commander.  “I know nothing much about you,” he said, “but as I’m a Dunfermline man myself I’m willing to take a risk.”   So off I went, kitbag on shoulder, from Victoria to the Gare du Nord, where I was met by an American driver who said he didn’t think much of Paris  but that life was otherwise good. 

SHAPE was controlled by General Grunther, supreme commander in Europe, who strolled along the lengthy central corridor in the morning, wishing us all a good day. His deputy was Field Marshal Montgomery, whom we seldom saw because he had his own private entrance leading straight to his office.  Most of the personnel were American, French or British, with small gatherings of Greeks, Italians,  Dutch and Danes, as well as eventually, during my time, a solitary German in the new German uniform. 

The RAF had its own small faction, commanded by Squadron Leader Goldie, a quietly civilised  man who caused nobody any trouble. But most of the RAF staff were dispersed to other departmnets and I found myself working initally for a naval petty officer in top secret files called Wallace Crummy and then for an American major, Lester R Dauphin, who among other things  ran a small private cottage industry as editor of a Boy Scout news letter. He was soon to be my editor, too, but I’ll come to that later. 

Meals were free in the British mess (mostly army, with cooks from Britain) or, if you were happy to pay the very low price, in the much superior  French mess. I sometimes went to one, sometimes the other, though I know which I preferred. The French mess also had the advantage of possessing an excellent small upright piano in the kitchen staff’s chnging room, on which I found myself allowed to accompany the singing of old French songs and to give piano lessons for a few francs a go.

There was also an American mess, where we were not allowed to eat but could sit reading if we wished, and  there was a big international cafeteria, where you had to pay for meals but could buy a drink (as also in the French mess, which served wine;   the British mess served  water). But much of the time, at least in the evening, I ate in Paris, which in those days was stunningly cheap and which I was determined to get to know better than anywhere else I’d ever been to.  Sadly, a lot of my fellow recruits never bothered to go into town and preferred to hang  around SHAPE instead. Well, since it was all so free and easy, who could blame them? 

 I was not the only journalist on the premises. There was also the dapper Private Coote from the Daily Telegraph. There was Senior Aircraftsman Michael Harvey, whose girl-friend was the daughter of the Daily Mail’s Paris editor. Michael operated one of these smart, electrical, high-speed  reporting machines, which at one time you saw being employed in courtroom dramas in the cinema.  He was in great demand at SHAPE. 

Apart from office work there were few duties, no parades, and only the French were put on a charge if they failed to salute the flag. There was a good American library, from which I borrowed the recently published Catcher in the Rye. Using my magnificent Adler typewriter, built like a battleship, I wrote freelance articles about Paris for the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch and The Scotsman, both of which by then had new editors. My RAF pay was low, but enough for meals in Paris two or three times a week, for operas and  concerts, galleries and the occasional play. And - gloriously- there were classic films, enough of them to make me think of becoming a film critic. But I was not writing anything for SHAPE itself. That was something that still lay in the future. 

23 June 2014 

Tales of the Tales

My first encounter with The Tales of Hoffmann was the gloriously flashy film directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, with Sir Thomas Beecham as conductor.  I had left school and was on my first trip to London. The film had just opened in Leicester Square and I was among the first to see it. The reviews had dismissed it as ridiculously ostentatious but I loved every moment of it. It ran for a while in its original version  before box-ofice failure prompted savage cuts. When it finally reached Edinburgh I saw it again and still loved it, despite the mutilations, paticularly as it retained the closing shot of Sir Thomas conducting in the pit, which was the moment I had been waiting for. 

The next time I saw the film was in Paris, a few years later. For local audiences the singing  had been dubbed into French, with different, less impressive singers. The closing shot of Beecham was missing, because it had another conductor, the routinely efficient Andre Cluytens, who was not seen on screen. This time round,  I enjoyed it much less. Then, quite recently, the old Beecham version was reissued on DVD.  It was not uncut, but Beecham, at least, remained in view. 

I found that I still loved it for its glitter, for Moira Shearer dancing the role of the doll that sprang to life, and for Robert Helpmann and Leonid Massine for appearing in other dancing roles.  Singers’ voices had been dubbed from the start of the film’s history. Today, people are still buying it and, thanks to Beecham, it  remains the best version of Offenbach’s romantic opera you are likely to come upon.

But this weekend I saw another, filmed at the great Liceu Theatre in Barcelona, which in some respects was almost as good. It was conducted, extremely well, by Stephane Deneve, formerly of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra - surely the most exceptional conductor it has had in years. Natalie Dessai (whom Deneve had conducted in Pelleas and Melisande in a concert performance of Debussy’s opera when he first came to Scotland) was the touching Antonia. Kathleen Kim was superb as the doll. Laurent Naouri sang all four of the sinister villains, as Offenbach intended. 

The Hoffmann, Michael Spyres, seemed nondescript in comparison with Beecham’s polished Robert Rounseville. The decor and lighting were grey and dull, making Laurent Pelly’s production look as if it was set in a factory. But like a few other recent versions of Hoffmann - one of them at  the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland -  it restored quite a lot of little-known music, particularly for Nicklause and for Hoffmann’s Muse, which is traditionally omitted. 

The Venetian scene, placed at the end, was substantially rejigged, not entirely to its advantage. For all its good features, then, this was not a Hoffmann to surpass the Beecham/Powell/Pressburger version, which I shall be watching again this week. But it raised an interesting question. Why was Stephane Deneve, clearly an opera conductor of great ability, never invited to conduct Scottish Opera while he was in Scotland?  Was it for contractual reasons? If so, what a pity.

22 June 2014

Simply so French

Beaujolais was my first red wine, a true beginner’s wine because it was simply so  French,  so drinkable, so  available, and so inexpensive. I bought it for domestic wine and cheese parties, which were popular at that time, though British connoisseurs say today that wine and cheese don’t mix- tell that to the French! 

The shop where I bought it was Alastair Campbell’s in Bruntsfield, long defunct, but  very welcome in its day, with prices ranging from 25p (five shillings) for a bottle of red Algerian to around 50p for Chateauneuf du Pape, with Beaujolais notching in at 30p or so. Almost all their wine was French. though there were also Italian bottles, some Spanish Rioja and some Mosel, which we pronounced Moselle in those days  with the accent on the second syllable.

 Australian wine was not known to exist. When eventually it did, the wine of choice was called Kanga Rouge. Bull’s Blood from Hungary was something special to take to friends, or else Lutomer Riesling from Yugoslavia, because it was cheaper. But mostly it was Beaujolais which, even at its most basic, seemed a bit classier. Beaujolais-Villages, we knew, was better still, and the best Beaujolais of all had its own individual name, such as Fleurie, or Morgon, or Moulin a Vent, which was our favourite when we could afford it. 

Today the Beaujolais roll of honour remains more or less unchanged, though there came a point when nobody drank it because it had suddenly lost its credibility. That was the time of the great Beaujolais Nouveau race, when wine shops competed to be first to get the new wine. Some of this was rather good - Oddbins, when they first got going, were considered particularly  reliable - but most of it was bad, though people drank it all the same, often without noticing the difference. But in the end the word went round that it was undrinkable, which for a time  spelt the demise of Beaujolais including a lot of good Beaujolais also. 

Coming from the borders of Burgundy, though using a different grape, it should almost always have been good or goodish, of course.  It was a wine that certainly went well with steak and frites, with veal, liver and most French dishes other than fish. But lightly chilled, as was recommended, it could be tried with fish, too. In other words, it was a very useful wine which at its best could be considered even more than that. 

To disparage it, as some of us still do, is a serious blunder.  It’s a wine of which I continue drink quite a lot, and it’s a safe buy from most supermarkets (Waitrose’s house Beaujolais, with a railway engine on the label, is recommended).  The most famous producer is Georges Duboeuf, an apt  name for  Beaujolais. It is quite easy to find and comes bottled with lovely floral labels, particularly suitable for Fleurie.   But other names, such as Louis Jadot and Joseph Drouhin, are also good, and most of the recent Beaujolais vintages have been up to standard.

21 June 2014