Copy cats

It has taken a long time for someone to gain permission to write a new Hercule Poirot novel. But the gifted Sophie Hannah has suceeded, and her book, The Monogram Murders,  is available at prices ranging between £15 and £18, though of course kindle undercuts that with its £6.99 edition.

I’ve bought it, but not yet started it. The reviews so far have been unsurprisingly mixed, principally because the Christie style is apparently harder to emulate than the Ian Fleming. But as an old Christie fan I’m game to give it a go.

 Not that James Bond is really that easy to imitate either, and only William Boyd, it seems to me, has sensationally succeeded in doing so. Nevertheless I’m looking forward to Hannah’s book - though at well over 300 pages it looks a bit long for a Christie. 

 On the whole I tend to prefer writers sticking to their own styles, and would certainly argue that PG Wodehouse is impossible to copy satisfactorily.  Who will come next, I wonder?  JK Rowling, at least, has succeeded in copying herself, even if the novel she has written about English country life slightly runs out of steam.

19 September 2014

Remembering Tertia

Hailing the fiftieth anniversary of Edinburgh’s New Town Concerts the other day, I wrote of their precursor, the Freemasons’  Hall concerts organised by Ruth d’Arcy Thompson in the years after the Second World War.

These, too, were notable events - especially at a time when good chamber music in Edinburgh was sparse and the Festival, founded in 1947 was said to represent three weeks of life in a sea of inactivity.

But Ruth, at the time, was not Edinburgh’s only indomitable woman of music. There was another, even more vigilant, who from her home at 34  Regent Terrace organised the weekly National Gallery Lunch-hour Concerts which featured performers of the quality of John Ogdon, Thea Musgrave and Wolfgang Sawallisch (a pianist before he became an international conductor) in Edinburgh for the first time. This was the great, and memorably named, Tertia Liebenthal, daughter of a nautical German, who grew up here and became leader of the university’s Reid Orchestra under Sir Donald Tovey.

As a schoolboy, and junior critic, I was one of her ardent admirers. Her concerts ran year after year through the winter season, bringing good pianists, string players, singers and others to the relaxing surroundings of the National Gallery, where she was permitted to store  her beloved Steinway grand for the use of her performers, whom she would treat to afternoon tea at Crawford’s on Princes Street after the concert.

In a   sense, though not a pianist herself, she was Edinburgh’s Myra Hess, the pianist whose National Gallery concerts in London won massive support during the Second World War.

She imposed a strict regime on her performers. The centrepiece of her concerts, she ruled, should  as far as possible be something modern, and the closing work should be something  familiar, so that audiences could leave with music they knew ringing in their ears.

The system worked. The audience grew. Performers who failed to comply to her satisfaction were not invited back. As a cub critic, I learnt a lot of my business going to her concerts and writing about them. They were a weekly beacon in a by no means well lit  musical environment.

Gradually we got to know each other and to consult each other. If I was critical of one of her events - such as the time she invited John Ogdon’s wife Brenda Lucas to give a piano recital in his place - she telephoned me in an attempt to reason with me. Sometimes this involved lunch, either at her home, with its view of Arthur’s Seat, or else at her favourite Cafe Royal, where she ate mussels bercy (i.e. with  a wine, shallot and marrow sauce) washed down with a bottle of soothing Barsac (if she wanted a red it would be Valpolicella).

 Before long we began to lunch together regularly, whether or not I had enjoyed the concert. She liked hearing my views, as I did hers. Occasionally, at home, she would invite me to join her in a private performance of a Mozart or Schubert violin sonata on her other piano, because she liked to keep up her violin playing.

She was devoted to the Edinburgh Festival, went often  to Aldeburgh, spent Christmas at the Braid Hills Hotel and summered at Aviemore.  Her vintage Festival  was 1965, because Boulez was there, followed by 1968, which was built around Britten. During the latter festival, she chided me for disliking his Piano Concerto. She had reached a point in her life, she said, when she had “had” Beethoven and was contemplating dropping his music from her concerts.

Then suddenly, in the middle of her 699th concert, this tall, striking, impressive  impresario dropped dead. She had just announced her 700th programme, which was to be given by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. Eventually they gave it in her memory, and it included the premiere of a new Britten song cycle, Who Are These Children?, to  words by William Soutar. An era was over. Though there was talk of continuing the concerts, it never happened.

Her piano was sold. Ronald Mavor, by then director of the Scottish Arts Council, said that it was characteristic that Tertia died at her 699th concert, because she would never have done anything to mar her 700th.
18 September 2014

This week's wine: Sancerre

I once had a friend, a distinguished Scottish musician, whose only wine was Sancerre. He served it at lunch and dinner. He bought it by the case. He knew its nuances.

Much as I enjoy a good glass of Sancerre, my friend’s was an enthusiasm I could not share. If I have an obsessiveness, it leans more towards the steeliness of a good Chablis, a white French wine  that can be considerably dearer (and sometimes slightly cheaper) than the average Sancerre. But why do the nuances of this undoubtedly sophisticated Loire interest me less than those of the white burgundy from what is really not a huge distance away? Is it that I find it too soft and silky compared with the grand structure and integrity  of a great white burgundy?

To accuse it of being a soft sell - the wine, after all, is not particularly cheap and in a restaurant, indeed, tends to seem quite expensive - would obviously be unfair. But to call it overpriced perhaps comes nearer the mark. Its nuances are not in themselves quite fascinating enough to send you out on a great Sancerre quest - something I would certainly be prepared to do for a Chablis. The sight of the leather-bound wine list in a restaurant in the Chablis area, containing page after page of possible choices, is nothing if not imposing.

Looking at the range of Sancerres  in a British supermarket, you know that you are likely to get something nice for around a tenner - Tesco’s  house Sancerre is as good an example as any. Sancerre is a very pretty wine, very pretty indeed, and much to be preferred to some of the more aggressive sauvignons of New Zealand. But if I am spending £10 or  a bit more in a supermarket, I am not sure that Sancerre - or its  sister Pouilly Fume - is what I would buy.
17 September 2014

Fifty years on

Edinburgh’s New Town Concerts are celebrating their fiftieth anniversary this season with a survey of the  art of the string quartet.

Starting with America’s superb Emerson Quartet - hailed over here as the voice of Manhattan -  in November, followed by Britain’s youthful Belcea Quartet, all four events will feature a leading international ensemble playing key works from the repertoire. Though Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Shostakovich will have pride of place, there will also be dashes of Bach and Purcell and some touches of exotica, including music by that colourful South American, Alberto Ginastera.

The New Town Concerts were launched at a time when, apart from the Festival’s memorable morning concerts at the Freemasons’ Hall, chamber music had a scanty, vulnerable presence in Edinburgh.

Once the great visiting quartets had been and gone in August and September, Ruth D’Arcy Thompson’s winter chamber concerts in the Freemasons’ Hall struggled to keep things going  with the help of the Amadeus and similar quartets, but in the end collapsed through lack of funds.

 It was then that, in recognition of the aching gap in Edinburgh’s concert life, the New Town Concerts were founded and have thrived ever since. Although, like the Festival, these concerts  employed the Freemasons’ Hall as their setting, they switched to the Queen’s Hall when these surroundings became available in the nineteen-seventies and have found their home there ever since. Long may they triumph.
16 September 2014

Endangered orchestras

With down-sized orchestras here, locked-out orchestras there, and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under threat from  the day after Scotland votes yes, Norman Lebrecht’s Slipped Disc blog   has plenty to moan about at the moment.

But the BBC SSO has been in serious danger before - and survived.  Will it survive again?   The last time it happened, however, it was not the outstanding orchestra it now is. Its achievements were far, far less than those it now customarily supplies  under Donald Runnicles and Ilan Volkov, who are as desirable a pair of maestros as any orchestra has the luck to work with.  With a semi-staging of Berg’s Wozzeck, conducted by Runnicles, as a highlight of the forthcoming season, there is much to look forward to.

Apart from the danger to the orchestra itself, the fate of the Glasgow City Halls, the BBC SSO’s superb Scottish home, may also hang  in the balance. So yes, if there is trouble in the air - either from the referendum vote or from the BBC itself - we should maybe  listen to what Lebrecht and others are saying. He is not always wrong. And a point to keep in mind is this:   if the yes vote happens to lose the referendum, will the BBC SSO still be in danger? Unlikely perhaps, but not impossible.
15 September 2014

The future of symphony concerts

As staid as ever in their musical hopes, Edinburgh’s concert goers are presumably happy with what the coming season is offering them. I can’t say that it really looks fresh enough to me, even if the RSNO’s programmes are unlikely to be a deterrent.

But a glance on line at what the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra is performing in Germany shows deeper thought, and some arresting ideas. As John Duffus, however, suggests in his posting to this blog (see his response to Time for some swagger), it is not necessarily programmes that matter but method and approach. Could he be right? Your response woud be welcome.

14 September 2014

The allure of Verdicchio

If you want a change from Pinot Grigio, without paying too much for the privilege, Verdicchio remains a good choice. It has always been one of my favourite Italian whites, dry without being drab, and frequently priced around the £6 mark. 

It has things against it. People have trouble pronouncing its name, insisting that it is verdeetchio and getting cross when told it isn’t. But in fact the soft double “c” - as in Puccini - becomes hard when followed in Italian by an “h.” which means that verdickio is what  you should call it.

Nor is its provenance a strong selling point. The Marche region on Italy’s east coast, from which it comes, is not a top holiday place, at least for the British, though Pesaro, birthplace of Rossini, is a lovely resort. a cyclist’s paradise where seaside and academic life mix to perfecton, and where the beauiful inland city of Urbano is within easy reach. On the seafront stands an eye-catching villa in what the Italians call the Liberty style, but which we identify as Art Nouveau. The local wines, including Verdicchio, are delicious.

But another factor against Verdicchio seems to be  that it often comes in what is deemed to be an uninviting amphora-shaped bottle, which people treat with suspicion. But it’s a trend - the bottle, that is - which, in my experience, is gradually receding, and good Verdicchio is increasingly sold in standard bottles.

Both the examples currently stocked by Waitrose come this way. The first, a prize-winning 2013 Moncato Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi Classico (the classico reference is important) at £5.99, is a tasty bargain wine with a hint of almonds, admirable with seafood or something vegetarian. The other, at almost double that price, is more special, a top Monacesca Verdicchio, fragrant and sumptuous, a fine companion for a good-sized sea bass, rather than the puny fish usually sold in Britain under that name. 

M&S’s rival pairing of Verdicchios, both good, consists of a classico (in an amphora-shaped bottle) at  7.99 and a dearer one at £9.49, while Sainsbury offers its Taste the Difference Verdicchio for £6.99.

13 September 2014

Time for some swagger

No matter how cleverly it is concealed, or how artfully it is varied, the old concert structure of an overture, a concerto, and a symphony still keeps its grip on Scotland. The overture may not be called an overture but is simply a short introductory work which, if it happens to be new and potentially  unpalatable, can be got out of the way before it causes active offence.

This is one way of attempting to solve the “modern music”  problem in concert programmes. If there is a soloist, the chances are that he or she will perform a concerto, which leaves the final slot in the concert to be filled by a symphony or some other large-scale work. The formula is simple and, however often it seems to be going into abeyance, it always returns.

Pierre Boulez, in his New York days, devised concerts with two intervals, which looked like a characteristically radical change but usually turned  out to be a way of filling the time-lag required by the arduous reseating of the players necessitated by the kind of works Boulez liked to conduct.

Herbert von Karajan favoured the double-feature programme with one work before the interval and another, preferably louder, after it. Audiences were not fooled by such devices and the tripartite formula has continued to reassert itself, though I always admired Sir Thomas Beecham’s way of ringing the changes by secretly altering the running order and then announcing - as he once memorably did during the Edinburgh Festival - “I shall now conduct the work you imagine you have just heard.”

But Beecham was Beecham, a maverick who sometimes liked to end with an overture, or with Berlioz’s Trojan March (as he did in a marvellous concert I heard him give at the Paris Opera) or Chabrier’s sizzling Marche Joyeuse, or Massenet’s Last Sleep of the Virgin - things he was prone to call lollipops amd which always provided an element of glee or mischief. These days are long gone, and more’s the pity, though Robin Ticciati - admittedly more seriously - can still provide a touch of it in his concerts with the SCO, and so could Stephane Deneve  when he was in charge of the RSNO. It seems to go with a flair for French music, which Deneve automatically possessed and which Ticciati likewise has.

It could also be called the Haydn touch, which Beecham certainly commanded and which we used to refer to as swagger. In Ticciati lies our hope, though he’ll soon be off to Glyndebourne. Meanwhile I suspect we’ll find it in his concert with the SCO at the Usher Hall on  February 5, which opens  with the tingle of Boulez’s Memoriale, continues with  Mitsuko Uchida playing Ravel’s G Major Piano Concerto, throws in some Faure as an interlude, and ends with Haydn’s Clock Symphony. An event not to be missed, I’d say.
12 September 2014

A bit of this, a bit of that

As a large, modern, efficient symphony orchestra, the RSNO can fire its big guns - in other words perform such works as Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben as a repertory piece in a way it was once unable to.

Rightly, audiences now expect such showpieces, or blockbusters, to form a normal part of the winter season, and though  Strauss is almost absent this time, except for the desolate Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings, we can be sure that Ein Heldenleben  will not be missing for long  - though it would be good to think that the Domestic Symphony might be in the offing.

What we are getting instead are things such as Ravel’s La Valse, which are not  showpieces at all but, in this case, a powerful, deeply disturbing, masterly statement about the time in which it was written. We’re also getting Respighi’s Pines of Rome and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, old-fashioned colour pieces I now tend to regard as inessentials, and the radiant  splendour of Nielsen’s Inextinguishable Symphony.  A bit of this and a bit of that - including, from Sir Roger Norrington, a welcome dash of Haydn.

Not quite enough to suggest a  scrupulously structured season, but at least enough to please.The little touches of France, here and there, are things I look forward to. Are they  sufficient? In the absence of Stephane Denever, perhaps not. But they will do.
11 September 2-14

An omelette and a glass of wine

It is time that someone in Edinburgh had the courage - and the flair - to open a good  omelette bar. The menu would be simple and obvious. A handful of omelettes and a choice of a few nice French wines by the glass. Though wine experts say that eggs and wine do not mix - they say the same about wine and cheese -  such assertions can be safely ignored. As Elizabeth David said, they mix perfectly well if you are happy (as I usually am)  with the idea of combining them.

Apart from that, the premises would have to be right. Somewhere small, accessible, and intimate, somewhat French in feeling - omelettes being a French dish par excellence -  expert but unpretentious. The expertise could be the problem, but not necessarily. Elizabeth David once wrote a famous essay in which she commemorated a hotel on the Ile-St-Michel, just off the coast of Normandy, which reputedly made the best omelettes in the world.  The chef, Annette Poulard, worked unbelievable wonders, requiring her own special breed of hens, the best possible  French butter, a splash of top-quality cream, considerable sleight of hand, a perfect frying pan that was never to be washed, and even, some said claimed, a dash of foi e gras.

In fact her omelettes were not rich at all. In the end, after retirement, she disclosed that all she did was break some good eggs into a bowl, beat them well, put a good piece of butter in the pan, throw the eggs into it, and shake it constantly. “I am happy,” she added, “if this recipe pleases you.”

So there was no mystique, no secret ingredient,  nothing more than Frenchness and deftness. As a clumsy cook, who happens to love good omelettes, I know I could never compete. But is there not someone in Edinburgh who could show how,  serving  simple plain omelettes, herb omelettes, cheese omelettes, mushroom omelettes.The scope -  and, on my part,  the suggestion - is there. In Comiston Road, young Marie of the Marie Delices cafe restaurant, has scored a hit with her brilliant buckwheat crepes. Who is going to do likewise by opening  An Omelette and a Glass of Wine? The name is Elizabeth David’s of course.  But the same name, or something of the sort, could also be yours.
9 September 3014

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The two seasons

So which of the Edinburgh concert season grips you and to which, if either,  are you subscribing?   The Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s at the Usher Hall, with its emphasis, whenever possible, on what will sound good in these surroundings, or the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s, divided between the Usher Hall and Queen’s Hall, with programmes appropriate to each?

At one time the seasons were more clearly differentiated than they are now, with the SCO focusing on the territory - Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart -  to which it was better scaled than the RSNO. Gradually the RSNO, which was once by no means averse to performing Bach’s Brandenburg concertos or the St John Passion, retracted from the baroque and Haydn-Mozart repertoire.  Mahler, by then, was becoming the domain of big symphony orchestras,  and Schumann remained more their field of operation than that of the SCO. But now even this is changing. The SCO’s concerts are full of Schumann, and in the forthcoming season both orchestras are prominently featuring Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. It is a fascinating development, of a sort that shows how a small or smallish orchestra can be as  convincing in its playing of big symphonies as a “full” symphony orchestra.

Certainly the inroads an orchestra such as the SCO made an Brahms  have been startling - and a force, I would say, for the good, especially when the conductor has been of the calibre of Sir Charles Mackerras. Robin Ticciati’s Berlioz has been similarly revelatory. By reducing the old groundswell of cellos and double basses, such conductors have turned such composers into a different experience.

But what about Mahler? Will Robin Ticciati’s conducting of the SCO in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony in the Usher Hall on October 9 prove more rewarding than Sir Andrew Davis’s with the RSNO in the same surroundings on May 8, or sound disappointingly underweight?

Will the sudden great celestial   explosion in the slow movement  sound bigger and better when delivered by the RSNO than by the lighter-toned SCO? Theoretically it is bound to, but who can say?

And what, in that case, will happen to the finale? Will it sound like fine chamber music - as we can expect to happen in Ticciati’s performance with the SCO -  or will it sound merely listless, as sometimes happens even in weightier performances?

Far from treading on each other’s toes, the two performances could be just what we need in a single season, and there are good reasons for attending both of them.  They will certainly teach you more about the music, about how it can - or indeed should - sound. So which concert season is the one to book for? Ideally, I would dip. But it is a subject to which I shall be returning.
8 September  2010

The pizza path

Britain’s pizza chains are generally as bad as anywhere else’s outside Italy, but in Edinburgh, at least, there is good news. The justly-named La Favorita, an Italian-owned pizzeria in Leith Walk, has recently opened its own takeaway in Morningside Road. Delivery is not the quickest in town, which means that you need to place your order with foresight, but your pizzas arrive very cheerily in a bright yellow Fiat cinquecento.

La Favorita is not not just another pizzeria, nor is it the cheapest, though it has good offers, especially on Tuesdays - offerta Tuesday, as they call it. And it is really quite special, with log-fired ovens, excellent mozzarella, high-quality vegetables, and beautifully thin bases  as well as the choicest toppings among its assets - a real Italian job, in fact.

The pepperone pizza is fiercely fiery.  Starters include the indigenous riceballs of southern Italy.  There are polenta sticks, and even a well-priced selection of  interesting wines by the bottle. 

 And they are experimenting, not yet wholly successfully, with gluten-free pizza dough. Is gluten-free pizza a contradiction in terms? Not if La Favorita can prove otherwise. A more detailed report will follow. The Morningside takeway (let's  hope it develops into a restaurant) is at 350 Morningside Road, telephone 0131 447 4000.

6 September 2014

 

Obscuring the dates

If you think that chronological lucidity is vital to an orchestra’s concert brochure for the coming season, neither the Royal Scottish National Orchestra nor the Scottish Chamber Orchestra will win prizes this season for clarity of presentation.

Both brochures, in their different ways, are smart and snappy, though the RSNO’s is perhaps over-illustrated, and both contain the facts we want to find in them, even if these are not necessarily in the right order.  The SCO’s brochure, for instance, takes nine pages to reach the opening concert, though other concerts are listed in detail before that. In contrast the RSNO does rather better, coming to the point by announcing its opening programme on page five, and not confusing the issue beforehand with details of events coming later in the season. Yet  the RSNO’s opening concert, on its first  appearance in the brochure, does not stand out. You scarcely notice that the season has begun

Am I merely being pernickety? Perhaps, but a concert brochure should be a precise, sharp-edged, unconfusing statement of intent. The SCO’s opening concert, which is announced belatedly on page nine, is an attractive, eye-catching, not unserious full-page spread about the concert’s contents, linking the two works being performed, and explaining why.

As planned by Jonathan Mills, the Edinburgh Festival’s annual brochure has tended to be rather more strikingly presented, and this year it was refreshingly clear, though details of when the Festival began and ended were not perhaps as prominent as they should have been, with the closing concert in particular almost apologetically listed.

But the RSNO and SCO brochures, at least, contain plenty of good things, even if the RSNO seems excessively fixated by glossy pictures of how athletically the players spend their spare time - do we really want to know? - and by their conductor’s similar fondness for sport.

To details of the programmes themselves, and what’s worth hearing, I shall return in a later blog.
4 September 2014

The syllabus

After the Edinburgh Festival was over, there was a time when we used to wait with  something less than bated breath  for the unveiling of the Scottish National Orchestra’s winter season. If Karl Rankl or his successor Hans Swaorowsky was in charge, with one routine programme following another, this was not exciting news.

The syllabus, as it was sternly called, looked drab. Not until these plodding Viennese routiniers were succeeded in the1960s by Alexander Gibson did the concerts waken up and Sibelius - whose works had been banned by the churlish  Karl Rankl - began to form part of the programme planning, with Gibson doing all seven symphonies in his opening season.

Th Edinburgh Festival, which itself had seemed to be losing impetus  around this time, likewise suddenly galvanised itself by the appointment of Lord Harewood  as director, with his invention of themed festivals - like one-man shows as   Christopher Grier put it in The Scotsman.

Starting with Schoenberg, he proceeded to  Shostakovich, Tippett, Berlioz, and Boulez. Such things had never been done before in Edinburgh but they were now happening with a vengeance and transforming the Festival into a more bracingly adult event.

The knock-on effect was that the winter seasons similarly grew more exciting and Scottish Opera was founded.This was Scotland’s glorious moment, and it was seized by everybody who cared. Today the RSNO’s brochure is infinitely more colourful, but can the same be said of the actual programmes?  It’s a moot point.
3  September 2014 

How to survive the Festival

In the old days, if I may call them that, the week before  the start of the Edinburgh Festival was a time of anticipation. Princes Street, as you walked along it, seemed to have new atmosphere. Our batteries were about to be recharged. Exhilaration was in the air.

But the Festival was a much more clear-cut event at that time than it is now. The Fringe had not begun to sweep like a great tidal wave over everything in its path. Proceeding down the Royal Mile, you did not want to turn and flee.Though there were new faces everywhere, they did not overcrowd the city as we knew it.

Today the “official” festival has to be called the EIF to differentiate it from the rest. Too much has become not enough. The closing concert, with Giulini to conduct it, used to be an event. Now it tends to seem like just another concert.

Again, in the old days, I used to be asked what I planned toto do after the Festival. Keep my spirits up  was an immediate way to face the problem. Go to another festival was the way I solved it every year. It was one of the good things about being a music critic.  I was paid to go elsewhere and write about it. So, more often than not, I went straight to the Berlin Festival for operatic treats to match Edinburgh’s. The best year of all was when I spent a week in Berlin, then flew to Vienna to join the Scottish National Orchestra on its first major foreign tour, writing every night for three weeks, phoning my reviews to Edinburgh (a greatly time-consuming process in the days before computers) and chronicling the orchestra’s adventures  everywhere.

Peter Diamand once told me that he was baffled that that was how I wanted to lead my life after the Edinburgh Festival. He himself went to Peebles Hydro to recover. But then, as festival director, he had tensions and  obligations very different from mine.
2 September 2014

It is sad that the BBC SSO's future may again be in some doubt, but it has been in this situation before. In the early 1970s as one of its efforts to reduce costs, the mandarins at the BBC in London produced a document on the future of its music output which proposed, I seem to recall, the disbanding of 3 of the orchestras, the SSO being one. There was a huge public outcry as a result of which little if anything changed.

One solution discussed at that time was a formal association with Scottish Opera whose continued growth meant the SNO was no longer able to provide most of its orchestral requirements. The BBC SSO was an obvious solution and the orchestra did find itself playing for a series of performances of La Traviata conducted by its then Principal Conductor James Loughran. Unfortunately for the orchestra management in Queen Margaret Drive, its somewhat archaic Musicians' Union regulations meant that considerable additional payments had to be made to musicians for work outside the studio. Scottish Opera simply could not afford to continue down that route and tripartite negotiations failed to find a satisfactory solution.

So a freelance ensemble was formed from a nucleus of Leonard Friedman's Scottish Baroque Ensemble, the Sottish Philharmonia. From their ranks would soon emerge the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.



Posted by John Duffus to Conrad Wilson on Classical Music and Food at 31 August 2014 20:40

One out of nine

Of the Edinburgh Festival’s nine directors since its founding in 1947, only one, the ninth, Jonathan Mills, has been a composer. Until yesterday he refrained from employing the festival as a vehicle for his own music, but the theme of his final festival - the response to war by those with creative gifts - proved an irresistible opportunity for a performance of his  own Sandakan Threnody, a lament for the victims of the Japanese in the prison camp of that name in Borneo, some seventy years ago.

First heard at the Sydney Opera House in 2004,  it reached the Usher Hall last night in a performance by  the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Edinburgh Festival Chorus under Ilan Volkov’s lucid conductorship.  Coupled with what could be called its startling obverse, Janacek’s great, exultant  Glagolitic Mass, it formed the first part of an evening which certainly required the explosiveness of Janacek to bring the final concert of the festival to a resounding close.

Described by Mills as an oratorio, the Sandakan Threnody was conspicuously  more severe, with the singers  (somewhat underused in oratorio terms) supplying a sort of wailing wall, while  the orchestra provided more vivid sounds of its own, filled with sudden, striking  flashes of instrumental detail in the atmospheric manner of other Australian composers whose music has come to Britain.

In a work whose other effects seemed more drab - the closing lullaby had none of the balm poured on the closing pages of Britten's War Requiem - this was welcome and interesting. But the score as a whole did not quite hang together. It was certainly a threnody, but was it an essential one?

The exuberant outburst of the Glagolitic Mass after the interval, complete with a splendidly declamatory quartet of soloists and Thomas Trotter bringing bright shafts of colour from the renovated Usher Hall organ (never has that gargantuan instrument sounded better) it was the glorious resolution the concert needed.

Orchestra and chorus flung themselves into the splintery, marvellously compressed music with impressive abandon. The BBC SSO sounded like what it is now becoming:  a great orchestra. But what will happen to it if the referendum result is a yes? That was the ominous question which hung over the entire performance.
31 August2014

Nights at the Trojans

The opera critic of the Daily Telegraph, reviewing the Edinburgh Festival production of Berlioz’s The Trojans from the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, found little to write in its favour - the Guardian, giving the whole show only two stars, found even less. The man  sitting  in the next  seat to the Telegraph critic in the Festival Theatre, sharing the critical opinion, muttered during the interval his own form of deprecation.  ”If this was Scottish  Opera,” he said,  “you’d think it was pretty good. But for this festival you expect something  better.”

In fact there was a time when Scottish Opera did things quite as well as, and quite often better than, other companies appearing at the festival. Its first production of The Trojans, in Peter Diamand’s sterling years as director, was an impressive success. So was its second, staged outwith the festival. Its festival presentations of Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers, Berg’s Wozzeck, Gluck’s Alceste, Janacek’s Cunning Little Vixen,   Wagner’s Die Walkure, Beethoven’s Fidelio, Britten’s Peter Grimes (in a Colin Graham production supervised by the composer himself), an unnerving Turn of the Screw, and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin were all world-class events  in the company’s earlier history.

Its  festival debut in 1967 with an imaginative production of The Rake’s Progress during  Peter Diamand’s Stravinsky year, won the recognition it deserved. Lord Harewood, in his introduction to a book I wrote about the company,  said that Scottish Opera  had speedily attained festival standard. You could say, he added, where it was not yet perhaps quite as good as another company appearing at the festival, and you could say where it was better, but it was unquestionably of international class.  

At that time the company’s  attainments spoke for themselves. Its aspirations were  never in doubt. The London critics, dissatisfied with much of what they saw down south, came north and raved. This was a company that was going places, and we all knew it.
30 August 2014

Operatic reputations

To say whether Jonathan Mills  has been an operatically successful director of the Edinburgh Festival is as difficult as to say if he has been a failure. What is easier to assert is  that - in comparison with the festival’s great operatic  years - those of Lord Harewood and Peter Diamand - he has not staged nearly enough opera - which is, after all,  the mainstay of every great international festival, and has  not always  chosen carefully enough.

Strauss’s Capriccio, hideously transferred to the Nazi years, was a total disaster, but Die Frau ohne Schatten, staged by Valery Gergiev and his Mariinsky company, was deservedly a hit. Too many other things - not that there have been that many of them - have fallen between these extremes.

Both Harewood and Diamand ensured that, of the festival’s 21 nights, eighteen were filled by opera, Mills’s tally, even with a proper opera house at his disposal, has been nothing like that.

But the deciding factor - success or otherwise - will surely be Berlioz’s the Trojans. Scottish Opera did it thrillingly in the days when our national company was a real feature of the festival, which it no longer is. But The Trojans presented by the Mariinsky augurs well. Mills’s operatic reputation hangs in the balance.
28 August 2013

Sensational strings

The Scottish Ensemble’s Edinburgh Festival concert at the Queen’s Hall, to be repeated in Inverness, Dundee, and the Maltings at Aldeburgh, was  a sensational success.

To hear Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro, Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia, and Tippett’s vibrant Double Concerto in a single programme was not only a revelation, but to hear them so adoringly and eloquently played made the event all the more rewarding.  Popular though they deservedly are, these three milestones of British music for strings are seldom heard as an entity, made all the more  of a treat on this occasion by the inclusion of two masterly scores from the southern hemisphere as perfectly chosen and thoroughly appropriate interludes.

The presence of a group of young players identified as Commonwealth Strings, admirably partnering the Scottish ones,  added to the excellence, making the concert seem all the more unified. This was beautifully attuned playing, with the SE’s infinitely responsive Jonathan Morton as principal violin, swaying to every fluctuation of the music.

 Peter Sculthorpe's String Sonata No 3, filled with the fierce sounds and atmospheres of the Austrian Outback, and the premiere of the New Zealand composer Gareth Farr’s Relict Furies, held their place to perfection amid their British counterparts.

For Sculthorpe, who died a few weeks ago, the sonata  was the most  seering of tributes. But Farr’s elegiac cantata, which began like an exquisite extension of the Vaughan Williams fantasy which had preceded it, before moving into a more Mahlerish world of melancholy intensity, was no less fine.
27 August 2014
  

The editors in my life (13)

My first assignment as London cultural correspondent of The Scotsman in the 1960s was to review a comedy starring Iain Carmichael about an American  drama critic who carried scraps of paper, each of them containing a scribbled quip, around in his pockets.

It was not very funny but it was a portent because, as things turned out, I was not yet in a position to write reviews of London music in the paper. The Scotsman’s long-established London music critic, the lofty but affable John Amis, had decided not yet to withdraw from writing reviews  in order to concentrate on learning to become a Wagnerian heldentenor in Germany  - despite distinguished teachers he never succeeded - and had been privately pleading with the The Scotsman’s editor Alistair Dunnett to let him go on writing a bit longer.  John was  a good critic and Dunnett, a kindly man, relented. Moreover John was a wit whose reviews I had first read and enjoyed when I was living in Amsterdam, where the paper was readily available in Dutch shops.

Those -  thanks to Dunnett’s enterprise  - were the days when The Scotsman had developed its great  air mail edition and you could buy it in Paris, Marseille, Brussels, Rome, Germany, New York, Ottawa, or - so it seemed-wherever you happened to be. This is, of course, no longer the case.

John’s reviews were printed in the first edition and, with luck, in later ones also. I still remember the first time he wrote about a programme of music by Vivaldi, a composer far less familiar at that time than he is now. John was introducing him to readers with an opening paragraph which,  as I remember, opened as follows:  “One Vivaldi concerto in a concert. Compelling.  Two Vivaldi concertos. Attention retained.   Three Vivaldi concertos. Boredom. Four Vivaldi concertos. Sleep.”

What an achievement to be the first to say it! (It did not matter if he was wrong).   No wonder he held on to his job! In fact, Dunnett had correctly surmised that in my prentice period on The Scotsman I would have quite enough to do writing musical features and profiles, drama reviews (there was no London drama critic on the paper at the time), art reviews, think pieces, and attending press conferences, as well as a spot of foreign travel.  Concert reviews would come, but not yet.

 In the circumstances, though inevitably disappointed, I was not unhappy.   I was attending first nights of all major plays. I was interviewing actors, painters, instrumentalists, singers, and conductors. I had press tickets for concerts even if I was not reviewing them. I met Judy Garland at a press line-up in the Savoy Hotel. I lunched with Alec Guinness at Wheeler's - and it was Guinness who paid. I dined with Pierre Monteux in the Normandie hotel in Knightsbridge and when I asked him what it was like to have conducted the first performance of The Rite of Spring in 1913, he collapsed and had to be carried out. I spent a morning with Muriel Spark in Peckham, long before she moved to Italy,  and noticed how daintily she walked and how obliquely she spoke.

Writing reviews of plays - all the latest Peter Hall productions with the Shakespeare company, at one of which Harold Pinter, sitting in the stalls, shouted at someone in the circle to shut up - and heard from Tom Fleming, walking along the banks of the Avon at Stratford, of his unfulfilled plan to build a Scottish National Theatre on Cramond Island. Every day produced something new and I wrote about it in The Scotsman in a Saturday column that had been created for me.

Once in a while, Dunnett got cross, especially if I wrote about an artist who claimed that Scotland had made him an outcast but that his talents were recognised in London.  Dunnett would have none of that, and I was told where my responsibilities lay. But otherwise he looked benignly on what I wrote, not least if it was about Stanley Baxter at the Comedy Theatre, or the hair-raising scat singer Annie Ross (Jimmy Logan’s sister) or the droll comedian Ivor Cutler lying on a sofa in his dressing room at the Royal Court and singing, just for me, his poker-faced ditty, “Get away from the wall. It’s my wall.”

For the moment, the absence of concert reviewing did not distress me - or not too much. Its time would come, though I had to leave London to make it happen
25 August 2014

Strings worth hearing

To hear three of Britain’s most masterly works for strings - Elgar's Introduction and Allegro, Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia,and Tippett’s Double Concerto - at the Queen’s Hall onTuesday morning will be a special treat. No doubt it has been done before, though I cannot think that I  have ever experienced it, and the combined Scottish and Commonwealth forces who are sharing the programme will be in themselves enough to make  this concert an unique event.

Moreover the posthumous tribute to the great Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe -who died in his eighties a week or two ago - will add to this morning concert’s value, as also, let us hope, will the premiere  of something from New Zealand, Gareth Farr’s Relict Furies for mezzo-soprano and strings, commissioned by the Edinburgh Festival.

All that’s missing, it seems to me, is the tenderness of Elgar’s early Serenade - as well as the crackle of Britten’s Frank Bridge Variations -  though the inclusion of these would result in a concert of improbable length.

The performances,we can be sure, will be technically streamlined and will carry a powerful emotional charge, with Sculthorpe's sonata No 3 as a fiery rarity to remember him by. In other words, don’t miss it.
24 August 2014

Haddo days

June Gordon, as Lady Aberdeen insisted on calling herself when conducting her choir, orchestra, and opera company, was one of Scotland’s most stalwart musicians, determined to present works - Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, Bach’s B minor Mass, Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, Delius’s Mass of Life - others were intimidated by.

 Haddo House Opera and Haddo House Choral Society, her two great Aberdeenshire creations, both flourished in her hands. Though her conducting technique had a certain rigidity, she tackled problems head-on. Whatever the challenge, she knew how to meet it. As a critic I admired her enormously, though well aware that she could be difficult.

 The Haddo Hall, where most of her performances took place, was essentially a large wooden chalet, its walls hung with sledges, a sort of Aldeburgh Festival auditorium of the north. It was no surprise that Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears liked performing there - I heard them do Schumann’s Dichterliebe - but so did many other stars from farther south.  Janet Baker sang there regularly. The conductor Andrew Davis, like June a dedicated Elgarian, was in early days a chorister in her performances of The Kingdom and The Apostles, done in a single weekend.
Leon Goossens was principal oboe in her orchestra. Experienced brass players took the train from London to act as reinforcements. Her husband, Lord Haddo, sang in the choir.

Haddo House, in rural Aberdeenshire, was not exactly easy to reach but the trip was invariably worth the effort. The first time I went there she had recruited Alexander Gibson to conduct Britten’s still new-minted War Requiem in the 1960s, though she felt, I suspected, that she could have done it just as well, if not better, herself.

 Performers and critics in those days, including  William Mann from The Times,  were invited to stay at Haddo House - this was before it had become a National Trust property - and there were invariably interesting visitors, among them the Queen Mother on one occasion.  Young Prince Charles came over from Gordonstoun  to play in the cello section, and once left his royal toothbrush behind, as I myself did a pair of cherished silk socks, which were sent home to me in a plain brown envelope.

The night before a performance there was whisky in the library and on the day itself a sumptuous buffet lunch. As a critic I faced the problem of finding a phone from which to dictate my review without being eavesdropped upon.  Performers congregated in  the breakfast room the following morning, where with luck you might run into Britten and Pears, as I did the day after Dichterliebe, though talking to Janet Baker was no less welcome.


What has brought all this back to mind is the Edinburgh Festival’s forthcoming concert performance of Rossini’s last operatic masterpiece, William Tell, which the Turin Opera is presenting under Giananfrea Noseda’s expert conductorship at the Usher Hall next week.  It will be a very special Festival event, though of course June Gordon did it in a full staging at Haddo years ago.

Though she was never an avant-gardist - Stockhausen and Nono were not for her - she was always prepared to conduct difficult classical rarities, as William Tell was and still is. So she did that vast four-hour masterpiece, as I remember, more or less uncut and made it work. Her taste in opera was admirable, but in terms of production she went by the book.  A composer’s stage directions were there to be observed, not cast aside, and when Verdi wanted a horse in Macbeth she gave him one.  At Haddo House this  was not a difficult demand to fulfil.

Gloriana, which Scottish Opera has never staged , was her first big  Britten production, with the splendid Judith Pearce as Queen Elizabeth. and her first Puccini was Turandot, with a row of severed heads as decor.  June was one of Scottish Opera’s official advisers, and  chided the company when it got out of hand, as it did when Alexander Gibson and Peter Hemmings were replaced by controversial successors. Though Haddo’s forces continue to flourish, June died in 2009. Her memory lives on.
22 August 2014

Exciting or exasperating?

Apart from West Side Story, which was his masterpiece, most of Leonard Bernstein’s music was mediocre and often pretentious - not unlike his qualities as a conductor. Whether the RSNO manages to galvanise his sprawling Kaddish Symphony at the Usher Hall on Sunday remains to be seen. In his recording of it, he failed  to do so himself. But ever since he first appeared at the Edinburgh Festival, conducting one of the French orchestras in the 1940s and standing on what looked like a table, he often seemed too big for his boots.

When he reappeared in Edinburgh in Peter Diamand’s period as director, he was accompanied from the Waverley Station by bagpipes but was unfortunately marched to the wrong hotel. Though his two performances of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony were impressive, his subsequent appearance conducting his own Chichester Psalms, for which he demanded to replace the Edinburgh Festival Chorus with a choir of his own choice, was not.  Nor did his decision to add Ravel’s Bolero as an encore directly after La Valse seem anything more than an extravagant mistake

But that was Bernstein - the  superb musical  educator who  in Vienna transformed Tchaikovsky’s Symphonie Pathetique into a sixty-minute trudge, who notoriously distorted Elgar’s Enigma Variations almost out of recognition, who could make Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony the most tedious  of experiences  and announced to the audience, before conducting the same composer’s quiet and haunting Symphony No 14 that listeners would find it  sleep-inducing (I’m glad it was Carlo Maria Giulini who conducted it in Edinburgh).

Bernstein performances were examples of brilliant conductorial miming. But if you closed your eyes to them, what did you hear?  Rather less, I would say, than you saw. Some heard this and some heard that. If you were lucky, or receptive, you got the full Bernstein thrill.  If not, not. I must admit that I was not always lucky.

As for the Kaddish Symphony, if you are going to hear the RSNO perform it,  let me wish you luck.  He obviously will not be there to  conduct it. But whether that is to the work’s benefit all we can do is hope for the best.
21 August 2014

The editors in my life (12)

The chance to become The Scotsman’s first cultural correspondent in London came swiftly in the form of a letter from Tom Dawson, the paper’s new London editor. Talk of such an appointment had been much in the air, he said, and he wondered if I would like to have a talk with him.

I must not delude myself into saying, at this point,  that I thought  the appointment had been created specially for me.  In fact, as I was to discover later, it had been “in the air” for some time, and had originally been offered to Sir John Betjeman, who turned it down because the pay  was not high enough. The Scotsman was a distinguished newspaper, but it was also a canny one. In the end, Betjeman’s loss was my gain. My talk with Tom Dawson proved fruitful. The job would involve a weekly interview, along with reviews of major London musical events.

A starting date was agreed, and I returned to the BBC news room to deliver my resignation to the senior news editor, a man called Rumsom, whom I had previously met only once in the course of a year at Broadcasting House. Rumsom (nicknamed Rummy) smiled and reminded me that I had a contract. This, I was aware, was on its borderline, and Rumsom smiled again when I said so. He was not sure, he said, that he could release me. People did not just leave the BBC.  For a minute, he continued to be obstructive, pointing out the BBC’s need for me and the desirability that I continue. There was also the money element to be considered. Altogether things seemed to be growing ominous. Then he smiled again  and agreed that I could leave.

Broadcasting House in central London, for all its fame and architectural handsomeness, was not a place I would miss. The Scotsman’s cramped and cluttered little office on the edge of Fleet  Street, was much more my sort of scene.  Built like a lighthouse, with one smallish room on every floor (but at least, unlike the original Edinburgh office on North Bridge; with a lift to take us up and down) it was immediately appealing.

 My salary had dropped but my status had risen. The newsroom, housing the editorial staff, was near the top, with cubicles for the editor and two two women writers. There were desks for Richard Kershaw, the diplomatic correspondent, Michael Lake, the industrial correspondent, Michael Leapman, who had become the new commonwealth correspondent, Richard Jerman, who ran a sort of cottage industry as features writer, and other specialists.

Hermione, the secretary, sat in the midst of us.  Anita Christophersen, the fashion writer, had the privacy of a cubicle. The desk I was allotted was in the window. Political writers were on the floor above.  We were a team, though most of us would move on before long.  There was a spare desk for Edinburgh colleagues on London  assignments, which happened less often than I expected.  This  would be my life for the next three years.
20 August 3014

Hit or miss?

I was sorry to miss Ute Lemper’s Edinburgh Festival programme in the Usher Hall last week. Though the auditorium is a bit big for this singer and  the things she sings, Olympia in Paris -
one-time home of Edith Piaf - is not exactly bijou either.

I should have considered the concert a must for another reason also,  because it brought back Lawrence Foster - a conductor bafflingly dismissed by one critic as “drab” - who is an old friend of the Edinburgh Festival though more recently connected with the Monte Carlo Opera. Marseille, Monpellier, Barcelona and other Mediterranean places.

I recall a dapper performance by Foster and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of Tippett’s First  Symphony in the Usher Hall in Peter Diamand’s time, and he was once one of the RSNO’s most welcome and adventurous  guest conductors during its winter season.

In Foster’s hands last week, in a concert featuring a rich portion of the Lemper repertoire, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra was surely much more than the mere “backing group” some critics described it as. The fact that the scrupulously compiled items started with Kurt Weill’s Kleine Dreigroschenoper and later included a scintillating dash of Stravinsky surely spoke for  itself, as Lemper’s authentic selection of songs - even if she is now past her prime - must also have done.

Perhaps I am wrong and the evening did not work out to perfection. But Lemper remains an impressive talent, and so does the now septuagenarian Foster. Let us hope he comes back soon.
19 August 201

Another cup of coffee

“And  what do  you think of Nescafe?”  The question is inevitable, and simply answered. It’s better, I say, than a bad cup of coffee. My reply implies that it’s a different drink, but perfectly drinkable on its own terms, which is pretty much my attitude to it.

Stale, thin coffee, however real, is horrible. Nescafe is preferable to that. Yet somehow I seldom drink it.  Proper coffee is not  difficult to make, though it can be fiddly and time-consuming.  If I want something quick I drink filtered Rombout (which, I understand, should be pronounced Rombowt, not Romboo, because its manufacturers, based in Belgium,  are Flemish and not French).

Though it’s expensive - almost  £3 for a ten-cup  package - it’s readily available in large supermarkets, and can be bought in various flavours - the Italian is good.   The problem is that it’s not very strong, though you can improve it by using less water, and making it is simplicity itself.

Big supermarkets also sell their own brands of filter coffee for filtering straight into the cup.  These are perfectly adequate - the Tesco French coffee is indeed quite startlingly strong.  If you fancy a quick pick-me-up, this is one way to do it.
18 August 2014

Coffee dependence

The Swedes, as The Guardian informed us yesterday, call it “fiska,: which is a more interesting name than “coffee break” and, by the sound of things, a more interesting communal office activity.

But the interest, I suspect, lies more in the conversation than in the coffee itself. This aspect is underplayed in The Guardian’s article, though it’s something I myself would rank very high. Swedish coffee, in my experience, is not the most enticing in the world, and although it might not mar a coffee break it would not necessarily improve it either. At any rate, I would want to know more than The Guardian divulges.

In Edinburgh I no longer work in an office - where I used to take pleasure in making coffee for colleagues, including the occasional editor - I have a few favourite cafes where I like to drink a coffee with family or friends. At home my breaks are more often solitary - they tend to be screen breaks from my computer - but they may also be with friends or family if  anyone is around.

The conversation is important but so, in my view, is the coffee. If I am making it myself, it’s likely to involve good fresh beans and a French-style cafetiere of appropriate size. I prefer this, on the whole, to a stove-top espresso pot - which  is something I also like (and prefer to small domestic espresso machines, which are too often disappointing, I find).

But my appliance of choice is at present the very clever plastic Aero-press, which can be bought through Amazon in the form of a coffee-making kit, complete with an accompanying measuring spoon, stirrer, filter papers and a packet of good ground coffee.

It’s an amplification of the German Melitta method, whereby you traditionally pour hot water through finely-ground  coffee in a conical filter and flask. Instead, with an Aero-press, you press the hot water through a sort of vacuum tube (at the bottom of which the coffee is waiting) directly into  a cup. It’s simple to operate and the result is genuinely flavourful. If used in conjunction with a good-quality milk frother - I employ an admittedly quite expensive  but beautifully designed and efficient Severin, also available through Amazon - it gives you a superb cappuccino and, as my wife confirms, an equally desirable latte.

 Good conversation is dependent on the quality of the accompanying coffee. Good coffee is enhanced by good conversation. For the moment, I think I have my answer to the fiska challenge.
17 August 2014

Dutch perfectionist

The Edinburgh Festival, during the past month or so, has lost some of its great old stars.  The immaculate Lorin Maazel is destined never to return.  Now, at the age of 79, Frans Bruggen has also died.

First glimpsed as a spry young recorder player, darting on to the platform of the Freemasons’ Hall for a morning recital in the 1960s, during Peter Diamand’s period as Festival director,  he developed into one of the great Dutch conductors, far less flamboyant than Maazel, but impeccable in his ability to bring a classical purity of line and balance to everything he touched.

Recorder players are seldom sensationalists, though Bruggen did perform miracles with the encore piece, requiring two alto recorders to be played simultaneously, which his fellow Dutchman, Louis Andriessen, composed for him. He also inspired the vanguard Italian Luciano Berio to produce one  of the triumphs of modern recorder music in his masterly Geste in 1966.

But at that time Bruggen had still to show his skills as a conductor, which he later revealed in various concerts with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in Edinburgh and Glasgow. By then he looked gaunt and fragile, even spectral, conducting from a stool on the podium with a minimum of gesture.

 Yet, as in his recordings with his own Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, created  from young specialist players, about sixty of them in all, these were performances of the utmost finesse. The pristine beauty of tone he obtained in the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, his three great loves, will live on in our memories, as will the way he conducted Mozart;s Clarinet Concerto, fortunately preserved on disc.

Bruggen's was a career that went several ways, because he was also a great academic and baroque scholar, in Europe and America.  In his quiet way, he will be hugely missed.
16 August 2014

The editors in my life (11)

On informing Alastair Dunnett, editor of The Scotsman, of my  dissatisfaction with life as a sub-editor in the BBC’s London newsroom in the 1960s, I received an instant response.  Though he knew that music was my metier, and that I wished to get back to it in some way, he offered me what he hoped would be a desirable alternative. The post of commonwealth correspondent had fallen vacant in the paper’s London office. Would I be interested? As bait, he said he could offer some attractive foreign jaunts.

Dunnett, the most artful of newspaper editors,  believed that if you could do one job as a journalist you might be attracted to another.  The Scotsman’s Edinburgh-based music critic, Christopher Grier, could be a perfect diplomatic correspondent - or so Dunnett said to me, though he never actually tried to tempt Christopher in that direction.  The trouble, as he realised, might lie in convincing Christopher that it was a possibility.

Though I knew little about the commonwealth, or had any special interest in it, I accepted his suggestion that it would be worth my while visiting the paper’s London office, impressively positioned on the corner of Fleet Street and Bouverie Street, and having a talk with the London editor, Eric Mackay. I’d never met him before, but feeling that I had nothing to lose I made an  appointment to see him.

Our encounter was potentially momentous, because Mackay  - though nobody knew it at the time - was destined to become editor of The Scotsman in succession to Dunnett.  Tall, sombre, black-haired, with a conspicuous limp, he was an intimidating  presence, but he listened calmly to my nervous prattle about why I wanted the job.  Staring penetratingly at me as I spoke, he reminded me of the actor John Le Mesurier playing the role of a weary High Court judge.

Asked by him for my philosophy on the commonwealth, I could think of nothing original or  constructive to say. But suddenly he grinned - and Mackay’s Aberdonian grin was, as I was to discover, one of hist most likeable features.  “Well,” he said, “Mr Dunnett has assured me that you would be suitable for the job, so it’s yours for the asking.” Then he mused for a moment, while torrential rain poured down his window overlooking the Daily Express and Daily Telegraph offices across the road. “But,” he added, “I can’t help getting the impression that you don’t really want it.”

Both of us then relaxed and began talking about music and the cultural scene in London. He counselled patience. A more appropriate job for me might be in prospect.  He assured me that he would get back in touch.

 Christmas was coming and I wished him a merry one. He did not look very merry. Indeed, as I left the room he gave me another of his lingering stares and I resigned myself to hearing no more from him.   The letter, when it came, was from someone else, for by then Mackay had been moved to Edinburgh as Dunnett’s assistant editor and I was to become, to my surprise, the paper’s London-based cultural correspondent. In the most harmonious circumstances, I had joined the firm.
15 August 2014

A revolutionary orchestra

Though Ivan Fischer and his great Budapest Festival Orchestra will not be in Edinburgh this year, they are giving two concerts at the London Proms. The broadcasts of these, on August 25 and 26, will unfortunately clash with Andras Schiff’s piano recital and the concert performance of Rossini’s William Tell at the Usher Hall, but if you are free either night I would advise you to tune into
Radio 3.

The Budapesters, it’s true, are players you have to see as well as hear. Their long line of double basses, stretched across the back of the platform, is a visual glory as well as a grand groundswell of tone. Even when grouped in small clusters on the fringes of the orchestra, as they were for Mozart’s Requiem one year in the organ gallery of the Usher Hall, they make a memorable impression.

The flexible platform positioning of this orchestra is one of its special elements. Fischer has recently begun  to invite members of the public to start sitting amid the players in order to gain  different perspectives of the music. When. also recently, he announced that the days of conventional symphony orchestras  were numbered unless they agreed to change. you felt inclined to believe him.

So how will Brahms’s third and fourth symphonies sound when he conducts them side by side at the Royal Albert Hall  on August 26? Not like you ever heard them before, that's for sure. He conducted the SCO many times, and appeared at the Edinburgh Festival.  Schoenberg considered Brahms a genuinely revolutionary composer. Ivan Fischer should help us to see why.
13 August 2014

Death of a maverick

With death of Peter Sculthorpe at the age of 85, Australia has lost its greatest, most progressive composer. By chance his Sonatina No 3 for strings, a minor work in a vast output, is due to be heard at the Queen’s Hall on August 25 in an Edinburgh Festival  concert by the Scottish Ensemble and Commonwealth Strings, but here in Britain he remains an elusive genius, his finest works still an unknown quantity.

Yet it was at the Usher Hall in 1974, during Peter Diamand’s regime as Festival director, that the Sydney Symphony Orchestra made its first visit to Scotland with Sir Charles Mackerras as conductor and Sculthorpe’s scorching Sun Music IV  as the centrepiece of its opening programme.

The title Sun Music - also the  name of his absorbing autobiography - came to personify him as a composer, without making him much better known here, despite the fact that Faber became his publisher.  What went  wrong?  Not necessarily his Australian braggadocio, which led him to claim that the future of music lay in the Southern Hemisphere rather than in Europe, just as its past, he asserted, had its foundations in Australia.

His  struggles to  compose at the age of seven resulted in his Tasmanian piano teacher smacking him because she considered them irrelevant to music as she recognised it. His use of ancient Australian instruments, including the 1000-year-old didgeridoo, in his orchestration  has inevitably limited the performance of some of his works outside Australia.

The bizarre sonorities of his eighteen string quartets - major works in his output - have likewise proved problematic, with one critic comparing the sound of his sixth quartet to that of an elephant dragging barbed wire across a corrugated iron roof.

But the premiere of his opera Rites of Passage, commissioned for the opening of the Sydney Opera House in 1973, was delayed for a year for other reasons. The simple answer was that Sculthorpe had not completed it. The precise facts were that he had fallen out with his librettist, the great Australian novelist Patrick White, in a dinner-table brawl that resulted in a valuable Sidney Nolan painting being spattered with food.

In the end, the work was performed with Sculthorpe’s  own libretto. It  still awaits its Covent Garden premiere. Too much of Sculthorpe’s music has yet to prove exportable. Seize your chance, then, and listen to his Sonatina for Strings in Edinburgh.
12 August 2014

Bonjour Conrad!

From Marie, proprietress of Marie Delices, has come this response to my blog about her Edinburgh creperie yesterday. In it, she outlines some of her plans for what she is cooking for her Comiston customers. All the more reason, I would say, for lunching there and savouring this authentic taste of France.


Bonjour Conrad!

Oh thank you so much again for this review! Really, it is sooo encouraging and I’m so glad to see that you enjoy coming to Marie Delices. I’m still working on my new menus, trying to add constantly new things. Yesterday for example I’ve made a savoury cake made with smoked salmon, cheese and chives, served with some rocket leaves. I also made little cakes which I called gateaux incroyables because they’re gluten free, dairy free, and sugar free, and they were delicious! It took me a lot of time to create such cakes as it was a very big challenge for me, but I’m so happy because they’re really good and I didn't even use any sugar substitutes. I try to satisfy a lot of customers with allergies or intolerances. So I keep trying to offer new things!

Many thanks again and looking forward to see you and your family again in Marie Delices.

A tres bientot!

Kind regards,

Marie

The editors in my life (10)

As I soon realised, my job as a BBC newsroom sub-editor in London in the nineteen-sixties could be no more than a dimly interesting stop-gap.

Basically the work, though carried out by people of considerable intelligence and experience, was little more than secretarial. A senior editor would bring me a printed news-agency news story and read out, in his own words, the bits he wanted  to incorporate in the next radio news bulletin. I would then dictate his words, as accurately as I could remember them, to a typist, who would pass them back to the editor.

If the result differed in any way from what he had said to me in the first place, it would be returned to me for correction. Then I would pass it back to him. It was a tedious process, with no scope for creativity, and it continued on a punishing time schedule involving three-day stints lasting from ten in the morning until ten at night. As  your reward you were then given three days off, followed by an even more soul-destroying three-day stint from ten at night until ten in the morning, with a further three days off in compensation.

The night shift, which was spent assembling the early morning news bulletin, was even drearier than the day one. If you were lucky you could rest your head on your desk for a few minutes and snatch some sleep, but this tended to be interrupted by the crotchety night editor, a man called Beevers who accused you of slacking.

The one break in the monotony was the opportunity each morning to hand the bulletin, story by story, to the news reader. If the reader happened to be the famously jovial Frank Phillips - who would remind you never to refer to the chief constable of Kent in case he tripped over the pronunciation - all was well. But the icily aloof Alvar Lidell’s rebukes were less harmonious. Hating it if a sub-editor stood directly behind him as he read, he would ominously switch off the microphone and order you to  shift position to where he could see you. For me the best moment of the morning came when, at 10am, I was released from Broadcasting House and could stroll down to Piccadilly for coffee and croissants at Fortnum and Mason before heading home to bed.

Yet I made friends during these endless months in the galleys, as Verdi described his early life as an opera composer, and one of them was a quiet Irishman called Brian Parker, an associate of the novelist JP Donleavy, author of The Ginger Man, and a fascinating source of information about Dublin’s literary life.

But it was not enough.  Dreams of returning to Holland began to obsess me, and so did the lure of working more creatively in the London office of The Scotsman which, on the corner of Bouverie Street, fulfilled my ambition, now stronger than ever, to become a Fleet Street journalist. Though I was aware that it would mean a drop in salary - the BBC at least paid rather well -  I decided to approach Alastair Dunnett, by then The Scotsman’s flamboyant impresario of an editor, to see what he could offer.
10 August 2014

A gothic tale

Having sampled the two free chapters of Silkworm, JK Rowling’s second mystery story written under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith, I am now devouring the rest of the book, which seems just as good as, indeed even better than, its predecessor.

It’s a big read, twice as long as the traditional English detective stories by Agatha Christie and others which in some ways it resembles, but it is brilliantly sustained and thoroughly up to date in its procedures. Its crippled hero, the arrestingly named Cormoran Strike, is a match for Poirot and the rest, and the drive to Devon through foul weather, which forms the book’s centrepiece, is hair-raisingly evoked.

The murder around which the story is built takes a while to come to light, but is all the better for that. Be warned that it is gothically nasty, and how  Rowling resolves it must have demanded all her ingenuity.

The result is a good read as well as a long one. It’s also a meticulous observation of modern London, where most of the action takes place, and of what Rowling presents as the distinctly creepy world of modern publishing. It has been receiving mostly good reviews, and a year - if that’s the likely amount of time - will seem  very long to wait for the next.
10 August 2014

Encore Marie

Reopened after its summer holiday, Marie Delices, Morningside’s charming French creperie, seems set to go from strength to strength. Bubbling with fresh ideas, its young proprietress has extended the menu to include new crepes and galettes, still more enticing cakes with emphasis on gluten-free ingredients and, if you fancy a Proustian madeleine to go with your coffee, it’s there for the asking. This has become quite our favourite place within easy reach of Fairmilehead, where we live.

Back from our own holidays, we celebrated our return with a sampling of the new things on the menu - in my case the immaculate, spicy buckwheat galette of anchovies, capers, cheese and large thin slices of tomato, folded into an enticing plate-sized brown envelope.  My wife’s choice, also a newcomer to the menu, incorporated ham, cheese, sauteed onions and mustard, with sweet crepes of stewed apples, caramel, and creme chantilly for our daughters. As an assembly of flavours, they formed a veritable feast, augmented for me by a glass of Kronenbourg beer as an alternative to the juicy house cider imported from Britanny. .

Will a house wine be added to the menu? A cool  glass of Muscadet would be just right, as would a genuine French cafe creme in addition to the other coffees  - and not only during the Edinburgh Festival. Places such as Marie Delices - small yet comfortably roomy, with its  big stove in the kitchen at the rear, where Marie visibly works, and its  deft French decor - are just what are needed in Edinburgh.

When we arrived for lunch yesterday, a French couple were sitting in the window, a solitary traveller was  scanning the menu, two families had merged in the middle of the room,  and a large tray of galettes was being carried to a customer on the other side of Comiston Road. What sight could be more inviting? Even Marcel Proust, in his Parisian privacy, would get just what he wanted as he listened to Faure’s latest violin sonata.

Marie Delices is at 125 Comiston Road, on the left-hand side going up.
8 August  2014

Malaysian whispers

Edinburgh’s Chinese restaurants and takeaways tend to be humdrum and too MSG-dependent.  Its Indian places are rather better, without quite matching the flair of the best  of Glasgow’s. But what falls in between can be sometimes really interesting.

Such is Kampong Ah Lee, housed in that productive stretch of the South Side which also contains the long-established Kalpna, with its authentic vegetarian menu and, in a side street, the Cafe India, which, with its  array of small dishes, combines Indian cuisine with the .charms of Spanish tapas.

Kampong Ah Lee is Malaysian, with Chinese leanings, and thus something of a rarity to encounter in Edinburgh.Though its premises at 28 Clerk Street look plain and simple, the food impressively brightens the atmosphere, not only because it is so authentic but because it rings so vividly true.  The effect is a bit like eating an Indonesian meal in Amsterdam, where the food is irresistibly inviting   Not everything, perhaps, is perfect but it scores more hits than misses - enough for anyone’s first Edinburgh encounter with the cuisine of Kuala Lumpur.

What we ate was certainly nothing to do with  standard Edinburgh Chinese.  For a start, the rice, with tiny shreds of carrot, had its own specific individuality. The roast duck, served in chunks, had been cleavered through the bone, not sliced or shredded. The beef with black bean sauce looked  wonderfully dark and gloopy, and was conspicuously tender. Noodles were slimline, but best of all were the the large prawns in their shells, served with a fiery, sticky red sauce.

These were  fascinating twists on familiar ingredients, from a menu that took time to decipher. It was something special - though by Malaysian standards probably quite routine - and we shall be back to explore it in more detail, either in Clerk Street or what is evidently a branch in Fountainbridge.
7 August2013

The editors in my life (9)

With the collapse of The Star newspaper in London just before I started working there I seized my opportunity to continue as sleeve-note editor  for Philips in Holland a while longer, even though I had begun to tire of the job. But my eyes remained fixed on Fleet Street, and I was tempted in particular by an offer from Charles Fenby, director of the Westminster Press, whose chain of local newspapers included an opening that might suit me. We met a few times,and got on, but what he was offering meant living in Oxford as chief reporter of the Oxford Mail. Interesting though that might have proved, I turned it down and we amicably parted with the agreement that if anything more suitable turned up he would let me know. It never did.

Next came the chance to work as a sub-editor in the BBC’s newsroom at Broadcasting House. This, though hardly my scene, looked more promising. I was interviewed by a panel led by Geoffrey Hollingsworth, the newsroom’s deputy head - “what do you think of the new Forth Road Bridge?” I was asked -  and got the job.

Meanwhile, over in Holland, Philips had begun advertising for a new sleeve-note editor. My idea. which needed my boss Wim Zalsman’s endorsement, was that each candidate should be asked  to write a sleeve-note on the subject of a popular classic such as Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. My task would be to assess the results in terms of accuracy, liveliness, and originality. Zalsman agreed and we went ahead, even though I was aware, even then, of the risks involved in having a hand in the appointment of your own successor. Once a short list of possibilities had been selected from the hundreds of people - all men - who had applied for the job, Zalsman and I would fly to London to interview them.

At this repetition of my own interview nearly three years earlier, our choice was Bernard Jacobson, a young Oxford graduate who followed in my footsteps for two years before becoming a music critic in the United States, where he still lives. Our choice agreed upon, Zalsman  jovially dragged me to the cartoons cinema at Piccadilly Circus to see the latest Walt Disney before flying back to Holland to arrange my sleeve-note editor’s farewell, culminating in a lethal game of Dutch shove-halfpenny in the basement of his house.
6 August 2014

A benchmark burgundy

The best wine we drank on holiday in Galloway was not bought there but brought there by a friend who was spending a day with us.   A  2009 Pouilly Fuisse recently added - briefly it seems -  to the Waitrose list, it was perhaps no great rarity among French whites. But certainly, at its best, Pouilly Fuisse is a benchmark burgundy, very different from the Loire’s rival Pouilly Fume, and  ours was a good one, the perfect accompaniment to our salmon supper.

Pouilly Fuisse, it’s true,  can be a fleshy wine but this one had all the structure it should have had. With its hint of steel, it was a model of its kind. 

The wine authority Hugh Johnson has written with pleasure of drinking a “nutty” 2000 Pouilly Fuisse on a square in France  “amid merry broad-beamed grey-heads” eating  a vinaigrette of twelve different fresh vegetables, but ours was fine with fish, courgettes, and roasted baby peppers prepared by my wife in our rented chalet. Our Pouilly Fuisse was younger than Hugh Johnson’s, not so nutty but with that  tension which I prefer in a white burgundy (above all in the best Chablis) and quite delicious.

Wines we bought locally which we enjoyed included a  lovely red Louis Jadot Fleurie from the village shop and, from the Castle Douglas Tesco, a frisky Macon-Villages, a bargain at less than £7. 

5 August 2014

In the South

Grey Galloway is the title of a symphonic poem composed by the academic  Hawick-born John Blackwood McEwen in 1908, shortly before his (slightly) more famous Symphony No 5 in C sharp minor, known as the Solway.

But Galloway, where I have been spending the past fortnight, is today far from grey. It  is a  place of lush pastures, grand forests, scrupulously white-washed cottages, grazing cattle, tree-lined roads often quite French in their symmetry. The Solway is not necessarily a matter of mud, rocks, and smelly seaweed, as is popularly supposed, but of vast sandscapes, distant seascapes, and neat waterfront villages, such as Kippford, which again could be as French, or Cornish, as they are Scottish.

Kippford, indeed, is a delight, with its Anchor Hotel, facing the marina, serving seafood lunches and suppers on its sunny outdoor terrace, with cask ale to rival the wine. Dogs - we have two King Charles spaniels - are as welcome as they seem to be in most of Galloway, and as they also are in the enclosed garden of the sweet little cafe-restaurant at New Abbey, where you can eat fresh or smoked salmon, scrambled free-range eggs, chicken liver pate with oatcakes and where, without charge, you can  drink your own wine. The ice-cream, of course, is Cream of Galloway. as good as it gets.

While admittedly touristic, New Abbey, south of Dumfries, is a place of sublime grace and holiness, its cafe sitting in the shadow of the ruined Sweetheart Abbey itself.

Such is modern Galloway, which we have visited two summers running and have come to adore.
5 August 2014

Is it a Zinfandel or a Primitivo?

The dispute between Zinfandel and Primitivo - if it can be called a dispute - is not so  baroque as the battle between Tancredi and Clorinda, but it sounds as old as the hills and is proving no less challenging to handle.  Zinfandel is said to be California’s native grape, capable of producing its most seductive red wine. Primitivo, despite its name, is  Puglia’s (i.e.  Southern Italy’s) potentially finest red. but is it the product of one and the same grape variety?   If so, how and when did it get from Italy’s heel to the western United States?

Though I’m not up to speed on the latest stage of the debate. it’s certainly a running story and has been capable of growing quite heated. There is no doubt that Zinfandel is the better, more enticing name, compared with which Primitivo does Italy no favours. Would you give such a wine to someone as a present?

Yet the answer is that they would be lucky to receive it, at least if it were a good example of its kind. like the one I have just been drinking from Waitrose, a Paolo Leo Primitivo of Manduria. currently reduced from £10.99 to £7.99, perhaps because nobody has been buying it.  But it’s a delicious wine, especially if you decant it. which mellows its flavour and makes it taste like a great Italian red - and, to be ftank, better than some great Italian reds sometimes taste.

At its current price it is a bargain, and I shall be buying more when I return from holiday, if there is any left - failing which the Ristorante Contini in George Street serves a good specimen. Otherwise.  a well-chosen Zinfandel will do very nicely, and Waitrose is again, by the look of things, able to oblige with its Apothic Red  - how’s that for a name? - which at £9.99 may be worth a try. I’ll give you my thoughts on it when I return from Galloway. where neither Zinfandel nor Primitivo may prove easy to find.

Writing resumes on August 4.
17 July 2014

How green was my Gruner Veltliner?

While the white wines of Alsace, for all their elegance. continue to wobble on the edge of popularity, just as they seem always to have done, Austrian Gruner Veltliner is going from strength to strength.  Though there are similarities between them,  it seems plain to me that the banks of the Danube are proving increasingly  successful - more so perhaps than those of the Rhine - in enabling wine producers to strike a balance between the greenish sweetness and dryness that rewards the palate. The result may be less mellow than we would expect of an Alsace wine, but it can be, in the words of the English wine authority Hugh Johnson, “really snappy” - which is not a description you would often use of something from Alsace.

Perhaps it’s the flintiness of the polished Austrian wine at its best which makes the difference, and which makes it so good to drink. It’s not what you might associate with the rough young wines quaffed in the open air at the local  inns in what is now the Viennese suburb (in Beethoven’s time the village) of Grinzing, celebrated  in old Viennese songs by that gemutlich baritone Erich Kunz, where you eat  chicken on the spit or wiener schnitzel  beneath the trees. That was something - perhaps still is - often quite raw in taste, not that it seemed to matter,  since you tended to ignore the rawness for the sake of of the spirit of romance created by where you were drinking it. With a good modern Gruner Veltliner, however, you get a quality wine without losing  the romanticism.

Yet in Britain our supermarkets are still holding back a little on the appeal of these bottles. Though it’s possible to find at least one type of Gruner Veltliner on their shelves, it’s harder to find two. But the small Waitrose stable of these wines has now grown to three -  two of them established (and, priced at more than £10,  not inexpensive) examples of the breed, plus what is presumably intended to be an enticing new cheaper model at £7.99.

The trouble with this bargain, however, is that, despite its sophistication, it does taste undeniably edgier. So my recommendation, for the moment,  is that if you want to try Gruner Veltliner, it’s worth spending  a little more on one of the pricier bottles, with their finely-chiselled minerality, or else wait for Waitrose to bring them briefly down in price, as they sometimes do.
16 July 2014

Charwood connections

Though the rumour that the Tusitala restaurant at Fairemilehead was to become Edinburgh’s latest branch of Sainsbury proved unfounded - it was denied in a printed statement by the owners - the place nevertheless changed hands last month.  It’s now more prosaically  called Charwood, serving fairly similar food to what appear to be its numerous customers,  but placing a heavier emphasis on pizzas, steaks, and burgers.  The loss of the old Samoan name - chosen in tribute to Robert Louis Stevenson’s final  residence in the Pacific - strikes me as a pity, especially as the explanatory Stevenson pictures which used to adorn the entrance to the restaurant have also gone.

But at least the place still looks southwards towards the Pentland village of Swanston and the famous T plantation, with their old Stevenson associations. In fact, at first glance, it would seem that little has changed. The furnishings and colour scheme are just as they were, the big wood-burning stainless steel oven is still in place, and the menu is broadly similar. The differences lie mainly in aspects of the cooking.

The Shetland mussels, formerly a house speciality, tasted what could only be described as tired when I ate them at lunchtime today. It was a word, I fear, that could also be applied to the rest of the meal, including the panna cotta dessert, with its drab strawberries and broken honeycomb biscuit.  Nothing, including the macaroni cheese chosen by one of us, looked very appetising. Moreover the bright Chilean sauvignon, which used to steer the menu in the direction of Stevenson’s Pacific,  has gone, though the replacements by chance  include a Picpoul de Pinet from the French Languedoc, not far from where Stevenson travelled with donkey. The coffee looked too uninviting to sample.

Did we simply choose badly? Were the steaks, priced from £15 to £48 (for a classic chateaubriand), the things to go for?  Presumably yes, but here we come to a small enigma, since Charwood, in restaurant terms, is a fashionable name in other parts of the world. Call it up on your computer and you will find that there is a much-vaunted Cairo Charwood’s specialising in - what else? - steaks and pizzas, the best, it seems, in Egypt.   If there is a connection between the Cairo one and the Edinburgh one - there’s evidently another in Southampton  -  who knows?  But if the Edinburgh one is that good, I’d better order a steak next time I go.
15 July 2014