The Full Seraglio

Though it will be a year before the new Glyndebourne production of Mozart’s Turkish comedy, conducted by Robin Ticciati, is released on DVD, the argument has already begun, with The Guardian praising its revelatory aspects and The Times and the Daily Telegraph dismissing it for its prolixity.

For The Guardian, the production’s  completeness is what counts, along with the quality of the performance. Every spoken word, every aria, every possible note of music appears to have been included, to compelling effect,  in the irresistible version presented.

The critic, Tim Ashley, observantly claims that the restoration of so much material, usually omitted, is a rare treat.  For his rivals, however, the whole thing  is merely a drag, which made them  feel like administering the kick in the pants Mozart famously received from his employer  on departing from Salzburg.

But the fact is that Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail is a sublimely copious opera, not necessarily improved by established cuts - the Glyndebourne version evidently has twenty scene changes.  Though the work’s  sheer richness originally disturbed the Austrian emperor - who reputedly responded to it with the words, “Too beautiful for our ears, my dear Mozart, and monstrous many notes”  - the truth is that the composer toiled long and  hard to get it the way he wanted, and that he succeeded brilliantly in his efforts.

The gifted director, David McVicar, has clearly appreciated this aspect of the piece and Robin Ticciati - who, in his concert  performances with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra has proved himself a Mozartian of exceptional promise - has gone as far as to insert a fragment of the great B flat major Wind Serenade, written around the same time, at an appropriate moment in Die Enfuhrung. Too many notes, dear Ticciati? In the context of this production, maybe  not.

More than any other Mozart opera, perhaps, Die Enfuhrung is a work that people like to tamper with. Sir Thomas Beecham, another outstanding Mozartian, used to separate Contanze’s two great arias in Act Two so that they were not heard one after the other. He was wrong to do so, as we now recognise.

Today, as ever, Belmonte’s aria at the start of Act Three is considered gratuitous. But is it really?  Everything, it seems to me, depends on the beauty of the performance. How good or bad  this comprehensive Glyndebourne production is is something we shall not know in Scotland until we see it on DVD. But I look forward to being reassured by it.
17 June 2015

A Revelatory Rosenkavalier

The live DVD recording  of last season’s controversial - though I would prefer to say revelatory - new  production of Der Rosenkavalier at  Glyndebourne has been joyfully released.

Whatever its faults, and I have had difficulty finding any that seriously trouble me, they do not lie with Tara  Erraught, the fine young Irish mezzo-soprano who sang the central role of Octavian and was chided by the London critics for being “dumpy,” “stocky,” and - worst of all -  “fat,” a word which, so far as I know, was employed by only one reviewer, and by him (they were all male)  admittedly obliquely. But the damage was done and, after such a tizz, it seems quite brave of Glyndebourne to have issued its two-disc DVD, showing the entire cast in revealing close-up.

And what do we see? No previous Octavian, in my experience, has been attacked so needlessly  for visual  reasons, though occasionally the word “priggish”  or “arrogant” has been used about exponents of the role in Act Two  - I seem to recall that Janet Baker was thus described  when she sang it for Scottish Opera many years ago.

I thought that Baker, on the whole, was an admirable  Octavian, and I believe that, for different reasons, Tara Erraught is even better.  The difficulty about Octavian is that, as conceived by Strauss and Hofmannsthal, the composer and librettist,  he is a seventeen-year-old boy who is played by a girl - one of the opera world’s most famous “trouser” roles - and has to dress up, in Act One and Act Three, as a chamber maid, just like Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro.

Again like Cherubino he is an aristocrat, and at the start of the opera he is amorously involved with another of the work’s aristocrats, the Marschallin (or field marshal’s wife)  who is attracted to boys when her husband is away. The story grows farcical when the Marschallin’s country cousin, the raucous Baron Ochs, arrives to marry Sophie, daughter of a nouveau riche Viennese family. It’s an arranged marriage - they have never met before - and Octavian gets inextricably involved in the proceedings when he meets Sophie and falls for her, thus bringing his relationship with the Marschallin to an end.

As operatic tradition goes, most exponents of Der Rosenkavalier are more, sometimes much more, mature than they are meant to be. But, usually  being possessors of fine voices, they get away with it. With an uncommonly youthful cast at his disposal, however, Richard Jones, Glyndebourne’s resourceful director, made a virtue out of the the cast available to him and created portrayals of striking truthfulness, without losing the advantage of expressive voices. When not even the Marschallin is shown to be an older woman  - the whole point of the character is that she is actually quite young - their relationships became all the more sharply defined.  Kate Royal, tall, slim, elegant, and silvery-voiced - was an ideal Marschallin. Tara Erraught’s Octavian was a bright-eyed boy, and the fact that she was smaller than the Marschallin seemed perfectly in keeping. Indeed the latter’s interest in adolescent boys (her black pageboy is clearly going to be her next young lover) is vividly put.

Nor is  Lars Woldt’s active young  Baron in any way the clumsy old lecher of tradition. Rude and irritating, yes; maladroit, no. Teodora Gheorghiu’s Sophie, who so quickly sees her future in Octavian and not the Baron, is spot-on. With young Robin Ticciati of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra making his debut as Glyndebourne’s latest music director, the performance is in the right hands. Richard Jones’s production, apart from placing its big brush-strokes correctly, is alert to all the tiny visual details a good Rosenkavalier requires, including a gratuitous but gloriously apt appearance by Sigmund Freud. Though Act Three, with its Verdian bating of the Baron, so akin to that of Falstaff, as usual has its longueurs, I loved the whole thing and am delighted to recommend it.
14 June 2015


 

Musical Times

John Duffus, whose responses to my blog are among the pleasures of writing it, has been back home in Scotland this week en route  to a busy spell on the Continent, where he is attending the Leipzig Bach Festival among other things.

Lunching with him on Monday - Contini’s ristorante  in George Street was our chosen spot  - we inevitably talked about music and about Scottish Opera, for which John once worked before heading for a new life in what we used to call the Far East. There, in Hong Kong and now in Bangkok, along with the odd moment in Bali and detours to North and South America -  even Fitzcarraldo’s Peruvian opera house has been on his itinerary -  he has spent the rest of his career as a high-flying musical events manager, arranging concert appearances for the likes of Pavarotti (ten times), Jessye Norman, Renee Fleming,  Yo Yo Ma, Isaac Stern and many other star names.

While sipping Contini’s house Pinot Grigio, the only Pinot Grigio in Edinburgh to taste (along with Valvona and Crolla’s) as it should, he had much to tell us, including the fact that, at the age of 67, he is writing his memoirs and would like me to read them privately while he is at work on them.  Since they already amount to some 200,000 words, he will clearly need to trim them to a marketable length.

Meanwhile I am looking forward to seeing them and giving him my thoughts. That they will be full of good things - some of which he has already touched upon in his responses to my blog - I have no doubt whatsoever. Vivid musical memoirs are always worth reading, and the fact that John has spent so much time in Asia, while touring the rest of the world, should make his ones very special.

Rudolf Bing’s memoirs of the New York Metropolitan, 5000 Nights at the Opera, which he wrote after leaving the Edinburgh Festival, of which he was the founder, is a classic of its kind, which I find myself returning to periodically. But Scotland was not their particular subject whereas it is in Aberdeen, his hometown, that John’s will begin.

This, at least for  me, should give them an added attraction. What he says about Scottish Opera in the old days, and of its more recent misadventures, is sure to carry a sense of regret - only a few of us now remember what the company was like when its hopes were high - but if John sets it down as prelude to his foreign experiences he will have performed a fascinating service.
9 June 2015

This Week’s Wine: White Rioja

White Rioja, not the most prevalent of wines, could be called an alternative to red Rioja for people who distrust supermarket versions of  the latter.

Whether it is an acceptable substitute is another matter, but Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Rioja Bianco  is perfectly serviceable, if not exactly sensational, correctly priced around the £7 level. It is dry and Spanish, neither much better (taste the difference?)  nor much worse than other Spanish whites of its sort which can be found in supermarkets at this price.

Well, perhaps it is slightly above average, and we recently  thought it perfectly drinkable when sipped fully chilled on one of Edinburgh’s rare warm days. But somehow we never finished the bottle, though we admit we would not be  averse to encountering it in a Barcelona bar.

Much more impressive, however, is Waitrose's latest Gruner Veltliner from Austria, selling at £10.79 but currently available with a 25 per cent discount, which brings it closer to the price of the Rioja.

Produced by Markus Huber, it possesses a lot of Viennese charm and goes nicely with the Glyndebourne performance of Der Rosenkavalier which I have been watching on a newly issued DVD.
5 June 2015

Theodora from the Salzburg Festival

And what’s this? At the start of a two-disc DVD, it could be anyone’s guess. A crowd of people are enthusiastically  assembling for what looks like a lively business conference, with a cocktail party in the offing. The men are in dinner jackets, the women in black dresses. Behind them, a vast array of organ pipes stretches across the breadth of the Salzburg Festspielhaus’s huge cinemascopic stage, where Herbert von Karajan once conducted The Ring.

The crowd of people are, in fact, mostly members of the admirable young Salzburg Bach Choir, laced with some top-quality stars, under the stylish conductorship of Ivor Bolton, who for a time was in charge of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.  Here, with the substantial Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, he continues to prove his worth.

Representing what in Handel’s time would be the forces of evil, the randy, predatory chief executive officer of the business organisation - if that is what it is -  is making a boorish nuisance of himself to the only woman dressed in white, who is today’s personification, we can assume, of the heroine of Handel’s tragic oratorio about Christian martyrdom a long time ago. She brushes him off but he will be back.

Christof Loy’s recent theatrical reinvention of Handel’s great, late masterpiece as a modern opera seria grows gradually underway. Clearly it is Salzburg’s answer to Peter Sellars’s famous Glyndebourne production of the same work, and is a fascinating response not only to Handel but to Sellars at Glyndebourne. Even if you already possess the Glyndebourne DVD, do not resist the temptation to buy the newer one. Each in its own way makes an impressive case for updating the story from Roman antiquity to the present time, while remaining true to the musical eloquence of the original.

Theodora is sung with touching purity, even when her dress is colour-coded from white to scarlet,  by Christine Schaefer, who once sang Berg’s Lulu, a role much less pure, at Glyndebourne - another DVD well worth acquiring -  and who is a famed exponent of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire.  The counter tenor Bejun Mehta is ardent as her lover, the secret Christian who faces death with her at the end, and Joseph Kaiser is the fine tenor who sympathises with their plight.

Another tenor, Ryland Davies, the star of some early Scottish Opera productions, plays the small Handelian role of the Messenger.  The sublime Bernarda Fink is Theodora’s devoted supporter (at Glyndebourne it was the lovingly remembered Lorraine Hunt Lieberson)  and Johannes Martin Kranzle portrays  the brutally convivial CEO with ample verve.

Such intelligent updating  brings a gripping new look to the plot, just as it did at Glyndebourne. Thus staged, Handelian drama breathes  afresh.
2 June 2015
 

Theodora at Glyndebourne

What’s this?  Amid TV cameras, excited young supporters are assembling to hear a persuasive politician, with armed bodyguards on each side of him, deliver his message. In the course of his speech he fakes a heart attack, is revived by medics, leaps back to his feet, and continues his harangue.

The reinvention of Handel’s tragic oratorio by the American director Peter Sellars is underway. The singers employ Sellars’s own private, distracting sign language, also used by him in other productions, to convey their emotions. At Glyndebourne in the 1990s, with Wiilliam Christie conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the transformation of this late, long neglected masterpiece was a hit. Dawn Upshaw, Loraine Hunt Lieberson, and the robust counter tenor David Daniels represented Christian morality. The Scandinavian baritone Frode Olsen was the dictatorial voice of evil. It was not the first time a Handel oratorio had been staged  as an opera, but it was done with supreme conviction, as this  three-disc DVD - where it is joined by a no less arresting renovation of the opera  seria  Rodelinda and a jeu d’esprit concocted under the title of A Night with Handel, with the composer’s modern biographer Jonathan Keates as narrator, strikingly continues to confirm.

Rodelinda, directed by Jean Marie Villegier in terms of a 1920s Hollywood monochrome film, again with Christie as the most perceptive of conductors and with the superb  Anna Caterina Antonacci in the title role,   offers similar evidence that Handel updates more satisfyingly than anyone else.

Each aria and ensemble is like a scene from a great silent movie brought to vivid vocal life, complete with subtitles. The plot profits from its melodramatisation as an episode from fascist Italy. The slow unfurling of the story, both emotional and witty, remains as riveting as it must have been when Glyndebourne unveiled  its take on baroque costume drama in the 1990s.

If you do not already possess it in your DVD  collection, buy it now from Amazon at bargain price.
30 May 2015

Handel in Miniature

As a gateway to opera on DVD, Handel has all the qualities that matter - an intimacy of scale even in his most dramatic works, roles that gain new vividness in DVD close-up, plots that can be strikingly (rather than pointlessly) updated, melodies that blossom afresh in their renovated surroundings.

But above all it is the intimacy that counts. This hit me first, long before DVD was invented, at Ledlanet Nights in Kinross-shire, where John Calder’s little opera festival half a century ago staged pioneering productions of Partenope and Agrippina, the first in Scotland and among the first in modern times, which displayed Handel’s sublimity in a way that the annual Messiah in the Usher Hall has never managed to do.

Crammed into that postage-stamp theatre-in-the-round, with the instrumentalists of Leonard Friedman’s Scottish Baroque Ensemble tucked into what seemed little more than a cupboard at the side, the works sprang instantly to life in a manner that Handel seldom did in big surroundings.

Years ahead of today’s great international Handel revival, the performances were triumphs of the most ingenious sort. Seeing these works again on DVD, in stagings from all over Europe, it is exhilarating to rejoice in them anew, in admittedly larger-scale productions but ones that DVD can bring into our homes at far less than opera-house prices.

From time to time this blog will be recommending DVDs worth buying, starting inevitably with David McVicar’s perfectly poised, inspiringly voiced Julius Caesar at Glyndebourne, made possible by the festival’s astute general manager, David Pickard, before anyone had thought of his becoming director (as was announced earlier this week) of the BBC Proms in London.

As the three-disc DVD reveals, McVicar’s was a Handel production that had everything - wit, anguish, the right pace, the right space, beauty, perception, fancy, resourcefulness, and William Christie conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment  (an outfit which, as it happened, David Pickard helped to create).

Sarah Connolly sings Caesar with a brilliance suggestive of the impeccable Claude Rains acting the part in the film of Caesar and Cleopatra. Angelika  Kirchschlager and Patricia Bardon are Pompey’s grieving son and widow.  Christophe Dumaux, that most seemingly eccentric of counter tenors, is the evil Tolomeo with Christopher Maltman as his lascivious henchman. Danielle De Nese is the bewitchingly saucy Cleopatra.

It is an ideal cast  and the updating of the plot, which transforms Caesar’s troops into a sort of kilted Victorian garrison regiment, is superbly conceived.  If you do not already possess a Handel DVD, this is unquestionably the one to start with. I shall be suggesting a few more in future blogs.
27 May 2015

A Carmen Round-up

An upsurge in productions of Carmen usually means that opera companies are worried about revenue. Are last week’s revivals at Glyndebourne and at the London Coliseum a good sign or a bad?

 We can see for ourselves when the ENO version is streamed live to cinemas around Britain on July 1 - we plan to see it in Castle Douglas, when we happen to be in the vicinity.

This morning the two productions prompted the Daily Telegraph to nominate its ten greatest exponents of the role, which rightly included the wonderful Conchita Supervia and, in 1977, Teresa Berganza in the famous Edinburgh Festival production.

In comparison with so many of her rivals, Berganza’s was a  subdued but memorably precise  Carmen - “mysterious and introspective” was how the Telegraph aptly described her in that great performance conducted in the intimacy of the King’s Theatre  by Claudio Abbado with Placido Domingo as Don Jose and Mirella Freni as Micaela.

That was certainly not a Carmen produced on a shoestring, and was probably the most expensive event Edinburgh (with Peter Diamand  as director) ever staged, but in quality it was worth every penny and has stuck strongly in the memory. I feel glad it was here that it happened.

Among recent productions, the most fascinating in my view was the one at the Opera Comique in Paris, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner with Anna Caterina Antonacci in the title role - not at all flashy but attentive, like the production as a whole, to the spoken dialogue (which Bieito’s Coliseum version largely omits) and to scrupulous characterisation  even if the Micaela was a a little too fluttey and the Escamillo lacking in incisiveness.

But Carmen is a far from easy piece. You can buy this performance on DVD and, for its atmosphere, it is well worth acquiring, certainly more so than Herbert von Karajan’s staid performance at the Salzburg Festival. But what a pity Berganza’s portrayal was never filmed on DVD.
25 May 2015

Another season

Scottish Opera’s announcement of its 2015-16 season - proclaimed from the company’s flamboyant new annexe in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal - has brought with it, among some good things, the familiar whiff of expedience, cutback, and cheese-paring.

Handel’s Ariodante, it’s true, is one of his greatest and most poignant operas, brought to the Edinburgh Festival by the Piccola Scala company with a glorious array of counter-tenors  many years ago. The new production, from the team that recently gave us Orlando,  certainly looks promising.

A new Scottish work shared with Music Theatre Wales - Stuart MacRae’s The Devil Inside, with a libretto by Louise Welsh based on a supernatural story by Robert Louis Stevenson - also looks like good news. But a pocket production of Cosi Fan Tutte, destined to tour the Highlands and Lowlands, and co-productions of The Mikado (in conjunction with the D’Oyly Carte), Dvorak’s Rusalka (snared with Grange Park Opera) and Bizet’s Carmen (with Welsh National) make originality seem like a lost cause.

Coming from a company that once staged Cosi with Janet Baker, the small-scale touring production of Mozart’s masterpiece sounds like utilitarian padding - or what Lord Harewood used to describe as spending money to save money. Dvorak’s mermaid opera is a lovely piece, but should the company’s new music director Stuart Stratford be making his debut with an imported production of it?

As for Carmen, it is being done everywhere at the moment, a sure sign that playing safe is prevalent in Britain at present.

Is this really the sort of unadventurous programming that the SNP should feel proud to preside over? With every year that passes, Scottish Opera as we used to know it seems further and further away.
21 May 2015

Travels with a Chorus

As a chronicling critic, I have travelled three times with the  RSNO Chorus - once to Israel  and twice to the United States - in the days when John Currie was chorus master and the schedules were  hugely ambitious.  For me, all three trips required the blessing of Eric Mackay, The Scotsman editor of the period, and he took pains to remind me on each occasion that I was not only a critic but a journalist.  Rightly he recognised that adventures involving some two hundred singers might have their dangers and it was my duty to report them if problems arose.

The tour of Israel in 1972, for example, meant landing in a heavily protected El Al aircraft at Tel Aviv’s Lod Airport, where there had recently been a massacre by Japanese terrorists. In short, I was to keep my eyes peeled even when reviewing a concert of classical music.

But the main trouble in those days was simply getting a phone line to The Scotsman and raising enough cash for the dictating of long and expensive reviews. Most of the hazards in Israel proved to be minor ones, such as attacks of food poisoning in the halls of residence where the choristers were staying or of sunstroke during a day off on the heights of Masada beside the Dead Sea. The concerts themselves, with performances of Brahms’s German Requiem with the Israel Philharmonic conducted by Daniel Barenboim as if it were a vast Mahler symphony, were in comparison trouble-free, even although Currie warned his choristers that a Barenboim performance could be very different from a Barenboim rehearsal.

Nor was there trouble on the first long American tour, a greatly intricate affair which the singers, from the start, were determined to enjoy rather than grumble about, as the RSNO itself traditionally did on such occasions.

It began in the picnic atmosphere of Hollywood Bowl and moved eastwards to Philadelphia via St Louis and a sensational flight over the Grand Canyon. Alexander Gibson, not yet knighted, conducted Belshazzar’s Feast and some Charles Ives with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Danny Kaye dropped by to direct - up to a point - one of the rehearsals. Verdi’s Requiem and Haydn’s Creation, both under Gibson, were sung in the open air in sultry St Louis, in a park beside the Mississippi.

Choristers on such tours turn every concert into a party, but danger was not averted on the next trip to America, and Currie was forewarned of it before take-off from Prestwick. Taking me aside in the departure lounge, he told me that the Cleveland Orchestra was on strike and the first week of concerts looked like being in jeopardy. With the opportunity to back out, if I so wished, I phoned Eric Mackay, who instantly rose to the occasion. Two hundred choristers adrift in America would be a news story in itself, he said, and I should have no hesitation about going.

Immediately after take-off, John Currie went to the front of the cabin in the chartered Boeing 707 to announce  that “something terrible had happened.” The choristers, fearing that  the plane was about to crash on Goat Fell, were relieved to find that nothing worse than a week of cancellations lay ahead. Nevertheless there was an occasional mugging - Cleveland, though the home of a great orchestra, was a perilous city to stay in - and even a hold-up at gunpoint to give me something to write about, even if it distressed the folks back home when they read about what had been happening to beloved relatives.

But in fact nobody was actually injured and matters  were resolved when the Los Angeles Philharmonic, with which the chorus was to appear later in the tour, offered some extra dates before the culminating concert - Carlo Maria Giulini conducting Verdi’s Four Sacred Pieces - was reached. America, in the end, had resourcefully sorted out a tour that could have been a disaster.
19 May 2015
   

This Week’s Wine: Lay of the Land

The name may look a bit ungrammatical and the label brings no explanation, buy this is rather a good 2014 New Zealand sauvignon blanc, not too aggressive in its flavour of gooseberries and as attractive as an aperitif as an accompaniment to seafood or pasta.

 What the label does tell us is that “Lay of the Land wines have been a long time coming” but that after ten years their Marlborough-based producer, Mike Paterson, has got them right. Since “lay,” among other things, can mean “song,” I like to think that these are singing wines, and a good example of what young outfits, encouraged by Naked Wines of Norfolk (now operating in conjunction with Majestic Wines), are producing.

This one at £8.99 a bottle fits nicely into its price bracket. Though Marlborough wines are not renowned for variations in flavour, it is a happy specimen of its kind.
17 May 2015

Troubles with Tosca

After its disappointingly routine  predecessor, Donna Leon’s new novel Falling in Love, out this month, brings her back up to standard with a thriller set in and around Venice’s Fenice Theatre, where her chain of Guido Brunetti novels began more than twenty books ago.

As she has already proved, she knows enough about opera to steer a story through the intricacies of such a subject and, though this one did not disclose anything I did not already know, it sustains its plot - about a star soprano pursued by a creepy stalker, the way Elisabeth Soderstrom famously was in real life - to enjoyably melodramatic effect.

Since the book concerns a series of performances of Puccini’s Tosca, a work thoroughly despised by Brunetti’s wife Paola, an authority on the novels of Henry James, melodrama is the appropriate word. But since the tale starts with a touching Italian quotation from Handel, and one of its crucial episodes involves the backstage singing of a Handel aria, it is easy to see where the author’s sympathies really lie.

It’s a theme, not irrelevant to this latest of her books, which she could develop further in future. But the passing  references to Handelian sexual deviation do this present book a subtly subversive service.  It is Puccini who gets a little in the way as the story moves into its final scene, though this, admittedly, does it no great harm.
13 May 2015

Rosenkavalier in Close-Up

Glyndebourne’s most recent production of Der Rosenkavalier, conducted last summer by young Robin Ticciati of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, is to be released on DVD on June 1. Though The Scotsman in the old days encouraged me to make the trip to Sussex each year, the festival is now beyond my reach. But the chance to see its best productions - for a tiny fraction of the cost - in domestic surroundings is a great boon. Though the atmosphere of Glyndebourne itself is missing, the compensations are plentiful, and the chance to see Berg’s Lulu, Handel’s Rodelinda and Theodora, Tchaikovsky’s Onegin and masses of Mozart whenever I wish is one of the assets of my seniority.

The Rosenkavalier, it’s true, was undermined for some critics by its supposedly “fat” Octavian, which caused some controversy when the production opened. But looking at pictures of Tara Erraught in the role I could not see what the fuss was about. Octavians come in different shapes - the role, after all, is that of an adolescent boy played by a mezzo-soprano - and two of the best in modern times have been sung by women not famed for their good looks.

The voice and the personality are what count, and though Octavian does not need to be fat to be convincing, she does need to be priggish in Act Two, as Strauss’s characterisation of her suggests, just as she needs to be able to put on a show of vulgar tipsiness in Act Three.

So we shall see how things turn out in the ruthless close-up which DVD brings to all opera. Let me say that I am greatly looking forward to seeing the fine detail of the sublime Richard Jones’s production and do not expect to be disappointed.

As for Robin Ticciati, as Glyndebourne’s new music director he will be conducting a new production of Mozart’s Seraglio this year. That’s something else I look forward to buying on DVD when the time comes.
11 May 2015

This Week's Wine: Vinho Verde

Like Pinot Grigio, only more so, Portugal’s Vinho Verde is one of those risky white wines that fail more often than they triumph. Even half a century ago, when it was quite fashionable to drink it, this sour, fizzy wine summed up what the French like to call vin ordinaire. But whereas plenty of vin ordinaire is perfectly drinkable, the trouble with Vinho Verde was that so much of it wasn’t.

It was never a reason for going to Portugal - the red wines were usually better - though they did sometimes (not often) seem to enhance the salty food. I  have only once been on a Portuguese wine-tasting trip, up the Douro valley, where the scenery was as wonderful as it needed to be. A  distinguished colleague, whom I shall not name, spent much of his time mixing his wines and swirling the result, to see if he could make them taste better. The improvement, he claimed, was marginal.

Today, circumstances have changed, though not, on the evidence of Marks and Spencer’s Tapada de Villar, very beneficially. The fizz is still there - other producers have reduced it to a mere prickle - but with its low alcohol content (ten and a half per cent) the effect is like mineral water, with instant cut-off in terms of after-taste.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with low-alcohol wines - the Germans know how to make delicious ones - but this one, not cheap at £8 a bottle, seems to me to have  little to offer.
6 May 2015

Le Carre without the spies

I have been re-reading The Naive and Sentimental Lover, John Le Carre’s solitary “straight” novel, which rather flopped when it was first published in 1971, with the result that he never produced another of its kind. Yet it is an impressive book, with autobiographical features based on his relationship with his friend and fellow novelist James Kennaway and Kennaway’s wife Susan, with whom he had what appears to have been a mysterious affair around the time of the break-up of his first marriage.

The story begins somewhat gothically in an old dark house near Bath, lit only by lantern, and proceeds to a big central scene in Paris, perhaps faintly Joycean, and more than a little laboured, I thought.  But the book recovers strongly in the succeeding London chapters, one of them at the Savoy Hotel, followed by a climax in the Swiss Alps.

In a way it is like an espionage novel without the spies, much of it gripping, intricate, and sometimes hilarious. It’s a long book, undeniably exasperating at times, though I was never  in danger of giving up.

Kennaway, who was schooled  at Glenalmond in Perthshire but whose reputation nosedived after his death in a car accident at the age of forty, plays a star role in the book.

As I have mentioned in a previous blog, I once interviewed him in his study in his London home near the Thames embankment, but the subject of his private life - about which I knew little at the time - never came up. I knew and admired him simply as the author of the brilliant army novel Tunes of Glory and other early successes, though his illuminating final novel, Silence, preceded by Some Gorgeous Accident, were still to come. He was an inspired screen writer, whose death - seemingly of a heart attack - took place when he was driving to his country home in Gloucestershire.

His wife Susan, in the 1980s, wrote what was evidently a fascinating memoir of him, which Allan Massie reviewed  in the London Review of Books and which (having tracked it down on Amazon) I am now about to read. Happily his qualities as a novelist are showing signs of rediscovery. Thanks to Le Carre, I cannot wait to renew my acquaintance with this maverick novelist. The London Review of Books, by the way, has just placed its massive archive on line for six months. This, along with the next dozen printed copies of the magazine itself, seems  a snip at £12.
3 May 2015.

A Critic's Friends

While readers are frequently a music critic’s enemies, musicians are not necessarily his friends. In my experience, if they are composers or performers, they can be as disdainful of critics as anybody else. But if friendship is possible, or indeed desirable, it can be worth cultivating.

The days when music critics, as a matter of principle, refrained from getting to know, or even speaking to, performers because it might supposedly influence their judgement are far in the past. It is something that used to be said of old-school critics such as Ernest Newman, whose presence would strike fear into orchestral players and whose shiny bald head could be easily spotted in the audience.  The tenor Ian Bostridge, in his latest book, has written that he can always see who is sitting down below when he is giving a recital in the Wigmore Hall and recalls the time he noticed a distinguished pianist with the music on his knee, visibly jabbing his finger on a page of a Schubert song and nudging the fellow musician who was sitting next to him.

The art of the newspaper interview, anathema to people like Ernest Newman, is not now something automatically shunned by serious critics. Indeed, from the start of my career, I have happily practised it and regarded it as part of my job, enabling me sometimes to make new friends - though occasionally enemies. Yet my predecessor on The Scotsman never “did” interviews, and it would never have occurred to him to do so.

Befriending performers admittedly has its risks. Sir Charles Mackerras, before starting lunch, invariably asked, “Who is paying?”  At least it instantly cleared up what could have been an awkward problem of etiquette. More difficult can be the interview which turns out, when printed, to seem in some way insulting.

A single even faintly critical reference and the relationship can be severed forever. It has happened to me more than once, and it is no good telling the outraged composer or performer that one’s mild rebuke has come in the wake of many glowing appraisals. The criticism, however slight, can be unforgiven. The drama critic Kenneth Tynan used to say that he was ready to flinch every time he entered a theatre for fear that an offended playwright or actor might be sitting in the audience.

The literary agent Giles Gordon, who sometimes reviewed for the Evening Standard, used to be a wary member of the same London club as the novelist Kingsley Amis. One day, having given Amis’s latest novel the thumbs down, he was horrified to find himself lunching with a friend a few tables away from the celebrated author. Trying not to catch Amis’s eye, he asked his friend to tell him if Amis was looking at him. His friend gave him the all clear. Giles thereupon looked up from his plate to find Amis glaring directly at him and giving him, in full view of everybody, an enormous “V” sign. Such is a critic’s life.
1 May 2015    

A Critic's Enemies

A critic’s enemies - as I discovered when I was music critic of The Scotsman - are mostly his readers. Some of mine wrote angry letters. Others phoned me, accosted me in the street, visited The Scotsman, came to my house to tell me what they thought of me.

Though I worked too far away to offend the Pest of Poole, as my London-based colleagues nicknamed their most persistent adversary, who wrote to them in different colours of ink, he was a man who certainly had his equivalents here in Scotland.

I never quite understood how I could arouse the wrath I did.The very first letter I received denounced my “daily lucubrations.” Another compared me with a pebble rattling inside a tin can. Complaints were almost always worded in terms I would not have dreamt of employing myself about a performer.

When, after long and careful thought, I decided to change The Scotsman’s spelling of Tchaikovsky to Chaikovsky, the verbal abuse I received astounded me. Yet it was at a time - the 1970s - when other publications were likewise beginning to make the change. The music faculty of Edinburgh University, under Michael Tilmouth’s professorship, had already done so. Peter Diamand, the Edinburgh Festival’s director at the time, gave me permission to do so in my role as programme editor, though his successor John Drummond changed it back, as also did The Scotsman after my retirement.

Yet when Tchekhov became Chekhov, nobody, so far as I  remember, erupted in rage.  My Tchaikovsky campaign eventually bit the dust - not least, I always thought, as a result of the complaints of readers resistant to change. The New Grove, as Grove’s Dictionary came to be called, had already felt forced to retreat from its plan to change the spelling of Tchaikovsky when libraries all over Britain and America advised the editor, Stanley Sadie, to back off - he would be opening, they said, a very nasty can of worms if The New Grove started spelling Tchaikovsky with a “C.”

Maybe, in the end, it did not matter too much that the decision failed, and I myself now accept that Tchaikovsky remains the prevailing British spellng. Readers did worse things than crumple their copies of The Scotsman when I offended them. Members of choirs were partucular culprits when they received what they regarded as rebuking reviews.

A correspondent who signed himself B.Cook responded vigorously whenever I wrote about the Edinburgh Bach Choir. A would-be assassin in the Edinburgh Royal Choral Union said that he frequently saw me walking across Queen Street and vowed one day to run me over. A member of the Edinburgh Nurses Choir expressed the hope that she would find me in front of her on an operating table, and another contrived to get British Airways to send me a one-way ticket to Bahrain ( BA, discovering what had been done, telephoned me and asked me to destroy the ticket).

Yes, critics make enemies. At least I was never punched, though two members of the Scottish National Orchestra’s Friday audience once got me up against a wall in Lothian Road to ask why I hadn’t reviewed the previous week’s concert. “Whaur was your crit?” they shouted in my face. I replied that I had reviewed the same programme in Dundee on a different day, but they had obviously failed to see my report. They were not amused, but at least it showed  that my reviews mattered to them.
28 April 2015    

This week’s wine: Picpoul de Pinet

The announcement of a merger between Naked Wines and Majestic Wines sounds promising. Both are interesting outfits, the former a Norfolk-based supplier concentrating on new young wine producers. These include Benjamin Darnault of the Languedoc, whose latest (2014) vintage of the whimsically-named Picpoul de Pinet tastes like his best yet.

Though Languedoc wines are nowadays ten a penny, they are generally reliable and Picpoul continues to have a deserved rarity value. Darnault’s version of this dry, nicely prickly southern French white is thoroughly characteristic, and an excellent aperitif which is fine with seafood. The bottle comes with a personal message from the trophy-winning producer on the label along with a pretty line-drawing.  Darnault can be seen introducing  his wine on You Tube, followed by a convivial regional wine tasting, complete with singing and dancing.

If Majestic, a long-established wine seller who have a good track record and a way of finding inviting premises, including a former garage designed by Sir Basil Spence in Edinburgh, start stocking it, it will be well worth buying there, and the Majestic insistence that you buy their wines in bulk - minimally six or twelve bottles at a time - should seem no hardship. But Naked Wines themselves are prompt deliverers and the 2014 Picpoul is attractively priced at £8.25 a bottle.
26 April 2015

The Trials of Flying with (and without) an Orchestra

Touring a symphony orchestra is like an army manoeuvre.  Touring a chamber orchestra, if it happens to be the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, is a lot simpler and more pleasant.  Yet the occasions when I have  joined up with the SCO in mid-tour, or said adieu to the players when I have returned home ahead of them,  have not always been so easy.  It’s on these occasions that I have been alone in the hands of airlines, and more aware of discomfort and of what is apt to go wrong. Though flying is infinitely safer - while no less tedious - than it has ever been, there is always the possibility, however faint, that you will find yourself on board a flight where the pilot is trying to axe his way back into the locked cockpit where his crazed co-pilot is intent on flying himself and the passengers into a mountain.

Flying by British Airways in the nineteen-eighties to what was still called Bombay, before proceeding to Hong Kong and Taiwan, where the SCO was in the midst of a series of concerts, proved simple enough, though balanced on a knife-edge of timing. Breakfast in Bombay’s transit lounge was far from bliss, but waking finally  from slumber after several more hours in the air,  and glancing out of the window to see the windows of tower-blocks flashing past was not the most comforting way to realise that the plane was on the notorious hairpin descent into the old Hong Kong Airport.  Safely installed an hour or two later in the Hong Kong  Hilton I just had time for a cup of tea before catching an underground to the “New Colonies,” as they were called, in suburban Hong Kong, where the orchestra was playing that night.

Arriving in that seething pedestrianised suburb was like stepping into a scene from the film Blade Runner.  A policeman directed me through the crowds to the hall where, just before the concert, things seemed suddenly refreshingly calm. In the foyer, a small, polite Chinese boy tested his English on me by asking: “How are you? Are you keeping well?” Directed backstage, I encountered David Todd and Steve Carpenter, the orchestra’s two assistant managers sitting to left and right at the rear of the platform, David reading the New Yorker magazine, Steve playing electronic chess with himself.  The orchestra was not yet on the platform.  David gave me my ticket and I went  in search of my seat.

These concerts in Hong Kong were an eating as well as a listening experience. James Conlon, an excellent American conductor with whom the orchestra had been  making some successful appearances, was in charge  and  constructing his programmes around the Jupiter and other Mozart symphonies. The main auditorium in central Hong Kong, where the subsequent performances were given, had been modelled  it was said on the Royal Festival Hall in London. Despite being in furthest Asia,  I felt peculiarly at home.

It was the eating that differed. Sauntering through Food Street, which was clearly the place to go, was like exploring a pedestrianised encyclopaedia of Chinese cuisine, a day-to-day adventure of the choicest sort.  In contrast,  a fascinating trip to the clifftop abode of Run Run Shaw, the suave Chinese philanthropist by whom the orchestra was invited to lunch,  was like stepping into the luxury of a James Bond novel.

Flying from Hong Kong in a thunderstorm felt even more dangerous than flying into it. But the island of Taiwan was an idyllic setting for the next portion of the tour, as a day off among its rivers and mountains revealed, even if the city of Taipei, at the time of the visit, was choked with motorbikes. There the culinary speciality - snakes alive - was a challenge most of us resisted. In other respects I found Taipei, with its exquisite botanical garden, a pleasure to visit.

But it was  the Japanese tour, a year or so later, which involved me in the worst journey of my life.  Flying out with the SCO on British Caledonian’s new weekly direct flight over Siberia was fine. The performances, featuring the beguiling Portuguese pianist  Maria Joao Pires in Mozart concertos conducted by James Loughran, were a delight. Travelling by bullet train was sensational. But my flight home, some days before the orchestra returned, was my undoing.  The long morning bus journey to Tokyo airport on teeming Japanese motorways was the most fatiguing of starts. The sight of the British Caledonian aircraft, with one of its engines gaping open, looked unpromising. Unexplained delay thereafter followed unexplained delay.

 The departure lounge was claustrophobic. Throughout the day, new departure times were announced and ignored. Such hold-ups, as the writer Geoff Dyer recently remarked, are to be endured rather than enjoyed.  In the end the plane was slowly towed away and we were given a choice: either to trek back to Tokyo for the night with no guarantee of a flight next day (“heaven forbid” was my silent exclamation, Tokyo  by then being my least favourite city in the world) or fly to London by Japanese Airlines via Anchorage, taking off around midnight. I opted, wrongly,  for the latter,  but the desire to escape forever from that airport was very strong.

On board the plane, dinner was served promptly but was dreary even by airline  standards.  At dawn we landed in Alaska in a snowstorm on a runway glassy with ice. The long wait at the terminal was  alleviated, though only slightly, by the sight of a fellow passenger, the clothes designer Jasper Conran,  trying on scarves in the vast timbered shopping mall.

Then off we went again - still sliding, or so it felt like, on sheet ice - for London. Only it wasn’t going to be London. Somewhere over Shetland it was announced that London was fogbound and the plane would be flying to Paris instead.

Being imprisoned in a small transit lounge at Charles de Gaulle airport  proved, however, to be no Parisian pleasure. Flight transfer staff  informed me that I would be eventually flown to London by another airline. But I spied a ray of hope. Since my final destination was Edinburgh, could I not, I asked, take Air France’s nightly much-hyped  champagne flight direct to Turnhouse? Though the absolute impossibility of this was meticulously explained to me, I won my way in the end. Clutching my boarding pass I was allowed on board to enjoy what was this time, by airline standards, a delicious French dinner with copious champagne. The following day, as I struggled to produce a column, I confessed to readers that I was beyond jet lag.

Was it, apart from its closing stage, my worst journey ever?  Its only rival, again under the auspices of the SCO, was not long afterwards when, with Barry Tuckwell as conductor and solo hornist, the orchestra toured Sicily. Flying out with the players entailed changing planes in Rome, where a number of instruments and suitcases were accidentally left behind. By the time this was partially rectified the following day, the opening concert in Palermo had to be given with some players wearing t-shirts and jeans.

A bus drive along Sicily’s shimmering north coast brought us to Messina, the second stop on the tour, after which I was departing because I was scheduled to visit Amsterdam directly after returning to Edinburgh.  The SCO had deftly booked me on a sleeper to Rome followed by a morning flight home. But a sudden sleeper attendants’ strike in Sicily  put paid to my rail journey. Astutely the SCO booked a taxi to take me by ferry at four in the morning from Messina to Reggio Calabria in southern Italy, where I could catch an early flight to Rome. Amazingly it worked.  Two days larer, after writing my report in The Scotsman office, I was en route to Amsterdam.
22 April 2015

Lunching with Jessye Norman

Lunch with the FT - the weekly column in which the Financial Times interviews business, political, and cultural celebrities in restaurants of their choice at the paper's expense  - yesterday turned its focus on the statuesque Jessye Norman, the Edinburgh Festival’s star singer of the nineteen-seventies.

Now in her own seventies, she is inevitably no longer the soprano she was when, under Scotsman auspices, I had lunch with her at Raffaelli’s Edinburgh  restaurant, an occasion to which I have alluded once before in this blog.

Now in the twilight of her career, if so dim a word can be applied to so huge a personality, she is still a star in her firmament, even if the Financial Times, in its review of her most recent New York recital, fearlessly tore her apart. The fact that her interviewer in yesterday’s paper was not the reviewer of her recital, was clearly an advantage for the interviewer.  Neither of them, in the course of lunch in Oxford where the singer was attending a book launch,  referred to the review - one of the notorious Martin Bernheimer’s most supreme hatchet jobs - though the interviewer could not resist quoting from it in her resultant article.

But evidence that Norman is still the indomitable presence she used to be was not lost in what appears to have been an almost placid conversation. Though her choice of food seemed modest by her standards - battered oysters followed by crab salad and camomile tea - the occasional flashing riposte made its point. Clearly, she has not been tamed by time, and the woman who arrived at Raffaelli’s all those years ago with her own unexpected retinue was still recognisable.

Those were the days when she could alarm the Scottish National Orchestra by disappearing in the middle of a Scottish concert tour until a search party located her chauffeur-driven car in the grounds of a hotel in Aberdeenshire.

Trains and aircraft were never her scene. Rather than cram herself into a sleeper, she once took a taxi from Edinburgh to London. Rather than risk the perilous staircase down to the platform of Glasgow City Hall for a concert performance of Act One of Die Walkure under Alexander Gibson (a conductor whose finesse she always admired and with whom she once recorded a disc of her favourite spirituals) she insisted on special stairs being built to the stage from the level of the stalls. The Edinburgh Festival was lucky enough to programme her - in songs by Schubert, Brahms, and Strauss - in her prime.

As for that Raffaelli lunch, it was not an occasion to interview her but simply to say thank-you and to bask in her glory, as did all the restaurant’s eavesdropping customers that day. It cost the usually parsimonious Scotsman a bomb, but in the opinion of this critic it was worth every penny.
19 April 2015