The Editors in My Life (29) - My Week in Warsaw

After the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s successful trip to Eastern Europe in 1978, the Scottish National Orchestra was quick to follow suit with an appearance at the Warsaw Autumn  Festival along with concerts elsewhere in Poland.  

Of all the journeys I have made with Scottish performers, this was by far the most dispiriting. More than thirty years after the Second World War, Poland still seemed a country which had been trampled upon, and which was still victimised. It was not a place at ease with itself. Warsaw’s Old Town, though handsomely rebuilt, looked unnervingly like a film set, leaving you constantly conscious of what lay just below the surface (see Wajda’s searing trilogy)  Shops were devoid of basic essentials. Having accidentally left my toothpaste at home, I found myself unable to buy more.

But Eric Mackay, by then Alastair Dunnett’s successor as editor of The Scotsman, rightly saw it as a trip worth going on and immediately said yes when I was invited to chronicle the experience.  Since Malcolm Rayment of The Herald, a music critic with Poland among his specialisms, would be flying there ahead of the orchestra and staying on after the players had departed for the luxury of Vienna and a concert at the Musikverein featuring a theatrical new horn concerto by the Edinburgh-born Thea Musgrave, Mackay saw the point of The Scotsman taking a different approach from its Scottish rival.  My aim was to track the whole tour and assess the contrasts between East and West.

In Warsaw the featured composer was to be Andrzej Panufnik, who had escaped from his Communist overlords and settled in Birmingham after the Second World War, thereby becoming persona non grata in occupied Poland. The SNO, it was hoped, would help to re-establish him with a performance (for which special permission had to be sought) of his passionate Sinfonia Sacra under Sir Alexander Gibson, along with the Polish premiere of Peter Maxwell Davies’s atmospheric Orkney masterpiece Stone Litany and  of Michael Tippett’s ebullient Fourth Symphony. The days of the SNO going abroad to play Tchaikovsky appeared to be over.

Musically, at least, there was nothing depressing about the visit.  Travelling with the players by LOT Airlines, Poland’s then somewhat uncomfortable national carrier, I found myself immediately separated from them on arrival  and transported to a different hotel, the famous old Bristol on the banks of the Vistula, which seemed a promising enough destination, even though it had been reputedly Gestapo headquarters  during the Second World War. On entering it, however, I was shaken to encounter fierce spotlights in the lobby and what appeared to be Nazi SS officers in the corridors. But I had not, as I feared, entered a surrealistic  time warp. A film was being made, which explained everything.  But, after surrendering my passport at reception, the drabness of my slit of a bedroom, with its filthy curtains and rusty sink, prompted me to flee to the security of the newly-opened Intercontinental Hotel, where the orchestra was staying and where I found a room awaiting me - there had been, it seems, an administrative bungle.

Though the Bristol has now been modernised, the Intercontinental seemed like a little island of American comfort in a cheerless city. Yet it, too, had its drawbacks at the time.  Was it right to eat lavishly available food in a hotel restaurant which few local people could afford to enter? The furtiveness with which the hotel staff illegally sought to exchange zlotys for dollars under the watchful eyes of what may have been disguised security officials was constantly alarming.

But I, as a visiting journalist, had a small risk of my own to take before departing for the joys of modern Vienna. Back home in Edinburgh, a member of The Scotsman’s political staff had asked me if I would deliver a book for him to an old friend in Warsaw. The book was Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope, banned at the time by the Communist regime. As an innocent music critic I agreed to go with it - though what, I now wonder, would Eric Mackay have said had he known? (his fury was limitless when some members of his features staff went on a private parachute jump in Perthshire and broke their legs).

More apprehensive than I pretended to be, I got the book safely through airport security and out to Warsaw’s dispiriting suburbs. But at the apartment block to which I was to take it there turned out to be  nobody at home. A dog growled softly behind the door. I placed the book beneath a dustbin and headed back to town to hear Panufnik.

Two weeks later Eric Mackay received a visit from a pair of bureaucratic Poles. I had written too disparagingly, they said, about flying with LOT Airlines and what was he going to do about it? I wrote disparagingly about many things, he replied with a mirthless grin, and he proposed to do nothing at all. It was pleasant to be  back in Scotland.
24 March 2015

This week's wine: A different Pinot Grigio

Pinot Grigio once seemed the safest of Italian whites - and still does if you buy it from Valvona & Crolla.  Elsewhere it has long been a matter of luck, or lack of luck, but the problem is there to be sidestepped.

If you have rightly become distrustful of northern Italy’s most prevalent white, or if Valvona prices have come to seem too steep, would a southern Italian Pinot Grigio do the trick?  Or a Hungarian one? Or a Slovenian?  Everybody seems to be at it, trading on the fact that it is a wine we have all heard of. 

Though most of these Pinots, for better or worse, taste like Pinot Grigio, choosing something from outside Europe can brings a different perspective. For quite a while now I have been buying Australian Pinot Grigio in the knowledge that it tastes fresher and brighter than most of the Italian stuff, and more interesting than a lot of the Australian chatdonnays that continue to flood the market. 

Lindeman’s Bin 85 Pinot Grigio is a good example. You can buy it with ease at Tesco or Asda or, if you live on Edinburgh’s South Side, at the very useful Avenue Store in Blackford Avenue, where the 2014 vintage is selling, very invitingly, at £7.99, 

Without losing contact with its traditional taste - as Australian Chardonnay certainly does -  it has a cheering Pacific overtone, and adding a bottle to your basket is the easiest thing in the world to do. It’s fine with salads, or pizza, or pasta - all the things Pinot Grigio should match but today often does not.
22 March 2015

After the Crash

The recent explosion of Scandinavian thrillers is what we have come to call a literary phenomenon. But the trend is spreading. From France this month, much of it set in northern France, comes Michel Bussi’s After the Crash, which opens with a Turkish Airbus crashing in the Jura Mountains on a Christmas flight from Istanbul to Paris. Even today, “Don’t fly home for Christmas” remains one of the most alarming warnings people receive from morbid friends about the dangers of flying.

Here is the story of a disaster in which all but one of a flight’s passengers die. The survivor is a baby girl, found near the wreckage. The twist is that there were two baby girls on board and, since both sets of parents have been killed, nobody can precisely identify the survivor.

The year is 1980, just before the establishment of DNA testing. The story, in which I am now immersed, is endlessly unfurled but undeniably gripping.  With rival grandparents - a rich industrialist family on the one hand, the impoverished owners of a waffle-and-chip van on the other - claiming adoption rights, the tale develops in a very French manner. Who will end up winning the child? There are tiny hints of Zola, perhaps even of Flaubert, along the way.

But, with the advent of a private investigator,  After the Crash also becomes a tease - spookier and more sinister as it progresses. Now about halfway through it, I admit I am hooked.  Even if the ending may prove to be less revelatory than I am hoping for, it is easy to see why this substantial book has already sold more than 700,000 copies. Michel Bussi is clearly  someone to watch.
21 March 2015
   

Late Additions

The gaps - tantalising or otherwise - in the 2015 Edinburgh Festival programme have now been filled. Two operas were added yesterday to the schedule at the Festival Theatre plus an electronic encounter with The Four Seasons at the Playhouse.

The Magic Flute will have  four performances from Berlin’s Komische Oper, and The Marriage of Figaro three from Ivan Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra with sundry soloists . Compared with the old days, when the two Mozart operas might have been given up to ten performances each in the (admittedly smaller) King’s Theatre,  it is not a lot. But it is obviously better than nothing.

Indeed Fischer’s decision to break down the barriers between performers and audience, already successfully tried out by him in New York, has good omens, though how it will work on the stage of the Festival Theatre remains to be seen. If you admire Fischer as much as I do, you will certainly want to see and hear this progressive - and superlative - Mozartian in action.

As for The Magic Flute, it, too, this German expressionist production in the style of the 1920s  is coming from a reliable source. But how well will Vivaldi’s four violin concertos survive  their updating, in which, besides the electronics, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra will be taking part?  Better, let us hope, than Handel’s Messiah at the long-defunct Crystal Palace.
18 March 2015

This Week's Wine: Something Slovenian

Yugoslavia’s Lutomer Riesling was one of the great party wines of my younger days, and something to drink convivially by the bottle in restaurants that stocked it.  Its red equivalent, a good deal heftier,was Hungarian Bull’s Blood, but Lutomer Riesling, being light and quaffable, did very nicely, or so I thought at the time.

I have not seen it for years, and what  Marks & Spencer are selling in its place is something which memory tells me is very different  as well as very much better - and so it should be, you may feel inclined to add, considering that it costs £10 a bottle.

Made from a blend of Furmint, Traminer, Pinot Gris, and Riesling grapes, it may be expected to have a certain taste of Alsace about it, since three of these four grape varieties are closely associated with that part of Europe. But as the twelfth-century vineyards from which it comes - the wine has what looks like a fundamental  identifying date, 1139, though the M&S vintage is reassuringly  2013 - lie close to the Austrian border, we may also expect the flavour to have something slightly Austrian about it.

This, at any rate, was what I thought I tasted in it.  Though described as a dry white, there is a touch of sweetness about it, deriving no doubt from its riesling content. There is also, when the bottle is first opened, a slight prickle on the palate, which adds to the pleasure of drinking it. On the whole I think I would prefer to savour it without food, though veal or creamy cheese would not go amiss.

It is certainly something worth trying.The label suggests that M&S bottle it themselves. If so, the result is a coup for the supermarket, even if the name may seem too like a phone number - are we expected to ask, in our local branch, if they have a bottle of the 2013 1139?
14 March 2015

More Than Schubert

So impressed have I been by the tenor Ian Bostridge’s investigative  study of Schubert’s Winterreise that  I have gone back to his earlier book, A Singer's Notebook, which I somehow missed when it was published a few years ago.

Its piece de resistance is the Edinburgh Festival lecture which Sir Brian McMaster invited him to give around the time of Baz Luhrmann’s sensational Australian production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which Roderick Brydon conducted at the Festival Theatre and in which Bostridge, in the process of developing his career, played a part - those were the days when opera was still worth seeing in Edinburgh.

Bostridge’s lecture, drawing on his experience as a historian as well as a singer, makes a somewhat protracted read, but it’s the shorter pieces - mostly essays and commentaries on favourite composers - that really grip the attention. His enthusiasms extend far beyond Schubert to  include Monteverdi,  Mozart, Hugo Wolf, Kurt Weill, Noel Coward, Stravinsky, Bob Dylan and, above all, Britten.  His notes on these figures have been judiciously selected, his essay on Mozart’s tenor roles being particularly rewarding. In writing it he fell foul of that touchy opera director David McVicar, who pinpointed his failure to champion the role of Ferrando in Cosi Fan Tutte, every modern director’s favourite Mozart opera.

McVicar’s belief that Bostridge failed to rate Ferrando because it was not a role that suited him may well be true, but equally right is Bostridge's own belief that Idomeneo was Mozart’s greatest tenor role and the centrepiece of what Mozart himself considered to be his greatest opera. Not for nothing have such tenors of the calibre of Pavarotti and Vickers been attracted to it in their time.

Compared with Idomeneo, claims Bostridge, Mozart’s other tenor roles seem pallid. In The Marriage of Figaro there is scarcely a tenor to speak of. In Don Giovanni there is only the insufficient Don Ottavio (though one of the best Ottavios I have seen was the one who, in Graham Vick’s fascinating Scottish Opera production, kicked over a wastepaper basket in his frustration). Belmonte in Die Entfuhrung suffers from a surfeit of arias at least one of which seems expendable in comparison with what is sung by his beloved Constanza - and, to be blunt, something the same can be said of Ferrando in Cosi.

Such essays, coming from an intelligent singer rather than a critic, are worth encountering, but Bostridge’s preference for Weill over Brecht in The Threepenny Opera is equally sharp. as is his passionate championing of Britten’s War Requiem, a work more about death than about war, as one of Britten’s two most crucial masterpieces - the other being The Turn of the Screw.
11 March 2015    

Another New Coffee Pot

There are coffee pots - avoid them -  which manage to make all coffees taste disappointingly the same. But our latest household pot is not a failure in that or any other respect.  What I brew in it - be it my favourite organic Ethiopian,  Waitrose’s Peruvian decaff, or Taylor of Harrogate’s mellow Lazy Sunday -  tastes quite distinctively how we expect it to taste.

This glass coffee maker with its heat-retaining zip covering comes with a funnel-filter of fine mesh and stainless steel, and a neatly foolproof pourer which fits snugly into the neck. The pot comes in two sizes - ours holds a bit less than a litre but is fine for a single cup - and making coffee in it is simplicity itself. It is also easy and quick to clean.

It is a Danish device named Eva Solo, an utterly non-gimmicky, non-mechanical, non-steam-belching  invention, not cheap, but which can also be used, if you so wish, as a small wine decanter. That, in the first place, was why I bought it and how I used it, until I received a superb big Le Creuset decanter as a present from my son, at which point I started employing Eva Solo correctly as a coffee maker - clearly its primary purpose.  As such it seems peerless, or will be until I find something even better.

It comes in two sizes, and you can buy it from Amazon.  It looks good and is nice to hold, infinitely more so than a fiddly traditional cafetiere or even the Aeropress (slower and messier in comparison. and  with a vacuum plunger that grows increasingly hard to press down) which I recommended not so long ago. The Eva Solo is a delight to use. Since we can get through several types of coffee in a single week, this is just the coffee maker we have been waiting for and I do not know why I did not start using it sooner.
8 March 2015

This Week's Wine: Muscadet Again

Muscadet, as  I keep asserting, is a matter of chance. At its cheapest, it can be vile and harsh. At its dearest, more elaborately named, it can be a French delight. But most Muscadet comes in between, and that is when luck becomes a factor. It’s when we realise that cheap can sometimes be good, and expensive disappointing. 

This week from Waitrose it is a Muscadet which is cheap but good enough to make you want more. At £6.49 a bottle, it can hardly fail to be unpretentious. Named La Mariniere, with a sketch of shellfish on the label, this is unquestionably a basic Muscadet, its appellation as plain as can be, but its taste as bright as you could wish. 

It tastes, quite simply, like Muscadet, and that is why we loved this 2013 specimen. If stocks last, we shall be buying it again.
5 March 2015

Schubertian Strains

Halfway through Schubert’s Winterreise comes the moment of lilting sweetness - and of sweetness defiled - which is the song Fruhlingstraum. It is a problematic song, in some ways almost sugary, as Ian Bostridge admits in his searching new book on the great song cycle, not least when the music reaches the word Seligkeit, meaning bliss or happiness.

It’s a word ominously familiar in Schubert, and there is a separate, buoyant  little Schubert song of that very title, which was one of the first I ever got to know and love. I was still a schoolboy when I bought Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s early recording  and I chose it for what lay on the other of this ten-inch blue-label Columbia  78rpm  disc, which happened to be Die Forelle, The Trout, source of the Trout Quintet.

This  was a  song I already knew and adored and wanted to hear again and again.  These were the  days when Schwarzkopf’s voice had few of the mannerisms it gained later in her career and when Gerald Moore was her sublime accompanist.

But though her youthfully exuberant recording was fleet and blissful, Seligkeit (like so many Schubert songs) has its undercurrents, which were ominously caught by the mezzo-soprano Brigitte Fassbaender in a more recent recent recording which was her contribution to the vast CD collection of Schubert’s songs devised by the pianist Graham Johnson.  On the front of the plastic box is a picture of a graveyard and Fassbaender’s is a Seligkeit to remind us that Schubertian bliss - as we are increasingly coming to realise - all too easily ends in despair.  It is something that Ian Bostridge, in his exhaustive new  study, rightly devotes much space to explaining.
3 March 2015

Eastward Bound

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra, founded in 1974, made its first major foreign tour just four years later. Based, like the players, in Edinburgh, I was the only critic to be invited on this enthralling trip to Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria -  and to chronicle what I  heard and saw. The Scotsman was amenable. My expenses were being paid. It was the first time a Scottish orchestra had ventured into Eastern Europe. Roderick Brydon - still in place as its admirable Edinburgh-born musical director, though alas he  would not be there much longer -  conducted every concert.

The interesting Michael Roll, winner of the first Leeds Piano Competition, played Mozart. Budapest, Bucharest, and Sofia were the principal destinations, but there  were some unexpected  diversions - to Brasov, not far from Dracula’s castle, where Andras Schiff, another early Leeds contestant, was in the audience, and to Bekeszaba, a salami town in  the far east of Hungary, with earth roads but a passable hall.  It was a long bus ride from Budapest. Memories of the hotel now escape me, but musically the place was virgin territory, and the coffee bat frequented by members of the orchestra carelessly  served salt in its sugar bowls.

It was possible - just - to imagine Bartok and Kodaly  once  turning up there in  quest of rare  folk songs, and indeed Bartok’s Divertimento and Kodaly’s Galanta Dances formed part of the orchestra’s repertoire. Brydon, with his flair for these composers, was still in his heyday, as indeed was Michael Roll, who subsequently vanished into obscurity.

At that time  the SCO had yet to cultivate  its relationship with international conductors and  soloists, but what it did it did well. Its new administrator, the  flamboyant Australian Michael Storrs, was busily reshaping the orchestra’s destiny, and was assiduously  hiring soloists who could also conduct.  One of these, the violinist Jaime Laredo, would soon take the players on a mammoth American trip, performing  Vivaldi’s Four Seasons all the way,  with immense success. By then, and on tours even farther afield,  it was no longer the orchestra Brydon helped to found, but it was certainly going places.

Meanwhile Budapest seemed triumph enough. The city, still under communist oppression, had a faint air of Janes Bond about it, especially in the tea room  and ornate subterranean baths of the Gellert Hotel. In the centre of town there was a historic art nouveau restaurant, modelled on Maxim’s in Paris, though the food was nothing much. Hungarian violinists serenaded the Scottish players after their concerts in the handsome Liszt Hall. Lunch at the residence of the British Consul on the heights of the old town consisted of food flown in by diplomatic bag.

Flying to Bucharest by the erratic Tarom Romanian Airlines, or so it was said to be at the time, seemed perilous. Take two valiums suggested Michael Storrs to the players before departure. En route a pair of air stewardesses fiercely fought with each other, their quarrel accidentally amplified by loudspeakers throughout the plane. In Bucharest  there was a louche young audience and a Romanian music critic asked  me if I could find a place for him on a Scottish newspaper. Later, still pleading earnestly, he wrote to me at The Scotsman.

It was easy to see why he wanted out. At the opera house, in the midst of what looked like a depressing season, I saw a dreadful production of Mozart”s Seraglio, supposedly enhanced by a gratuitous corps de ballet. On the square near Bucharest’s simulation of Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, a soldier prodded me in the stomach with his  gun and told me to move along. My crime was that  I had been standing still. Olivia Manning’s great Balkan trilogy, which I been reading throughout the trip, made me hope to eat carp but none came my way.

Sofia, however, was a delight. With its spacious walkways, impressive buildings, and airy views of distant mountains, it hardly mattered that the only food was meatballs. At the end of the tour, the place was a tonic. Travelling with a small orchestra, I discovered, was nicer than travelling with a big one. It was not the last trip I would make with the SCO. Spain,  France, America, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, with further experiences to record, still lay ahead.
2 March 2015

More about David

On the last day of February - while the wind still blew, the rain still lashed, and I continued reading Ian Bostridge’s vast and absorbing new study of Schubert’s Winterreise - my friend David Shaw’s sister Christine came to supper with us in Edinburgh.

She had returned a week previously from Hull, where she had organised David’s funeral with the greatest care and love, said my wife Sue, who had driven down with Cosima, the second of our three daughters.

The deaths of good friends are one of the recurring penalties of old age, but our supper with Christine avoided sadness.  We looked back with cheer. Inevitably we spoke of old times, as David and I had often done, but also of the present.  Though still conscious of how much I shall miss him, I talked with pleasure of his gifts as a mimic - something of which other people, even Christine it seems, were scarcely aware. But in my experience, with sudden and complete adroitness, he could evoke the visual tics and and gestures, the vocal mannerisms, of those we had known up to half a century ago.  Not even Philip Larkin, his boss at Hull University Library, could escape his warm attention.

It was an accomplishment which, of course, he shared with Larkin’s friend Kingsley Amis, a famous and priceless imitator, whose funniness could be more malicious.  David’s - like that of the conductor Alexander Gibson, another brilliant mimic - was always kindly, with none of the edge of cruelty personified by, for example, Herbert von Karajan, whose mimicry of his fellow conductor Otto Klemperer was not only embarrassingly inaccurate but also positively nasty.

Our evening with Christine was one of fond anecdotes, of good times remembered, which had been eloquently evoked by my youngest daughter Marcella who, on the day of David’s funeral, had said to me, “Don’t be sad that David is dead, be glad that he lived.”

I had been sitting with her, on the afternoon of the service, playing recordings of the music that was being heard in Hull - The Lark Ascending, Ae Fond Kiss, and Elgar’s Cello Concerto, chosen by Christine, along with that splendid hymn, To Be a Pilgrim.  The vicar, a portly and not unjovial man,  was a member of the  Church Army, an institution I know nothing about. But he was clearly a welcome presence, possibly in some ways faintly like David himself.

Christine resides just down the road from us in Edinburgh, so her journey, even on a stormy night, was perhaps not too daunting. The thought occurred to me that in childhood the Shaw family also lived “just down the road” in a different house.    It seemed a nice thing to remember on Saturday.
1 March 2015

Eating Out: MacDonald’s Hotel, Cardona, Peebles

A recent winterbreak in Peebles was a happy surprise - dinner, bed and breakfast, complete with friendly, expert service, a nice view, plus gym and swimming facilities for little more than the price of a meal in a good Edinburgh restaurant. 

MacDonald hotels - there are others elsewhere in Scotland - seem to get things right, and this one between Peebles and Innerleithen was a nice place to spend a night. The pleasant restaurant uses good ingredients, including free-range chickens and eggs, and cooks them with some flair.  The menu is short, sensible, modern. For main dish I had two sorts of steak with a mustard and carrot sauce and herby mashed potato, preceded by a ham terrine. My wife began with a salmon and mackerel roulade followed by lamb. Puddings included an exceptionally light, undemonstrative creme brulee. 

Though the wines were not cheap, there were enough good things under £30 as well as a free bottle awaiting us in our room.  Though this was no more than a pink Italian Zinfandel (presumably Primitivo), at least it was dry and a welcome, drinkable  gesture. 

The award-winning breakfast incorporated fresh unsalted butter and the best hotel coffee I have tasted  in a long time. When I asked what it was, the waiter supplied the answer promptly. It was Matthew Algie’s Ethiopian, and thus could hardly have been better chosen. We celebrated with a second cafetiere. 

25 February 2015

   

More photos of the opera house in the Andes

About David

I have been reading Ian Bostridge’s fine new book, Winter Journey, during one of the most wintry months of the year. It is a month during which my dear friend David Shaw has died in Hull, where for many years he assisted Philip Larkin in the university library. His death was on February 10, the day on which another dear friend, Lynne Walker, who was married to yet another dear friend,  the music critic Gerald Larner, died four years ago.  February, more than ever, can seem a heartless time, and reading Bostridge’s book about a composer who died at 31 has intensified my desolation.

I knew David, who had just turned 82, for 75 years, from our earliest Edinburgh schooldays, when we rode our tricycles (mine blue, his black with big wheels) around Davidson’s Mains, where we grew up and played merry Scottish street games, such as kick-the-can, in and around a triangular patch  of grass, laurel bushes, and water, at one corner of which two quiet roads merged.

We enjoyed this more than we enjoyed our school, a turreted place of torment and, at times, humiliation, which we spent the rest of our lives recalling together - cheerfully enough by then and with a wry humour we shared whenever the subject cropped up.

David, in fact, was a gloriously humorous man, who never got married but who would have made a great husband for the wife he never found. Although, for most of our careers, we lived far apart, we conversed frequently by phone and met whenever he was in Edinburgh, which was several times a year, staying with one or other of his sisters, attending the Festival, or seeing plays in Pitlochry, a place he loved to visit.

Though he was a Scot (born in Hamilton) through and through, he stayed on in Hull, where he had many friends, after his retirement. Though Kingsley Amis, Larkin’s best friend, despised it, David thought it not so bad a place in which to live, as indeed did the doleful Larkin himself.

My wife, who has friends of her own there, has visited it periodically, and I have happily gone with her. I liked it, too. On one occasion David joined us for a barbecue and arrived by taxi carrying two bottles of vintage Chateauneuf du Pape. He was generous as well as jolly - the perfect party guest.

The last time we saw him down there we had been holidaying in the Yorkshire Wolds with our daughters  and agreed to meet him in Beverley, a lovely town, for a bar lunch in an attractive hotel on the square. We gathered around one o’clock. We were still there at seven, sitting in the garden, increasingly reluctant to depart.

After Larkin’s death, I tried to persuade David to write a book about his former boss, but he would have none of it. He was not a writer. Many books, he rightly said, would come to be written about Larkin by other people.

Though I once suggested that I write David’s book myself, and though he showed faint interest, the idea never got anywhere.  Whenever he and I met in Edinburgh with friends - usually in the bar of the Sheraton or over a meal at the Braid Hills Hotel - we always talked about other topics. We did not lack things to say.

Last week my wife drove to Hull for the funeral, with one of our daughters. Fearing I might lack the stamina needed for the winter journey, they persuaded me to stay at home.  After the service they met his friends and neighbours in the aptly-named Goodfellowship Inn and told me all about it when they got back. And now I am reading Ian Bostridge’s Winter Journey about a forlorn masterpiece composed almost two centuries ago, which seems the timely thing to do.
23 February 2015

 

Murder on the Orient Express

I have been only once, as a journalist, on the Orient Express, by which time it was in its revamped format aimed at the transportation of honeymooners, people sedately celebrating wedding anniversaries, along with supposedly lucky newspapermen between London and Venice or, in my case, between Verona and London. Invited, with the witty John Amis of the BBC, the well-informed freelance Martin Hoyle, and a prim Belfast journalist who shunned gourmet food, to write about the experience,.

I met my colleagues at Gatwick for our charter flight to Italy. In Verona we lunched in a goodish restaurant full of Roman relics in  glass cases - John, humming Beethoven’s Ruins of Athens, was delighted when I identified  the musical reference - followed by a trip round town with a dapper guide in a linen suit and Panama hat whom I nicknamed Fitzcarraldo in tribute to the Dublin-born adventurer who, in Werner Herzog’s film, wanted to build an opera house in the Andes.

We were then driven to a Valpolicella vineyard for a wine tasting and salami selection. At night came Aida at the Arena, amid flashing Japanese cameras - Martin furiously scolded but failed to deter members of the audience sitting near him - and the distant flash of lightning over the Dolomites. Our hotel was at the northern end of the lake, chosen in preparation for the next day’s perilous mountain hike, which John, wearing one of his gaudy waistcoats, handled with aplomb but which, on a high ledge, brought tears of misery to Martin’s eyes.

The  climax, however,  was still to come.  It was reached with the boarding of the famous train at a wayside station. We had been forewarned, to our horror,  that we would have to share sleeping compartments, but this was a deception on the part of our prankish escorts.  In fact each of us had his own separate, beautifully renovated compartment, complete with a polished-wood art deco  washing cabinet. Later, in the bar, I offered John a drink, and I handed the bartender  the equivalent of a £20 note for our glasses of Campari.  “I’ll need two of these,” he replied. Drinks on the new Orient Express did not come cheaply, but dinner, at least, had already been paid for.

While our colleague from Ulster ate scrambled eggs, the rest of us were given sea bass - the proper Italian fish dish, sliced from something as large as a salmon,  and not just one of the fiddly sprats served in Britain.  At the piano, barely audible as the train swept through Alpine tunnels, was Jan Latham Koenig, a rising young conductor - he had appeared at the Edinburgh Festival - deeply embarrassed to find music critics in his midst. Meanwhile, on a sofa beside  the bar, lay a woman beneath a blanket.  Before falling asleep she had  told us that  her husband had locked her out of their compartment. So much for the Orient Express as a place in which to celebrate your wedding anniversary.

At the Gare de l’Est in Paris next morning, crates of lobsters were loaded on to the train in preparation for lunch en route to Boulogne. The Ulster journalist had more scrambled eggs, but no doubt they were cooked to gourmet standards.  On board the boat the slumbering woman was reunited with her husband and were briefly seen embracing.

Finally, on the British leg of the journey, a dainty afternoon tea was served in antique British coaches. It had been, on its own touristic terms,  a good trip. But would I do it again? Remembering the brutal cost of that Campari, I rather think not.

Here is the opera house in Peru mentioned in the blog. John Duffus sent this to me. He and my friend, Thomson Smillie are in the photo. Thank you, John.


23 February 2015

Incidents in Aberdeen

To share - through reading - a train journey with Paul Theroux is to be reminded that it is the most satisfying form of travel, compared with which a flight is merely transport. The Great Railway Bazaar remains one of my favourite literary journeys.

Yet his essay on the Night Ferry - London to Paris - included in the less famous Sunrise and Sea Monsters makes succinctly clear why that trip used to be considered  so special. Recently I have been re-reading The Kingdom by the Sea, his comprehensive  tour of the British coast by train, bus, boat and on foot, with great delight. It used to be considered an ill-tempered book, not least because it expresses such contempt for Aberdeen, but I would say that it gets most things right.

Instead of describing castles and churches, it concentrates on the people he meets, likes, and sometimes despises. Reading it in conjunction with Notes on a Small Island by his fellow American Bill Bryson has been an education.

Most of Bryson’s British journey is inland, and he spends more time seeing the sights and getting lost but it is a funnier, if less articulate, book.

Moreover, like Theroux, he conspicuously loathes Aberdeen. What is it about the Granite City that puts people off? Partly it seems to be the inhabitants, a view I tend to share. Once, reviewing a concert at the Music Hall, I found myself blocked at the entrance by a bulky loud-mouthed doorkeeper. I was from The Scotsman, I said, and I had come to collect my press ticket at the box-office.

 “I’m a Scotsman myself,” replied the smug official, “but that’s no going to get you in here unless you already have  a ticket to show me.” It was an altercation completely in line with those described by Theroux and Bryson.  In the end I managed to elude him, but the memory, nearly fifty years later, still rankles.

Yet at least once I have found myself on the side of Aberdonians. It was in that grim pile, the famously expensive Station Hotel, where I was breakfasting with Felix Aprahamian, music critic of the Sunday Times, during Scottish Opera’s springtime visit.   Scanning the menu, Felix pointed his finger at the grilled herring and asked “Is that an indigenous dish?”  “Yes,” replied the waitress at the sight of Felix’s raised eyebrows, “I think you’ll find it a very tasty product of Aberdeen.”
21 February 2015

This week's wine: Triade

It is neither Orvieto nor Verdicchio. It is not Soave, and it is certainly not Pinot Grigio. But the British belief that Italy’s whites are all much of a muchness compared with its reds is challenged by this product of Campania, from close to the toe of the peninsula and more like a fine Greco di Tufo  than any of the wines mentioned above.

Waitrose is currently selling it for £6.69 a bottle, which is a very inviting price for a wine normally costing £8.99. Like other wines using the Greco grape, it has body and structure, a hint of lemon and almonds making it a nice aperitif and good accompaniment to fish - particularly, it is said, if the fish is mackerel - and pasta dishes.

The grapes, blending Greco with Fiano and Falanghina,  are grown on volcanic soil on upper slopes, giving this white its  quite distinctive flavour, which escapes the scorched earth taste of some other southern wines.

So, even if its name is unfamiliar, it is well worth sampling as long as the reduction lasts. In other  words, buy now - you’ll be lucky to get it for so low a price another time.
18 February 2015

This week's wine: Muscadet Sevre et Maine

A good Muscadet is hard to come by. Not even when the name is extended geographically with the words ”Sevre et Maine,” which used to be a guarantee of quality, especially when the words “sur lie” extend it farther, can we be assured of something special. “Sur lie” means that the wine has been rested for a period on its lees, which supposedly brings a slight prickle to its flavour. All too often, however, it merely brings a bland fizziness, which does not make it desirable at all.

Most supermarkets today are content to stock a single basic Muscadet which rises, though sometimes only just, above the ordinaire. Yet traditionally this north-western French wine is good with food.   Waitrose sells a reliable one called Fief Guerin, attractively priced at £7.99.  The other day on a visit to the long-established wine shop, Villeneuve, on the High Street of  Peebles, I found another, a 2013 chateau-bottled Muscadet Sevre et Maine sur lie called Chateau Poyet, costing a tenner but worth its elevated price.

A classic Muscadet, clean and piquant but not lacking fruitiness, it was said by the  jaunty young shop assistant to be good with fish - or, indeed, with fish suppers. But it would be good with much else, and can be recommended.

Villeneuve is worth visiting. It carries an interesting stock, is neatly laid out, has won a Which? award, maintains its own website, and supplies many local hotels and restaurants. Moreover it has an Edinburgh branch in Broughton Street.
15 February 2015

The editors in my life (28) American tour

After its first major European tour in 1967, the Scottish National Orchestra made a brief but unremarkable trip to Norway before scoring the international coup that really mattered - its first American tour, ending with concerts in New York and Washington. By then, in 1976, David Richardson, formerly of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, had replaced Robert Ponsonby as administrator - vowing that he wanted the orchestra to perform all 104 Haydn symphonies in the course of his stay in Scotland. Though he failed in this admirable endeavour, he enabled the conductor Alexander Gibson to expand the orchestra’s repertoire in other directions. As for me, I had a new editor,  the quietly austere but excellent Eric Mackay,  who continued to allow me the freedom to do my job which I had enjoyed as staff music critic under Alastair Dunnett. By this time, Dunnett had been elevated at the age of 65  to the chairmanship of Thomson Scottish Petroleum, an offshoot of the Thomson Organisation which ran The Scotsman, The Times, and the Sunday Times (before Rupert Murdoch got his hands on the London-based papers) as well as many outfits in Canada.

But Eric Mackay’s reign at The Scotsman proved just as beneficial as Dunnett’s, and when David Richardson invited me to join the Scottish National Orchestra for the climax of its American tour, Mackay immediately gave it his blessing, not least because Richardson offered infinitely better financial terms than Robert Ponsonby had previously done. The SNO would pay my air fares, hotel bills, and travel inside America in return for articles and reviews -  an arrangement that thereafter became standard when a critic was invited to tour with a Scottish orchestra. If I did not enjoy myself, he said, he would accept what I wrote in criticism.  Malcolm Rayment of The Herald was likewise invited, along with a feature writer from The Guardian, and Malcolm’s editor this time gave him permission to go.

 Arriving in New York a day ahead of the orchestra, I had some precious hours of sight-seeing, walking the length of an autumnally sparkling Fifth Avenue from Central Park to Washington Square, pausing en route to look round Tiffany’s, watch the outdoor skaters on their rink, and browse in Barnes and Noble’s bookshop. Later I  had time to circulate the Guggenheim Museum, be overwhelmed by Guernica in the Museum of Modern Art, visit the Frick collection, and lunch in the Russian Tea Room where, in 1976, Woody Allen was still a regular  presence. It was my first time in New York. Manhattan was magic.

Malcolm arrived next day. He had the good luck to know the purser on his flight, and was instantly upgraded to first-class, where he was plied with so much food and drink that when he disembarked he thought he had gone blind - in fact an eclipse of the sun had coincided precisely with his arrival. Then, in the evening, the orchestra strode triumphantly into the hotel on the edge of Central Park  after what had clearly been a successful tour of regional America. Carnegie Hall lay ahead, with the prospect of the premiere of an atmospheric new tone poem entitled Aurora by Iain Hamilton, starting in darkness and ending in a blaze of light  - just the sort of thing that had been missing from the earlier European tour. Alexander Gibson conducted a poetic account of Elgar’s Enigma Variations in the splendid hall’s warm acoustics. The concerto was Beethoven’s Emperor, expertly and robustly played by John Lill, replacing Iain Hamilton’s Violin Concerto which had been successfully presented earlier in the tour.

Next day came Washington, with a concert in the National Arts Centre, a pretentious edifice with a look about it of the architecture of Albert Speer. Compared with New York. Washington seemed  dull yet menacing. For supper in Georgetown we were advised to travel by taxi. Three buses - for which critics were not billed, as had happened after the European tour  - transported us back to Kennedy Airport in New York. Before leaving, I bought 1776, a complex American bicentenary board-game and challenging souvenir of the trip.  Gibson and his players would be back in New York a few years later, with a tired Claudio Arrau as soloist, and some sterling Sibelius to end the programme. But the first trip was the one I shall remember.
13 February 2015

This week's wine: Primitivo

The mistake most people make about Primitivo lies in assuming it to be an undrinkably rough,  tough, rustic Italian red, poured from a wicker-covered bottle on  the terrace of a primitive bar on some remote village piazza, In fact fact it is a sophisticated, juicy, greatly desirable but admittedly robust  southern  red  with an inviting aroma, produced in the Puglia region and imported by Valvona & Crolla, as well as  an increasing number of supermarkets which can rightly take pride in it.

Neither primitive nor particularly cheap, it is a thoroughly reliable wine which, made with increasing finesse, seldom disappoints. The fact that the primitivo grape is reputedly the same as America’s zindanfel would only be a  handicap if it did not measure up to its famous Californian cousin, but measure up it undoubtedly does.

If you have not already tried it, then buy a bottle of Marks & Spencer’s 2012 Notte Rossa Primitivo di Manduria to find out.  The label shows a stepladder with someone at the top reaching for the moon and stars - an apt symbol for a wine which, costing £10 a bottle, is worth anybody’s effort. It is a big wine (14 per cent alcohol) from a big grape, and its aroma, popularly described as tar and roses, certainly precedes it.The taste is rich and fruity, with a touch of dark Italian chocolate.

 Although many good Italian reds have an edge of bitterness, this one has the allure of being  impressively  smooth. For a good Primitivo with a bit more bottle age, expect to pay from £15 upwards at Valvona & Crolla.
8 February 2015

Blockbusters and Package deals?

Blockbusters and Package Deals?

Containing only the most meagre of operatic details, the Edinburgh Festival’s initial schedule for 2015 looks a bit like Hamlet without the prince.  At one time the operatic announcement was what mattered - what companies were coming and what they would be presenting on up to eighteen of the festival’s 21 nights - just as was the case in Salzburg, Munich, Holland and other great festivals of the world.

Opera was Edinburgh’s lynchpin. Will it be as important this year with a new director at the helm? It certainly wasn’t during his predecessor’s reign.  So we must wait and see. Even if it seems unlikely - and since many new productions turn out to be merely irritating -  opera does need to be more prominently featured than it has been in recent years.

Rumours that Ivan Fischer and his exhilarating Budapest Festival Orchestra will be  in residence at the Festival Theatre, staging Mozart in their own inimitable and   audience-involving manner, have not yet been denied, so let us hope for the best. The fact that these audacious Hungarians will be performing Mozart’s Requiem at the Usher Hall - something they have memorably done before - at least confirms their presence in Edinburgh.

The  concert schedule, announced in detail, looks at first glance like the now established mixture of blockbusters (The Rite of Spring, Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, Berlioz’s Requiem) and package deals (the complete Beethoven piano sonatas).

But although it offers nothing very startling, it contains quite a few good things. Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique has not been heard in combination with its vocal sequel Lelio since the early 1960s, and John Eliot Gardiner, as conductor of his own romantic and revolutionary orchestra will bring special authority to this arresting double-bill.

The 50th anniversary of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus is being thoroughly celebrated, with a performance of Sibelius’s vast Kullervo Symphony by the  RSNO under Edward Gardner and with  Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis as the festival’s climax.. Carlo Maria Giulini, who once conducted it here, had held back from this mountain range of a work until he felt “mature” enough to perform it, but young Robin Ticciati, undaunted by its challenges, is surely the right sort of novice to explore its subtleties.

A concert performance of The Pirates of Penzance by Scottish Opera, conducted by that master of Bachian baroquerie Richard Egarr, looks like being the joker in the pack, but the Royal Scottish Conservatoire’s concert performance of Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress will surely run it a close second.

The opening concert, by the BBC SSO and Donald Runnicles, prefaces Strauss’sEin Heldenleben with rare nuggets of Brahms. nuggets of Brahms with Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben.
6 February 2015

This week's wine: Pecorino

Though not quite a novelty in Britain, Pecorino is enough of a rarity to seem a startling addition to a supermarket wine list. It  is, not unpredictably, Waitrose which is promoting it by offering this delectable white from the Abruzzi at the bargain price of £5.99 a bottle - a February reduction on what will be its  standard price of £7.99.

Most of us know Pecorino as  a cheese with bite,  made from sheep’s milk somewhat in the hard Parmesan style. Pecorino, the wine from between Rome and the Adriatic, where Berlioz found his inspiration for Harold in Italy, is a white wine with flavour from a land where red wines are what matter. The Waitrose offer is a 2013 Terre di Chiete, giving a good impression of what can be done with the Pecorino grape.

This week I bought two bottles and have not been  disappointed. Drink it with seafood or veal, or as a very nice aperitif.

4 February 2015

Remembering Geraldine

The death of Geraldine McEwan the other day brought back memories of the first time I saw her on stage. I was still a teenager, making my first trip to London on my own and seeing as many plays and operas as I could within the space of a week and eating in as many interesting restaurants as I could afford. 

The Stage Door Grill, a Turkish establishment  in Wardour Street, off Leicester Square, quickly  became my favourite. From there it was an easy walk to the Comedy Theatre, where Geraldine McEwan, still a novice,  was appearing in Arthur Watkyn’s  For Better For Worse with Leslie Phillips. I had never heard of her and I cannot remember why this play attracted my attention but, on my second-last night, along I went. 

Not only was the play, about a pair of newly-weds, extremely funny, but McEwan, with her grainy voice, was so enchanting that I returned the following night to see her again, giving up an opportunity for something more elevating at Covent Garden. 

Though I cannot say I saw her in many other stage plays, apart from The Entertainer with Olivier,  I began to look out for her on television, where she frequently appeared, not only as Muriel Spark’s Miss Jean Brodie (a role in which I thought her superior to Maggie Smith) but as a quirky exponent of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. No less memorable in recent years was her portrayal of Jeanette Winterson’s mother in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.  Sadly, I never saw her in Shakespeare, in which she was said to have excelled.

2 February 2015

This week's wine: Pinot Gris

Though made from the same grape as Pinot Grigio, here is a wine whose only element of similarity seems to be that it is white. It would take the palate of an experienced Master of Wine to discern what the two actually have in common, but what the Italians do with this prevalent Venetian grape and what the French do with its Alsace version is something that teases my own taste buds.

In northern Italy, Pinot Grigio is produced in bulk, is immensely and often undeservedly popular, but at its best makes a nice dry aperitif or accompaniment to pasta dishes and seafood. It has the attraction of being usually  fairly cheap unless, in Britain, you buy it in a large pub-sized wine glass.

Pinot Gris is more of a rarity which, when produced in Alsace, gains that balance - or some might say imbalance - between sweetness and dryness so typical of the region. Its attraction lies principally in this often somewhat disconcerting feature. Is it sweet or dry  or neither?  At its best it is certainly delicious, poised somewhere between a Riesling and a Gewurztraminer, though it can undeniably become cloying if you drink too much of it.

That, it seems to me, is the problem with the Pinot Gris which Waitrose has added to its wine list. Make no mistake, this 2013 Pinot Gris Reserve produced by Beblenheim from 25-year-old vines is a lovely wine, praised by the enthusiastic Jane MacQuitty of The Times for its oomph and attitude.

But one glass of it as an aperitif is quite enough,  and perhaps another glass with a first course of white asparagus, but thereafter, with my main course, I would want to part company with it.

On the other hand, if you want to stay with the one bottle, a Chinese meal might do the trick. Or perhaps, once again, the sweetness of the wine might pall. At £10.49 a bottle, the price is on the steep side, and I am not sure if I would go for it again.

True, Rod Easthope’s New Zealand Pinot Gris from Naked Wines of East Anglia does not cost much less, but it is better balanced, with more tang to it and, in my opinion, it is definitely preferable. It’s also worth remembering that Australian Pinot Grigio, often cleaner in taste than many an Italian Pinot Grigio, can be worth a try, especially as it is widely available around £7.99.
28 January 2015

A wee memoir

“And how did you become a music critic?” was a question  I was continually asked in earlier days.  “By intransigence” was the answer I should have given, if only I had thought of it.


The ambition went back to boyhood, when I wrote reviews of the first few Edinburgh festivals for my school magazine and was singled out by my headmaster for the trenchancy of my style. Charles Munch and the Concertgebouw Orchestra performing Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique  at the Usher Hall in 1948 was my turning point. Transfixed, I watched Munch, who appeared to be conducting himself to death,  from a seat in the organ gallery, just behind the kettledrums, and thereafter  kept scrapbooks of cuttings by all the London critics, though Christopher Grier of The Scotsman was my hero. I vowed that one day I would succeed him. I was nevertheless amazed when I did so.

Having passed through my pop vocalism phase - though it was by no means gone for good - I had found my path into the classics by way of Tchaikovsky’s B flat minor Piano Concerto, whose first movement I could not hear often enough, Schubert’s Unfinished, Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro, Walt Disney’s Fantasia, and as much Sibelius as I could find.  My grandmother bought me a piano, and my parents chose a teacher.  I played all day, though with no great aspirations, sat and  passed Higher Music, listened to the Third Programme, which had been recently launched by the BBC, and spent all my pocket money on shellac gramophone records, which I bought in four Edinburgh shops - Clifton’s and Methven Simpson on Princes Street, Rae Mackintosh and Paterson’s in George Street, all of which had listening booths with glass windows where I passed entire afternoons.

Methven Simpson was the best and sold catalogues (HMV’s for some reason being particularly hard to get) over which I would pore. Rae Mackintosh was the first to recognise the virtues of Decca’s FFRR (full frequency range recordings) through which I discovered The Rite of Spring and Ravel’s La Valse, neither of which featured in Scotland’s concert halls at that time, nor even, if I remember rightly, down  in London.

At home I compiled my own concerts for performance on my parents’ polished wood radiogram, before saving up to buy my own table-top Deccalian, with its distinctive white speaker grid, though I could never afford what was known as automatic coupling, whereby records were stacked on a long spindle and dropped, disc by disc, on to the turntable.  Nor did I invest in thorn needles and sandpaper sharpeners, which struck me as somewhat fussy compared with golden metal (though they were almost certainly better).

In the days before there was a recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, I compiled gramophone concerts and  wrote my own programme notes for them, inviting like-minded friends to attend these  domestic evenings complete with coffee during the interval.  Beethoven’s Ninth, conducted by Herbert von Karajan on a heavy pile of Columbia discs, became my pride and joy.  Though these boyhood events developed in adolescence to the founding of an Intimate Music Circle (“how intimate?” asked one potential member - “will there be girls?”) which hired a room each week at  the Adelphi Hotel in Cockburn Street.

At home, though never in public, I played duets with pianist friends - Haydn symphonies, Moszkowski dances - but concert-going was largely dependent on the presence of Walter Susskind as conductor of the SNO (Elgar’s Violin Concerto and Mahler’s First Symphony in a single programme in the 1940s). Carl Rosa Opera brought its repertoire of touring productions.  The Beatrice Miranda company, a bunch of local amateurs, annually sang operatic excerpts, often excruciatingly. But there was enough for The Scotsman to employ a full-time music critic, the only one in Scotland. In anticipation of this responsibility, I wrote my own private reviews of every performance, good or bad, which I attended and circulated them among friends. Thus did I become a music critic.
27 January 2015

Farnes Triumphant

The first time I heard Richard Farnes, some years ago at the Perth Festival, I thought him potentially the best opera conductor in Britain.

He was, at the time, in charge of that plucky little company, English Touring Opera, and the way he handled its artful production of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos at the Perth Theatre riveted my attention.

Since then he has become music director of Opera North in Leeds and, with a Ring cycle and a much-praised Peter Grimes under his belt, has proved that my thoughts about him were no idle prediction.

There was a point, after he conducted the premiere of David Horne’s challenging Friend of the People, a complex modern opera if ever there was one, in Glasgow in 1999, when Scottish Opera could have grabbed him. It never happened, though he was to make sensational appearances around that time with Glyndebourne and English National Opera.

Now, a few nights ago, he made a guest appearance conducting a concert by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in Glasgow City Hall.  The programme included Delius’s Walk to the Paradise Garden and Walton’s film score for Henry V, among other things. Though I was unable to attend the event myself, I noticed that my colleague Michael Tumelty gave him a five-star review in The Herald, adding that he would have awarded six, if he had been allowed to do so. Will Scottish Opera offer him a production next season? Let us wait and see.
24 January 2015

The editors in my life (27) - to Italy

Holland’s handsome modern concert  hall - the Doelen in Rotterdam - gave the Scottish National Orchestra the closing success of its first long European tour. Back home in Glasgow, nobody appeared to notice that the players had ever been away, but there was a reason for this which greatly pleased my editor Alastair Dunnett. The fact was that Glasgow’s newspaper, the Herald, had failed to chronicle the tour because its newly appointed music critic, Malcolm  Rayment, was forbidden to go. In newspaper terms, this was a coup for The Scotsman, sensationally confirmed when the orchestra strode triumphantly  on to the Usher Hall platform  to perform its first concert after its return from abroad.

 The audience gave the players a huge welcome, and at the end of the evening Alexander Gibson rewarded his listeners with an encore - something unheard of at what would otherwise have been a standard winter season concert (and which, let me add, did not happen  when the same programme was performed in Glasgow). Suddenly re-raising his baton, Gibson unleashed the final fugue from Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, a work that had been played in its entirety more than once in the course of the tour. It was an apt and exhilarating moment as the players entered the performance  section by section, and the audience went wild at the end.

Though my reports had cost the paper what was said to be a fortune, they were reckoned by Dunnett to have been worthwhile and they paved the way for more to follow. Next time, less than a year later, it was Scottish Opera which made its first foreign trip, with Italy as its destination and Britten’s Albert Herring as the work it premiered at the annual Maggio Musicale in Florence’s historic Pergola Theatre, where The Marriage of Figaro had had its first Italian performance and  Verdi’s Macbeth was unveiled in 1847.

With around 1500 seats on five levels, the auditorium had a charming intimacy which suited Britten’s comedy to perfection and I had no difficulty getting my editor’s permission to attend - not least because Scottish Opera agreed to meet all my expenses (unlike the SNO, whose administrator Robert Ponsonby had billed Dunnett even for my bus journeys with the orchestra). Yet once again the Herald missed its opportunity by refusing to let Malcolm Rayment go along, though times were to change later when he joined me on many such trips.

Arriving in Italy in the midst of a torrential thunderstorm soon after the Florentine floods of 1966, when the River Arno broke its banks and thousands of works of art were damaged or destroyed, the opera company thought itself lucky to find the Pergola Theatre running as normal and fully renovated. With Roderick Brydon, Scottish Opera’s Britten specialist, as conductor, the performances won rave reviews from the leading Italian critics, who were seeing the work for the first time.

Here in Britain the Sunday Times previewed the production with words of which the company, as it now stands, should take heed. Pointing out that Jon Vickers had already appeared that year in Verdi’s Otello and that Joan Sutherland had starred in Rossini’s Semiramide, the paper declared: “But it’s  to Scottish Opera that the real honours go. That company, started seven years ago with two works and one week in Glasgow, will give two performances in Florence of its much-praised Albert Herring. And you can’t establish yourself in this field much faster than that.”

Representing Scottish Opera in Florence was its chairman, Robin Orr, who took me out to lunch in the first luscious pizzeria either of us had ever eaten in - which gave me an extra topic to write about. But it was the company’s first experience of a real opera house that mattered. For all its snugness, the backstage was big enough to hold  the scenery for the company’s entire repertoire - whereas in Glasgow, Wotan’s mighty ash tree in Die Walkure had been so big that it had to be stored in the street outside the stage-door of the King’s Theatre.
22 January 2015

The Editors in my Life (26) - Still travelling

The second leg of the Scottish National Orchestra’s first major European tour was a traversal of Germany from Munich to Dusseldorf, incorporating enough detours to make the players say that their agent, in planning such a trip, had folded his map the wrong way.

It was certainly more tiring, and for me less fascinating, than the first leg.  With Austria, and its final stop in Innsbruck, now behind them, and with Prokofiev’s Symphony No 5 as their running theme, the players arrived in Munich’s marmoreal Hercules Hall with nevertheless high expectations. But the polished marble interior was acoustically less friendly than it looked, and the concert never fully took wing. Dining afterwards with Sam Bor, the orchestra’s leader, and his wife Dorothie, a first violinist, I found that their feelings were the same as mine, and that, though central Munich was was exciting, neither of them was much looking forward to the more industrial cities that lay ahead.

True, there was Nuremberg, but its concert-hall turned out to be another disappointment, more like a modern conference centre, with acoustics that muffled the string tone, and an offhand audience.

And what of the detours, zigzagging around Lake Constance and the river Main? For my own part, as a critic, it was the diet of Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony - a fine work in small doses - that daunted me, and I opted out of one of the performances to see Antonioni’s brilliant London-based film Blow-Up (albeit dubbed into German) for distraction.

Back on orchestral track, I was alarmed to discover that the Dusseldorf programme would be at the giant Bayer aspirin factory at nearby Leverkusen.  The conductor Alexander Gibson, anxious to get on the road again afterwards, decreed that there would be no encores after this industrial event (as such things were known in those days back home  in Scotland). This suited me fine, as I had a long review to write - my editor wanted a substantial summing-up of the German portion of the tour - but it displeased the factory authorities and indeed provoked a minor incident.

As Sam Bor was leading the players off the platform at the end, he found his way blocked by the stage manager, who ordered him back on again. Sam, irritated by this intervention, thrust forward to the exit, but it was an unpleasant moment of misunderstanding at the end of an arduous tour of a country where Sam, in 1967, still felt ill-at-ease.

Only Rotterdam’s brand-new hall, with Jacqueline Du Pre playing the Elgar Cello Concerto, lay ahead and this went without mishap in more relaxing surroundings.
20 January 2015

The Editors in my Life (25) - travels

Graz, which was the second stop on the SNO’s first vast European tour in 1967, was where Richard Strauss sixty years earlier conducted the Austrian premiere of Salome, with Gustav and the lovely Alma Mahler, Puccini, Schoenberg, Berg, Zemlinsky,  Johann Strauss’s widow, and - it was said - a young Adolf Hitler in the audience. Along with the Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913, it remains high  on my list of historic performances I have missed.

The first I  learned about the charms of Graz was when, as a schoolboy, a neighbour with the memorable name of Stanley Concha advised me to go there. He had known it before the war, and loved it. When I joined The Scotsman I was on the mailing list of its opera house, so I received frequent invitations to attend performances there. The SNO’s two-day visit gave me the opportunity.

 Alas, Salome was not showing but there was a dreary Madama Butterfly, sung in German by a humdrum cast and staged on a shiny black linoleum floor which has remained for ever in my mind. Though it gave me a night off from a repeat concert by the SNO, I walked out at the interval. It was the first, but certainly not the last, time I had left an opera early - a critical weapon I soon learned to use when the occasion demanded.

At the first of the SNO’s Graz concerts, Jacqueline Du Pre had been soloist in the Dvorak Cello Concerto. A convivial member of the party, she had been in the hotel foyer while I was trying to phone my review to The Scotsman from behind the glass window of the hotel’s solitary phone booth. Spotting me, she donned my hat, which I had hung on a hook outside, pressed her nose against the window and, a cherished memory, pulled funny faces at me through the glass.

After Graz, the SNO proceeded to Linz, where it performed in a large school gym beside a noisy railway branch line. Sir Georg Solti had once conducted there, and famously got the trains diverted. Alexander Gibson had no such luck and Janet Baker’s singing of Mahler’s Ruckert Lieder had to wait until Salzburg’s Festspielhaus for acceptable surroundings.

Between these two stopping points, the orchestra had a night off in a somewhat sinister fogbound mountain village where the hotel proprietor, with a huge white moustache, said threateningly “I want to welcome you to my house.” Mass-produced schnitzels for supper formed his unappetising welcome.

Before leaving in its three buses the next morning, the orchestra’s administrator Robert Ponsonby, a former officer in the Guards, held a snap parade on the village square, where he asked the unforgettable question: “Who has left his boots on his bed?” The culprit was not, I  am relieved to say,  the music critic of The Scotsman.
19 January 2015

This week's wine: Soave

Soave, in Britain, is deemed one of the most basic of Italian white wines, but the Italians themselves think more highly of it. And rightly so, because much of the Soave they drink is better than what they send to Britain.

In Verona and around Lake Garda, Soave is a wine restaurants take pride in and serve  as a house speciality. It may be good, it may be less good, but it is usually worth drinking, especially on a warm night, after a performance at the Verona Arena, with lightning flickering in the distance. 

In Britain, it is what you find in corner shops amid a jumble of odds and ends. If the label simply says “Soave” - a place name but also a word meaning smooth or suave, it is best avoided. It will not be suave. But if the defining word “classico” or “superiore” - or preferably both - is also  on the label, it is likely to be a safer buy.

As so often, Waitrose sells a good one, a 2013 classico costing £7.99. It is certainly suave, without being sweet, but with a background hint of nettles which adds to its interest and makes it a match for pasta and antipasti, though it is equally enjoyable on its own. 

16 January 2015 

Paris Nouvel

Amid predictable controversy, France’s latest concert hall, La Philharmonie de Paris, opens this week - too soon according to its gifted architect, Jean Nouvel, whose hall on the lakeside in Lucerne can claim to be the finest modern concert hall in Europe.

According to Nouvel, the Paris hall is not yet ready - something that can be said about the opening of most other new halls. From commentators come complaints that its name is second-hand, acquired from the great Philharmonie in Berlin, which it resembles in its in-the-round audience layout, and in the terracing which has come to be called  “vineyard” design, in contrast with the conventional shoebox shape.

 Its position on the city outskirts, near the peripheral ring-road, has also been criticised. But its materials, employing a great deal of aluminium, are  undeniably striking, and its seating capacity of 2400, though large, evidently does not distance listeners from the music.

Until now, Paris - like London - has possessed no great halls. The Salle Pleyel, the Palais de Chaillot, the Chatelet and the Theatre de Champs-Elysees (the best of the bunch) all have serious acoustical deficiencies, as I well remember from the days, half a century ago, when  I lived there.

With the award-winning  Jean Nouvel as designer, there is surely hope for the new home of the Orchestre de Paris, whose conductor, at least for the moment, is the spirited Paavo Jarvi, son of the much-loved Neeme, whose period in Scotland was a good one for the RSNO.
14 January 2015

The Editors in my Life (24) More Travels

My most elaborate trip as music critic of The Scotsman began in 1967 as a week at the Berlin Festival and continued as a daily report of the Scottish National Orchestra’s first European tour, which took the players and their conductor, Alexander Gibson, from Vienna to Rotterdam, with Jacqueline Du Pre and Janet Baker as soloists.

By the time my career on the paper had run its lengthy course, tours by Scottish orchestras had become commonplace, but this one was the first of its kind and thus very special. My editor Alastair Dunnett agreed that I should go along, too, and chronicle the orchestra’s travels in detail. For the paper it was a considerable expense, but Dunnett valiantly footed the bill. Not until years later would Scottish orchestras start subsidising critics to travel with them abroad, in the  expectation of getting reviews back home.

Berlin - West Berlin at that time - was the easy bit of the trip,  entirely paid for by the festival. I had been there before, and knew my way around to the extent that not even Checkpoint Charlie proved much a problem when I wanted to attend a wonderful performance of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Komische Oper in the East. Only Magnus Magnusson, in his days as a Scotsman reporter, had preceded me to Berlin and he failed to make it across the border to the East.

In my own case, my Critics’ Circle membership card served as my pass - the only time it was ever of use to me. “They will be very impressed when you show it to them,” Horst Koegler, a distinguished West German critic, said to me beforehand. His prediction was correct, and so I got my first taste of the Komische Oper, a short walk through deserted streets  from the Wall. The only oddity about the glittering production of the Britten was that the role of Oberon was sung by a baritone, because counter-tenors at the time were frowned upon in East Germany, thus depriving the work of a bit of its sparkle.

From Berlin onwards, however, I was financially on my own. My flight from Berlin to Vienna via Munich was already paid for by The Scotsman, and so was my bill at the Intercontinental Hotel. Arriving there a day ahead of the SNO, I reviewed Josef Krips conducting Fidelio at the Vienna Opera, a showy but humdrum production with an enormous Karajan-style prisoners scene - it was he who had originally conducted it.

Then, back at the hotel, I transmitted my review - a tiresome and expensive task in the days before laptops, requiring the assistance of the hotel’s teleprinter department and a guarantee from The Scotsman that the transmission would be paid for at the other end. This was the nerve-racking procedure - which entailed “waiting for a line,” sometimes for more than an hour - I had to endure daily for three whole weeks.

The orchestra, when it flew in from Glasgow, was in churlish mood, not at all excited.  The players disliked the hotel, and found no joy in the great Musikverein hall - scene of the annual New Year’s Day concert - where they were to perform the following night. But the concert, with the doomed Jacqueline Du Pre as soloist, went well, even though no encore had been planned and the scherzo of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony had to be repeated instead.

At the end, the vibration of the playing caused one of the organ pipes to fall to the platform and crumple amid the players - a mishap less dangerous than it  looked, because the pipe was obviously very light. But it was a shock that caused a gasp from the large audience.  By the night of the second Viennese concert, Berlioz’s Corsaire overture was at the ready as an encore, the mood was happier, and the tour had properly begun.  Graz,  Linz, Salzburg, Munich, Nurnberg, Dusseldorf, Rotterdam and elsewhere lay ahead, but reminiscences must wait for another instalment of this blog.
13 January 2015

The editors in my life 23 - Travels

The big benefit of my budget for foreign travel as music critic of The Scotsman was that I never had to justify it. It was enough to get me to three or more festivals a year, especially if the festival was willing to pay a portion of the expense - usually the hotel bill, sometimes the flight.

In this respect the Holland Festival was the most generous, as also were Savonlina in Finland and Bergen in Norway. You could always assume that, wherever you went, tickets would be free - something especially useful if Bayreuth was your choice. Salzburg was notoriously ungenerous, at least in my day, and so, according to colleagues from elsewhere, was Edinburgh - the belief being that festivals which did not need to subsidise critics seldom did so.

In general I succeeded in getting to the festivals I wanted to attend each year - which firstly meant Holland, particularly in Peter Diamand’s time, when it seemed the nicest festival of them all, and specially inviting to critics because the performances were so good and so worth writing about.

In Amsterdam, critics were invited out to meals in small groups - Peter did the same when he became director in Edinburgh - but it never seemed like bribery.  Critics are invariably happy to bite the hand that feeds them. My first Scotsman editor, Alastair Dunnett,  was always appreciative if I  chose to attend a festival which was sending one of its events to Edinburgh, thus enabling me to write about it in advance.

Only once do I remember the Holland Festival blundering in this respect, when a new production of Don Giovanni, wonderfully conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini, had been booked to come to the King’s in Edinburgh after its Dutch premiere. But in Amsterdam, as I felt bound to report, it was a disaster - an early example of new-wave opera production so distorted in every respect that Giulini refused to conduct it a second time - i.e. in Edinburgh - unless it was completely changed.

Lord Harewood, who was Edinburgh’s director at the time, had two months in which to do something about it. He was up against his old foe, Lord Provost Duncan Weatherstone, who, after reading my review, demanded instant action.

By this time the Dutch production team had washed their hands of the entire performance, so Harewood placated Giulini by hiring an ad hoc team from Covent Garden, who designed a replacement backcloth at short notice and placed the most routine production, still with the original cast, in front of it.

Atrocity was transformed into nonentity, but Giulini conducted it in the form of a semi-staged performance and the Lord provost was reputedly pleased. I was not.
10 January 2015

This week's wine: Sauvignon Blanc

Sauvignon blanc comes in many guises. It can be dry or sweetish, soft or aggressive, cheap or dear, enticing or dull. It can come from France or Italy, Australia or New Zealand, South Africa or Eastern Europe.  Some of the best - and some of the worst - are French. 

Good ones - and bad ones - come from Bordeaux.  It has been compared, by one illustrious English wine scribe, with cat’s pee. Why do we drink it?  Because a good one is delicious, and does not have to be expensive. Chateau la Jaubertie, which mixes sauvignon grapes with semillon and gets the balance right, has long been one of my favourites. It comes from Bergerac, a good area for wine, and Judith Paris used to import it in her days of wine trading in Edinburgh. 

Visiting friends the other day, we were poured a South African sauvignon called First Cape, which Tesco sells for a tenner but is currently on sale at half price. This, too, is worth a taste - it’s soft enough to be a more-ish aperitif  but has a bit of life to it as well. 

First Cape wines are imported by Brand Phoenix of Dorking, Surrey, and you can buy them also at Waitrose, where their limited release Chenin Blanc - not actually one of my favourite grapes - costs £7.99, but their Coral Tree Semillon/Sauvignon, reduced from £8.99 to £5.99, looks like a bargain. 

9 January 2015

A musical editor

Michael Kennedy, who has died aged 88, was not one of the editors in my life. But as the Daily Telegraph’s long-established northern editor in Manchester he was an old friend and the only genuinely musical editor I have ever met.

How, amid his official duties, he found time to write so much, and so well, about music, I shall never know. But his books on Elgar, Britten, and Richard Strauss, whom he revered above Mahler - about whom he also wrote a book - remain very readable, as do his biographies of Sir John Barbirolli and Sir Adrian Boult, though his masterpiece was his study of the music of Vaughan Williams. 

His Oxford Dictionary of Music is still the best single-volume reference book of its kind - though Paul Griffiths’s Penguin dictionary is more illuminating and refreshingly opinionated if not always so accurate - and his sympathetic views on Richard Strauss’s Germanism  remain interesting though  inevitably controversial. 

As a newspaper editor he had an eye for talent, finding two freelances in Glasgow, Kenneth Walton and Michael Tumelty, who went on to hold major posts on The Scotsman and The Herald.

8 January 2015