This Week’s Wine: Boschendal Chardonnay

Its assertiveness is the giveaway. This is not quite the distinguished white French burgundy which, at first taste, you might assume it to be, but it is nevertheless a pretty impressive simulation of the real thing.

With an alcoholic strength of 14 per cent it is a big wine and its impact is like a smack in the face. It may not be a Meursault, but this South African 2014 Boschendal seems something special all the same, bold and buttery and certainly worth buying at the £9.99 price tag Waitrose has placed on it  - Tesco is charging the same for the Boschendal sauvignon blanc  which is its rival. Mistaking the Chardonnay for a white burgundy you might think you were doing very well.

Waitrose’s genuine domestic white burgundy - now reduced by 10 per cent to £8.99 - is less sensational  but is undoubtedly the real thing. At its price it is good buy as well as being genuinely French. So this, too, can be recommended, not merely for its authenticity.
12 October 2015

What poise!

Lovely to listen to from the start but the drama begins four minutes in!

A Delicate Touch

With the demise of Lucy Carolan, who died at the age of 62 alone in her Edinburgh home, Scotland has lost an ace harpsichordist but, at least  in my experience, deeply private musician.

A pupil of the renowned Edinburgh teacher Mary Moore, as well as of the austere Gustav Leonhardt in Amsterdam, she was admired for her performances of Bach’s keyboard partitas, which she also successfully recorded.

When her career got going, Edinburgh’s alluring Russell Collection of old keyboard instruments at St Cecilia’s Hall became her adventure playground, from which she could select harpsichords and other instruments for specialist recitals.

A fine accompanist, and valued member of the Scottish Early Music Consort, she lectured at Cambridge and Birmingham, toured Europe, yet appeared less frequently in public than she might have done.

Opportunities to review her were, for me, few and far between. The discreet strains of a tiny domestic clavichord - a sound-world offering much, so it has been claimed, to the solitary performer-listener -  were something  she could employ as expressively  as the glitter of a harpsichord. She will be quietly missed.
9 October 2015

A night at the Met

To my chagrin, I had to miss the New York Metrolpolitan’s international streaming of Verdi’s Trovatore on Saturday. For some people it remains  the most ramshackle an incomprehensible of operas. For others it is a masterpiece of the choicest sort, perfectly easy to follow. I am one of the latter, which does not prevent me from enjoying the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera as the most comic of all operatic spoofs.

With Anna Netrebko as Leonora and Dmitri Hvorostovsky, who underwent treatment for a brain tumour in June, as the nobly baleful Count di Luna, it was enticingly cast. But having recently bought the Berlin State Opera’s new Trovatore, again with Netrebko and with the now baritonal  Placido Domingo as the Count, along with Daniel Barenboim as conductor, I allowed myself to be too complacent about missing the Met’s version.

The shadowy abstraction of the  Berlin production is wonderful. But so, quite clearly, is David McVicar’s Napoleonic updating of Verdi’s great costume drama in New York. I was mad to miss it.

Even the wittily abrasive Martin Bernheimer in the Financial Times gave it the full force of his praise, declaring that he hardly missed the Marx Brothers.

No doubt the performance will be issued in the end on DVD, when I shall certainly buy it. But the live streaming on Saturday, celebrating the tenth anniversary of such events at the Met, and watched by hundreds of thousands of people around the world, must have been something very special. If, like me, you failed to see it, don’t let the opportunity go next time.
5 October 2015

Brendel Finalised

The final, revised, perfected version of Alfred Brendel’s essays on music is like the final, revised, perfected version of one of hid great performances - his last thoughts, say, on the Diabelli Variations, on which he sees possibility of improving, and amid which there is nothing to be amended.

His last performances were given some years ago now, the ne plus ultra a performance of Mozart’s E flat  major Piano Concerto, K271, in Vienna with Sir Charles Mackerras as conductor, after which he retired from the concert platform.

The perfected version of his essays, entitled Music, Sense, and Nonsense, were published last month, and are comparable with, or I would now say preferable to, those of Donald Francis Tovey, which I devoured in my boyhood  but feel that I have now outgrown, at least  in the sense that I am unlikely to read them again.

But I am still reading, and re-reading, Brendel. He can be tough going, especially on the complete piano works of Beethoven, but he continues to be worth the overcoming of any obstacles he places in your path. He is witty, though less so than Tovey. He is a formidable authority on whatever he writes about. And he has his occasionally irritating foibles, such as his refusal to accept the vast, important repeated section in the first movement of Schubert’s last piano sonata, his failure to like Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto, and his lack of enthusiasm for Chopin, in comparison with Liszt.

But on Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, in general, he is massively convincing, and happily they form the main substance of his book, along with his exhaustive thoughts on pianos. It is a wonderful book, which I have followed through its previous versions and extensions, marvelling at its wealth of experience and perception.

Yet so far I have seen only one review of it, by Alan Rusbridger in The Guardian, which is not enough. Perhaps because it is a perfecting of something already written, reviewers have failed to see the point of reading or writing about it again. But every word counts, and that remains the book’s whole point, and in its Kindle edition it is much easier to handle than in book form, even if its many musical examples are inevitably harder to read and its omission of the word “flat” from flattened keys  is a persistent irritation.

Yet reading  the book makes you understand why he gave up public playing when he did because it  will outlive him in conjunction with his recordings, which, as he says himself, should all be clearly dated, so that we know what position each of them holds in his long  journey to Brendelian perfection.

Re-reading the book, alongside Simon Schama’s big new study of British portraiture, has made me extremely happy that good things continue to happen, even if I need some moments of light relief, such as Nina Stubbs’s memories of being a nanny for Mary Kaye Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books, and her family, now out in a televised version written by Nick Hornby.
1 October 2015

Cousins reunited

At the Edinburgh Eye Pavilion  the other day, I met  a cousin  I did not know existed. Aged ninety, she was, like me, being treated for macular degeneration, an irksome malady which, for me, interferes with writing and reading but is held at bay with eye injections.

In the waiting room, along with her daughter, she had heard my name being called, and recognised it. My wife, who was with me, heard the words “music critic ” being murmured by someone  nearby. Not until later, when I was  about to leave, did we come face to face, and I realised that I was more than a music critic to her.

Spry and alert, she came straight to the point with the information that  she was related to me, on my mother’s side of the family. Her grandmother had been my grandmother’s sister.

This was news to me, since I did not even know that my granny had had a sister, although, married twice, she had made me aware that she had had two husbands, both of whom (the first,  my grandfather,  an army bandsman, the  second a prosperous traveller who collected antiques in Japan) were  dead before I was born.

My newfound cousin, I learned, had holidayed with me and my parents in Comely Bank, where I spent my early childhood, though I have no recollection of this, since I was scarcely out of my pushchair at the time.

Yet she had always remembered my unusual name which, she said, was that of the gynaecologist who had delivered me at a nursing home in Walker Street -  though my own understanding has always been that I was called after the German actor Conrad Veidt and the Polish writer Joseph Conrad. Still,  the gynaecologist struck me as a perfectly plausible addition to the list, especially as I knew that mine had been a difficult birth.  Nevertheless, had we had time, I would have liked to hear more from her about this.

But she correctly recalled that my Aunt Maymie, my mother’s sister (who, as I now realised, my cousin looked quite like) had lived in West Maitland Street at Haymarket;  and  she  confirmed that she belonged to the Paton side of the family, my granny’s name having been Joanna Keith Paton and my mother’s Joanna Paton Hunter,  with me myself following up the rear as Conrad Keith Wilson - the Paton link seeming by then to have been discarded.

Yet who knows? There are still things to discover  and I can see why  ancestry research has become a flourishing industry on the internet. Today, I should add, happens to mark what would have been my mother’s 110th birthday.
27 September 2015

A chance meeting at The Edinburgh Eye Pavilion

I'm writing a message to a lady called Joanna who's grandmother was my grandmother's sister. We met this morning at The Eye Pavilion. We parted without exchanging contact info but I mentioned my blog and hope you find it. I would love to invite you and your daughter for coffee. My email address is wilson.conrad@ymail.com

It would be lovely to hear from you.

Conrad
24.09.2015

This week's wine: Pinot Gris

Pinot Gris is one of the great white grapes of Alsace, which has recently been adopted by New Zealand.  In both guises it yields excellent, strongly recommended wine.

True, its most prevalent source of supply - the hinterland of Venice, where it is Italianised as Pinot Grigio - lies elsewhere, and  produces something not only quite different but by no means always a satisfying buy.


So take care.  Pinot Grigio wine, in its numerous Italian  forms, can be found everywhere, both cheaply and surprisingly dearly, though the dearer wines are not always superior to the cheap.

Produced by a  single vineyard, however, they can be very good and not to be sneered at.  Mass produced, on the other hand,  they are usually very basic, and not worth buying, except as a companion for fish suppers or the most routine pasta dishes.

But an Alsace Pinot Gris, if you can find one, is another matter. This week, unexpectedly, I came upon an admirable one in my local branch of Morrison’s, with a £7.99 price tag well below  what I would have been prepared to pay for it.

Alsace  wines are generally regarded as sweet with an interesting  undertone of dryness, or else dry with an overtone of sweetness, but this one got the balance right. Served as an aperitif and then with trout it was a success.


A New Zealand Pinot is similar, though with predictably more pronounced Kiwi notes. Waitrose currently stocks a nice one costing £9.59, with one of those rollicking  Kiwi names,  that you should not let yourself be deterred by. But if you can bear to ask for a bottle of Marlborough  Hunky Dory The Tangle, mixing Pinot Gris, Gewurztraminer, and Riesling, you are not likely to be disappointed. Again, as  an aperitif it is delicious.

Alternatively, also from New Zealand, there is Rod Easthope’s Pinot Gris, which goes up and down in price, but never rises too high.  Eashope is one of those new young producers whose wines are available through Naked Wines, and this is a particularly inviting one.
23 September 2025

Flourishing Bonds

The latest James Bond novel not to have Ian Fleming as its author is Anthony Horowitz’s flippantly entitled Trigger Mortis, published this week.

Horowitz is a master of pastiche whose predecessors as exponents of brilliantly faked Fleming include Kingsley Amis, Sebastian Faulks, and William Boyd. Reviewing Trigger Mortis in the Financial Times, the zealous Simon Schama - whose fascinating study of great British portraits, tied in with the National Portrait Gallery and a new BBC  television series is also out this week - has proved to be a bit of a Fleming himself.

His review - wonderfully witty,  observant, substantial, and to the point - is a glorious tease, suggesting that the next James Bond novel to be written may well come from whom else but Simon Schama.

Not that Horowitz’s book is in any way disappointing. Though not perhaps quite the equal of William Boyd’s Solo - which is surely the most seductive and persuasive  piece of neo-Fleming of them all, and the one which has the most disturbing ending - it is alive, fast-moving, and perfectly pitched,  with a grippingly oblique prologue, an artful reappearance of the hard-edged American, Pussy Galore, and, before the story  has gone very far, a vivid trip to 1950s Germany for a hair-raising  car-race in Burburgring, south of Cologne,  with Bond secretively at the wheel of (I speak as a non-driver) an alluring red Masarati.

Schama in his review conveys its freshness of  flavour,  scrupulously identifying one or two minor blemishes, just as Horowiitz himself works wonders of Bondian reincarnation and resourcefulness.  As his recent piece of mock Conan Doyle confirmed, he knows how to feel his way into the style of authors he clearly cares about,  and Trigger Mortis can be warmly recommended as a ripely convincing Bond experience.
15 September 2015

This Week's Wine: Try Lidl

Lidl, like Aldi, is finding better and better wine with which to tempt its customers. Though both firms are German in origin, neither of them seems to use German wine as a regular sales ploy. Personally I would not regret it if they did, such is the dearth of good German wine in British supermarkets.

Nor does the focus seem to rest particularly on the New World.  It is in France that both firms are finding their specialities and from French sources that they are assembling their most attractive offers.

True, Lidl’s  wine shelves are notoriously a shambles. You hardly notice the good bottles resting amid the much less good on their side walls.  The Cimarosa range which they do make some effort to display are mostly dull and drab.

Steer clear of these and trust that your eyes will catch sight of other things, whose price tags are often obscured, whose printed descriptions may seem to apply to different bottles altogether, whose layout is just a muddle - it almost as if supplies have been simply dumped on the shelves - but which happen to include some real riches.

The French offers, as I have said are the ones to go for, if you can find them  - and inevitably not all branches of Lidl carry the same stock. But every month there is something good available, including, at present, a pair of admirable white burgundies and the 2014 vintage of their established stand-by - a pale pink, nicely dry Cotes de Provence costing £5.99, which would seem a good buy at double that price.

There is also an excellent Fronsac claret, which does cost more than double the price of the Provencal pink, as well as a Margaux at nearly £17, showing that Lidl is not frightened to charge a bit more for something really special.

As Christmas approaches, Lidl also stocks up with lobster, pheasant, quail, and langoustines in Japanese batter, all attractive matches for the better wines.

I first came upon this supermarket some years ago when I praised in one of my musical reviews an ergonomic stool, visually very striking, on which a visiting cellist sat for his Edinburgh recital. A friend who read my review telephoned me and told me that his wife, also a cellist, had bought the same stool and that it was on sale very cheaply in the Leith branch of - guess where? - Lidl. Going to the shop to see for myself, I was too late. The stool was sold out.
11 September 2015

How Sweet the Caress?

William Boyd’s big new novel, rather uninvitingly entitled Sweet Caress, is not winning the best of reviews. Is it as poor as it is said to be? It was still on my reading list when I was warned off it by a close friend and Boyd enthusiast who told me he had passed the 30 per cent marker in his Kindle edition - Kindle still employing percentages rather than page numbers as gauges, perhaps because of the variety of font sizes they employ as aids for readers who, like me, have bad eyesight - and that his interest in it was dwindling. The book, he said, was deeply disappointing.

The story of a woman photographer born in 1908, it toys with reproductions of her pictures (in reality anonymous odds and ends Boyd had evidently acquired in car-boot sales), with walk-on roles for twentieth-century celebrities (a device which, like some other novelists, he has sometimes irksomely employed in previous travels into the past) and, aptly enough, with a sort of snapshot literary technique which gives the book an extremely fragmented structure.

Was I going to like it, I wondered, as I picked up my Kindle at page 0 per cent? Since I generally enjoy the innovatory aspects of Boyd’s literary style, I did not feel automatically opposed to those that are incorporated in Sweet Caress. I began by liking it quite a lot, but by the time I reached the 30 per cent point, my enthusiasm for it, like my friend’s, had begun to wane.

The fragmentation, especially in its Scottish sections, set on an island near Mull in 1977, failed to grip. But I persevered, and never wholly lost faith in it. It is really quite a good read, if sometimes uneven and sometimes, by Boyd’s high standards, somewhat slack.

I would like to read a review of it by Geoff Dyer, a good writer and novelist who shares Boyd’s affection for cameras and photography, but who has not yet pronounced upon it. How accurate it is in terms of photographic information, of which there is an abundance  (always in my view quite interesting), I cannot say.

But my friend, a fellow music critic, has pointed out to me that it contains, as so many modern novels do, at least one musical howler, a reference to Bartok which is wrongly dated.  Read Ian McEwan’s novels to find some similar mishaps.

The next book of its kind, employing the twentieth century as its backdrop, will be from Sebastian Faulks.  Let us hope for the best.
7 September 2015

Why critics?

In a recent posting on the subject of  critics (see my blog “ Days of Yore”) my friend John Duffus asks if reviews really matter.

To be dismissed as a parasite - not that John goes that far - is something quite familiar to me, and I have my answers to such accusations. One of them is Kenneth Tynan’s definition of a critic as “someone who knows the way but cannot drive the car” - which has always struck me as a sharp, succinct observation. Once, quoting it to the conductor Sir Charles Groves in the course of an interview, I was interrupted by his wife, who was present and remarked proudly that “Sir Charles not only knows the way but can also drive the car.” Coming from a conductor’s wife, It was a neat riposte.

In fact, there are plenty of conductors  well qualified to drive the car - think of Herbert von Karajan - but who cannot be said to know the way, if their opinions and style are to be taken seriously (just consider  what Karajan had to say about the abilities of Nikolaus Harnoncourt, his Viennese rival).

But whether or not critics matter can perhaps seem a moot point. Do bad reviews stop people going to a show if they want to do so?  Does a good review prompt them to go to an  event they do not desire to attend?  Sometimes yes and sometimes no, it seems to me.

“Beyond the Fringe” may initially have received no more than moderately appreciative reviews but there was something about it which rightly caught public attention and its four protagonists went on to win world fame.

Some critics, such as Bernard Levin, gained readers because they were witty and vicious, but I do not think people were greatly deterred by him from going to what he despised. Edward Greenfield of The Guardian, on the other hand, was the kindest - and one of the most popular - of critics,  who never wrote a bad word against anyone, yet never lost his following.

Reviewing events - such as concerts - which are already in the past by the time the review is printed has understandably perturbed John Duffus, though I myself  see it  as a vital part of newspaper criticism. The critic as chronicler is invaluable to the art of reviewing, if he or she is a good enough writer, and the fact that an event is already over seems to me of no consequence.

Every review of a work, even  the most familiar of works, is an incident, however small, in the ongoing life of that work.  Andrew Porter, who died recently, was the supreme exponent of that sort of review, and wrote in a way which showed why his large-scale reviews were worth collecting, as they were in the five volumes of reviews he wrote for the New Yorker magazine.

In this respect Bernard Shaw, whose reviews are still deservedly in print, was Andrew’s forerunner, a lesson to us all. William Mann’s reviews for The Times were, alas, never collected, though he did produce two fine big operatic books, on Mozart and Strauss, filled with a musical journalist’s spirited knowledge.
3 September 2015

Good Food Guiding

Now a wing of Waitrose, the Good Food Guide seems inevitably to have lost some of the character it possessed 65 years ago when it was edited single-handedly by its founder, Raymond Postgate, and thereafter by his successor, Christopher Driver of The Guardian.

Today, though printed on much better paper, it looks too like a the product of a committee, comprehensive but impersonal. In the old days, it is true, Postgate and Driver relied on the suggestions of readers for the restaurants it reviewed, but you felt that it was always finally dependent on one man’s opinion of each place.

Each entry was a small enthralling essay, so that if you wished, you could read the book from cover to cover, as I did, as if it were a single fascinating narrative. That special idiosyncratic flavour has long since gone - the decline began when Driver was deposed - and sadly it continues today.

Yet the 2016 edition, out this week at £17.50, is a handsome enough book. It is just not interesting enough to read rather than consult. Times, of course, have changed. The old pioneering spirit, when every mentioned restaurant seemed like a discovery, belongs to the past. All the expected places are in the latest guide and the taste of the 1950s and 1960s, not such a bad time for eating out as it is made out to be, so long as you picked your destination carefully,  has certainly vanished.

But what you have to pay in many places nowadays is too often shocking and there is little sense of discovery. So I am disinclined to name the Edinburgh restaurants which are listed in the latest issue or to enumerate which cities outside London win the most entries, which used to be a little game I played with myself whenever I used to review it.

It’s not just a sense of deja vu that prompts this response. It is a sense of boredom and of preferring other ways to spend my money. Also that many of my own personal favourites do not win a mention, which seems more a matter of bad luck than anything else.
31 August 2015

Days of Yore

When William Mann of The Times, Andrew Porter of the Financial Times, Martin Cooper of the Daily Telegraph, Desmond Shawe-Taylor of the Sunday Times, Gerald Larner and Philip Hope-Wallace of The Guardian, and Peter Heyworth of The Observer used to arrive in Edinburgh for the Festival, you knew they were here.  All were deservedly established professional voices of British music criticism, staff writers on their papers, with prominent, allotted spaces to fill. If you wanted to read their reviews, you knew exactly which page to find them on, because their editors valued them and were proud to employ them.

Today, when British newspapers no longer have staff critics, reviews are demoted, no longer essential reading, often hard to find, and lacking the old authority.  Quite a lot of events this year seem to have gone unreviewed or been inadequately reviewed. How aware were you that John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique were in town at the start of the Festival to perform Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique along with Lelio, its still little-known sequel? Presented as a unity they had been heard as an unity in the 1960s but never since then. They deserved a detailed, thoroughly perceptive review, but from whom did they get it?

As a boy, I used to compile my annual Festival scrapbook of clippings I wanted to keep, vaguely hoping but not yet realising that one day I myself would be writing about the same events.  Newspapers were smaller then, but their editors knew what mattered. Christopher Grier, my predecessor on The Scotsman, used to speak of what he called, perhaps somewhat pretentiously,  the Corps Critical de Londres filling Edinburgh’s small supply of first-class hotels - just three in those days.  Every night a  taxi would arrive at the George to deliver Percy Cater’s (now unremembered) reviews to the Daily Mail’s Edinburgh office at Tanfield.

Whenever  Kenneth Tynan, who famously claimed that to have a play staged at the Edinburgh Festival was the kiss of death, deigned to write a scathing report on the experience, his words were unmissable. Martin Cooper and his fellow music critics (particularly the Viennese-born Peter Stadlen)  on the Telegraph - for in those days leading newspapers fielded a whole team of staff music critics - developed their loathing of Mahler into what somebody called a heavy industry.

Well, Mahler’s position now stands unquestioned - who is given space to question it? -  but Cooper stated a formidable and memorable case for the opposition.

Peter Heyworth’s reviews were perhaps the most authoritative and penetrating - he was sound, too, on the subject of food, and once stormed out of an Italian restaurant in central Edinburgh declaring the place to be ridiculous - and I missed him a lot when he died suddenly in Athens. But all these critics, one or two of whom were to become among my closest, most learned friends, set the city alight in a way impossible now, seeming as vital   to the Festival as many of the events they wrote about.
28 August 2015

This Week's Wine: Triade

Triade is not an evocative name for an Italian white wine. Supermarkets do not plant bottles of it alongside their stock of Soave, Pinot Grigio,Verdicchio, and Orvieto, all of which have vivid place associations even if not always the stamp of quality.

Triade owes its name, in fact, to the three grape varieties -Fiano, Falanghina,  and Greco (as in Greco di tufo) - that go into its manufacture. Matured in small oak barrels, it is the taste of Southern Italy, and its flavour is sophisticated, nutty, vibrant,  and distinctive enough to make you remember it with pleasure.

Waitrose is one supermarket that supplies it, but the name, it would seem, has not caught the attention of customers - which is surely why it has just dropped in price from the £9 level to what deserves to be a very tempting £6.74. Whether or not the drop is permanent remains to be seen, but snap it up while it is on offer.

For swordfish or shellfish it is a perfect partner, but it is good enough on its own to seem the most inviting of aperitifs.
26 August 2015

Take it as it Comes

“Edinburgh must ask what its festivals are for.”  Voiced irascibly by TheTimes this morning, it’s a good request, but to whom should it be addressed and what, if anything, will be the answer?

What Edinburgh’s festivals are - if not what they are for - seems clear enough. They are a gigantic muddle, increasingly based on the principle that too much is not enough. Too much of what? Too much of what does not matter seems to be the irritated answer.

Lost somewhere in the middle, and striving vainly to re-assert itself, is what  we now call the EIF, which was once its raison d’etre.  Do you remember - I do - how Sir Thomas Beecham was once for presbyterian reasons forbidden to conduct Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis at the Usher Hall on the opening Sunday of the Festival and gave us the Ninth Symphony instead?

It caused a scandal at the time.Today the Missa Solemnis is just another work, conducted this year amid much else by a very young musician. The sense of occasion, thwarted though it was,  has gone. The Missa Solemnis, like Mahler and Bruckner symphonies, turns up anytime, hidden among stand-up comedians and similar enticements.

I accept that stand-up comedy is today something special to Edinburgh, and that there is little point in longing for the old days when the opening Sunday of the Festival was a sacrosanct night when nothing but the opening concert happened. The first night could be tremendous - think of the time when Sir Georg Solti conducted Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust and hissed to Arthur Oldham afterwards that his boy choristers had been out of tune.

But many of the Festival’s opening concerts were very dull indeed, and you could not even buy a consoling drink at the Usher Hall.

This year the opening concert is on a Friday, amid much else, which has been one way of shelving  the old tradition. The reviews were as slapdash as the concert itself appears to have been. But then the decline - some would say the international demise - of real music criticism is just another sign of the times.

So, as The Times asked today, what are the Edinburgh Festivals for, and what is to be done about them? The answer presumably is nothing. There are still high-minded festivals in Europe, such as Lucerne’s, which has just named Riccardo Chailly as its new musical director, an inspired choice in the wake of the great and glorious Claudio Abbadio. Such things continue to matter in cities whose cultural boundaries have not been eroded. Edinburgh is not the festival it was, that’s for sure. It is far bigger and more varied, but it is still a great event and, like it or not, we must take it as it comes.
21 August 2015

This Week's Wine: Soave

Supermarket Soave is not, on the whole, something to look forward to. It does not bring back happy memories of Verona and Lake Garda,where the better Soave flourishes . It does not bring back memories of anything more than humdrum supermarket Soave, whose only virtue lies in its cheapness.

But are other Soaves marketed in Britain really much better? I certainly have good memories of the one which British Transport Hotels used to sell in their wineshops around the country. Long since gone - the one in what used to be Edinburgh’s NB Hotel was a particular favourite of mine, transformed into a humdrum brasserie when the hotel became the Balmoral - and I miss it a lot.

But even in specialist wine shops it has become hard to find a Soave as smooth as its name implies. When Naked Wines of Norfolk, now operating in conjunction with Majestic Wines, announced its 2013 Marta Soave Classico, describing it as a “bright little beauty,” I hoped the best. At £10.99 a bottle, reduced from £16.99, it is clearly no bargain but is it any good?

No better than all right I would say, adding that you might as well stick to Waitrose’s or one of the other routine Soaves costing less than £8. The search continues.
18 August 2015

Barenboim in Bloom

Richard Morrison’s substantial interview with Daniel Barenboim in The Times this week was a journalistic work of art.

In the days when the chance to write a Barenboim interview used to come my way - around half a century ago - I thought him very hard work. For a start, he had almost nothing to say, and what he did say was usually a statement of the obvious. Despairing, sometimes unscrupulous, journalists tended to put words into his mouth and pretend he had actually said them.  He was, from boyhood onwards, the finest of performers, but meeting him was invariably a disappointment and something to be avoided.

Writing about a Barenboim performance was much easier.  Mozart’s last piano concerto, played with the gentlest, most luminous finesse with Alexander Gibson and the SNO, still sticks in the mind, as also does. very differently, the time he cut his his thumb on a bottle of beer just before playing  Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto on the opening Sunday of the Edinburgh Festival, yet performed it imperially, his thumb conspicuously bandaged, improvising new fingerings, again with Gibson as conductor in the Usher Hall.

So, once he had started his conducting career, he gave a ravishing account of Boulez’s Rituel as prelude to The Rite of of Spring at the end of one of Peter Diamand’s Edinburgh festivals. As conductor of Edinburgh Festival Opera - another Diamand caprice - he gave us a Marriage of Figaro gloriously sung, but so mature in its casting that one critic hailed it as Figaro’s Golden Wedding. Joined by Peter Ustinov as director, he later presented a very eccentric Don Giovanni with the violinist Leonard Friedman leading the costumed on-stage band on the roof of Giovanni’s revolving villa.

It was shortly before that performance that I flew to London to discuss the forthcoming production with Ustinov and Barenboim in a busy trattoria in Victoria. Ustinov  predictably, did most of the talking, wittily dwelling on Mozart’s stage directions and digressing about Massenet’s Don Quixote, which he had just directed at the Paris Opera, expressively humming its famous cello solo to the delight of the restaurant’s neighbouring customers. From Barenboim came the occasional interjection - some of them, so I fancied, pre-planned - but not much else. Since I’d met him before, I knew what to expect.

During the same period, before conducting the SNO Chorus in a doom-laden account of Brahms’s German Requiem at the Israel Festival, I gave him every opportunity to tell me about his exceptionally dark, Mahler-like interpretation of the work, but little was disclosed. The performance, when it finally took place, said it all - which was much to be preferred to the other way around, but somewhat tantalising all the same.

Even to talk to him about Beethoven -  his wunderkind treatment of the Diabelli Variations had been one of his early showpieces in  Edinburgh - proved a struggle.

Today, however, everything has changed and Barenboim at 72 has become one of the great musical orators of his time, declaiming with authority about Wagner and Bruckner, about music and politics, about modern conditions in Germany, where he is in command of the Berlin State Opera and Berlin Staatskapelle. and where he recently failed to apply for the vacant conductorship of the Berlin Philharmonic because it was not something he needed.  His latest piano, which bears his name, was played by him in a recent Schubert cycle in London. His Schubert duets - particularly the late A major Rondo  with his compatriot Martha Argerich as partner - provide some of the most revelatory and tender experiences in modern pianism .

He is now so busy that Richard Morrison had to interview  him on board the Eurostar - with the most rewarding result. Read it and be enlightened.
13 August 2015
               

On the Tightrope

Simon Mawer was Booker short-listed six years ago for The Glass Room, an admirable novel inspired by the building of a famous Mies van der Rohe villa in Czechoslovakia in 1929 and by the people who, in the author’s imagination, lived there before the Gestapo moved into it.

Since then Mawer has written two more novels, The Girl who Fell from the Sky and, published last month, Tightrope, in which the menace of Nazi occupation, and its aftermath, again looms over all that happens.

The heroine of the first of these is parachuted into France to live dangerously while helping the Resistance. Her story continues in the second, growing out of  its predecessor’s quietly chilling ending.  Both books have been compared favourably with John Le Carre. The writing is of a similar high quality but Mawer travels his own route into the world of espionage, with gripping results.

Mawer, who teaches in Rome, is a good writer -  he deserved his Booker nomination - who does not overdo the menace but lets his heroine, Marian, deal with it as it comes. Do her wartime experiences change her personality as the story of Tightrope moves into the Cold War? Has Ravensbruck driven her mad or was she - inevitably you come to think  - a bit mad anyway?

On the basis that you do not have to be paranoid to believe that you are being followed, the book advances strongly. I liked it very much and look forward to Mawer’s next.
9 August 2015

This Week's Wines: Summer Pinks

The paler the better is the established rule of thumb about pink (some would say punk) wines, now enjoying their annual wave of popularity among people on holiday. Provencal pinks are, by informed assent, the best of them all, dry and balanced, genuine in colour and quality, discreet in personality, they are vin rose which proves that this wine is not the rubbish some of us deem it to be.

But the paler the worse is, unfortunately, an equally reliable rule of thumb when applied to the so-called “blush” wines which have infiltrated the market in recent years, oozing a sweetness which is no more palatable than the taste of those other pale pinks which resemble humdrum whites to which a touch of colouring has been added. Avoid these if you can, even if some of them have inviting names and  may seem to have their origins in the prettily named, old-fashioned Rose d’Anjou, which looks a lot nicer than it it actually tastes and which at one time littered Parisian restaurant tables before being ousted by superior, somewhat darker, tarter Tavel from the Rhone.

But if you want to drink pink, Provencal Rose should today be your choice, even if it is harder to find and more expensive when you find it (though oddly Ikea serves it in their cafes).  Waitrose, with their usual perception, supply a couple of good ones in the £9-£11 category, not cheap but preferable in my view to pink Sancerre, which costs much the same, or even more but tends to be disappointing compared with its renowned  white equivalent.

But Waitrose’s lightly lemony  own-brand 2014 Provence Rose at £8.99 lives up to its price tag, as also does their Esprit de Biganay Cotes de Provence at £10.99. Their cheaper but not uninteresting Bijou Cuvee Sophie Valrose from the Languedoc is likewise worth sampling.

And what of all those almost tomato-coloured Spanish pinks which crowd our supermarket shelves?  Avoid most of them I say. For all their quaffable, affordable and initially enticing juiciness, many of them are crude and  deceptively high in alcohol strength. 
5 August 2015