The Shostakovich Story

People are asking me if I have read Julian Barnes’s new novel about Dmitri Shostakovich, The Noise of Time.  My reply is that I am reading it - indeed well into it -   but am finding it a bit of a trudge.

The problem is perhaps that it reads like a biography where too little is said about the music, though as a novel inspired by a frightened twentieth-century Russian genius it fails to illuminate his personality in a way you would expect an author as perceptive as Barnes to do. The Shostakovich story, as told here, is much as we already know it. The inner man is probed in a series of musings but not, it seems to me, freshly or enthrallingly enough.

Shostakovich, as is generally known, was scared of Stalin, and constantly feared punishment, not merely rebuke, for being a composer of whom the Soviet leader disapproved. He accepted the accusation that what he produced, in his opera  Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, was politically  unpalatable “muudle not music.”

Stalin’s response to it sounds a bit like an intensification of the British establishment’s response to Britten’s Gloriana.    Yet there was no reason to expect Stalin, seated with his cronies, to react otherwise.  Why such a man should have accepted Shostakovich as a great composer any more than Winston Churchill or the Queen would have done is explained as usual in terms his power and desire to interfere and humiliate.  The difference is that Shostakovich and Stalin were both Russian and that Stalin had the power - or Power as Barnes constantly  calls it - to be so menacing that the composer developed the habit of standing beside the lift shaft outside his apartment each night with a small suitcase in his hand waiting to be arrested.

It is obviously a harrowing story, but - I speak as a music critic - we already know it. Barnes, however, is presumably intending to reach a different public, which is not already aware what Shostakovich’s life was like - though anyone who saw his quaking appearance at the 1962 Edinburgh Festival which, thanks to Lord Harewood, the festival’s director at the time, he was permitted to attend, was able to guess. By then Stalin had been dead for nine years but the scars still showed.  The Fifth Symphony was a recognised masterpiece and landmark in Shostakovich’s output, but it remained a deeply ambiguous one, the triumph of its finale riddled with undercurrents where the truth about the composer, above-all his sense of irony, was evident.

It is the fact that Barnes could have faced us more strongly with Shostakovich’s contradictions is what makes his book a disappointment. What makes some of the music trivial and some of it not? We may not expect Barnes the novelist to supply the answer, and he does not do so.  The material is there, on page after page, but it does not quite add up to the major novel the book could be.  I shall go back to it, but without the hope raised by its beginning, with Barnes’s glimpse of Shostakovich stranded at a desolate Russian railway platform, out in the wilds, in the presence of a beggar - a hint here of the Simpleton in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov - hoping for a kopeck.
28 March 2016

The Truth about Cosi

I have been watching the DVD of Cosi fan tutte conducted by the late, much-loved Nikolaus Harnoncourt in which the sisters, Fiordiligi and Dorabella, are portrayed as identical twins.

This is not quite so revolutionary as it sounds - Cosi is an opera nowadays much interfered with -  though it adds a perhaps unnecessary degree of visual it also, in a curious way, weakens the impact of Mozart’s most perplexing comedy.   Neither Fiordillgi nor Dorabella, sung in this performance by Edita Gruberova and Delores Zieglier, is as dramatically convincing as they often are when portrayed by singers who look quite different from each other, whatever illumination it may be thought to bring to the amorous complexities of the story.  It is certainly no improvement on Elizabeth Harwood and Janet Baker in the masterly old Scottish Opera, however marvellously Gruberova voices Per Pieta in Act Two.  

So I cannot quite see the point of making the girls so utterly indistinguishable from each other, as Jean-Pierre Ponnelle did in this production, though it certainly adds to the inspired symmetry of Mozart’s flippant yet ultimately heartfelt comedy.

With Harmomcourt in charge of the Vienna Philharmonic, the orchestral accompaniment is admittedly in masterly hands. The touch is light, adroit, sensitive, frivolous where it matters, with as fleet an unfurling of the overture as I have ever encountered. Harnoncourt’s tempi, we should remember, were never fast or slow as a matter of principle, but as a matter of rightness.

But Ponnelle’s filmed version of the opera - where the arias are dubbed and the seascapes are less real than they seem- disappointingly fails to match the DVD of Harnoncourt’s more recent  Salzburg Figaro, which is a proper live performance in front of an audience, with Harnoncourt visibly in the pit.

Nor does Ponnelle’s film answer the many questions about Cosi that invariably arise.  Do the girls recognise their lovers in disguise or do they not? In one really good recent Salzburg Festival  production, available on DVD, they definitely do so, because they have inadvertently witnessed the plans for the plot against them yet the action still moves inexorably to this outcome.

But Ponnelle never makes his position wholly clear. Maybe the girls rumble the plot. Maybe they don’t.  But at least, in the end, the eighteenth-century moral is drawn, and Don Alfonso (thanks to Paolo Montarsolo’s knowing portrayal)  seems not quite the hard, cruel scoundrel he usually does today.    And the lovers - though no more convincing than they tend to be - are allowed their moments of fury when the plot begins to work against them.

Yet Anthony Besch’s perceptive old Scottish Opera production lingers in the memory because it made none of the mistakes made by so many more recent, over-ingenious, over-heated productions of Cosi. Besch’s  was a model of truth and wit, and it worked. The sudden startling transition from monochrome to colour at the start of Act Two, and the almost shocking return to monochrome at the end, were perfectly judged. The effect was that of a romantic dream that went wrong but was resolved when reality returned, and the way it did so was surely Mozart’s way. It surpassed any other production of Cosi I have seen, providing a rare moment of operatic magic and exactude and sublimity in the modern history of the work.
16 March 2016.

Harnoncourt the Great

Dead at 86. Count Nikolaus de la Fontaine und d’Harnoncourt Unverzagt (more simply known as Nikolaus Harnoncourt) was the great pioneer of what we have come to call historically informed performances. For all his fame in Vienna and Salzburg, he rarely appeared at the Edinburgh Festival, but when he did so in 1978, Peter Diamand’s farewell year as director, it was with his renowned Monteverdi triptych - The Coronation of Poppea, Orfeo, The Return of Ulysses - for which he was justly praised.

The productions, by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, had their superficial aspects, but it was the music of Monteverdi’s three surviving operas, and Harnoncourt’s handling of it, that mattered. His performances, with the Zurich Opera, stick in the memory, and it was sad that we never heard any of his comparably enlightened Mozart opera performances.

In his memory, I watched the DVD of his Salzburg Festival Figaro, recorded in 2006, the other day and thought it as revealing as ever - not too fast (though he could be very fast), lucidly articulated, unsurpassingly cast with the alert young Anna Netrebko as Susanna, Ildebrando d’Arcangelo as a light-footed Figaro, Christine Schafer as  delightfully childlike Cherubino, Bo Skovhus as a grimly perspiring Count, Dorothea Roschmann as the most forlorn of Countesses. It was a performance, polished on the surface but filled with undercurrents, that explored every facet of the music.

Luckily for posterity, Harnoncourt was a master of recording, in a way like Herbert von Karajan, whom he reputedly despised and whose musical obverse he was. The parallels between them - the Salzberg Festival connections, or disconnections, whereby he was banned by Karajan for twenty years, the devotion to Mozart whom Harnoncourt conducted infinitely better  - were finally (though not until Karajan died) in Harnoncourt’s favour.

But it was the sheer authenticity of his conducting, something the smooth and autocratic Karajan never possessed, that mattered most. At a time when performances on original instruments, with the shunning of vibrato, seemed thin and weedy, Harnoncourt’s were alive, confident, utterly secure. His ensemble, the  Concentus Musicus Wien - the Vienna Philharmonic of baroque chamber orchestras except for the fact that it contained many women - rehearsed for five years with his wife Alice as leader before it made its first public appearance and recorded all Bach’s surviving church cantatas.

His cycle of Mozart symphonies with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra employed modern instruments in a historically informed manner and the often explosive results were a revelation. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra spoke of winning him as guest conductor but got Charles Mackerras instead - a like-minded choice and a musician in a similar mould.

But we did need to hear more of Harnoncourt here, and it was a shame we didn’t.
10 March 2016

This week's wine: Offers

Cut-price Chablis, if it comes from Waitrose, is worth watching for, and the latest is no exception. A product of the excellent Cave es Vignerons, as fine a French co-operative as you will find, it is a classic of its kind, an unostentatiously alluring white burgundy at full price (£11.99) but reduced until March15 to £9.49.

Though it possesses the wine’s bench-mark steeliness, this 2014 version is not at all aggressive.  In fact, though it shows its mettle, it is attractively light and pretty, not marred by oakiness, and lovely to drink before a meal as during one.  It is what I have been buying recently and shall keep on doing so for the coming week or two.

Not that it has no rivals. Triade, produced from three good southern Italian grapes (fiano, greco,  falanghina) is another current Waitrose offer which, though obviously different, can be drunk in the same sort of way. This 2014 Bianco Campania, down from £8+ to £6.59, knocks spots off many a more familiar Italian white, and is worth sipping on any occasion.

Rather dearer, but forming a conspicuous part of Lidl’s Easter array of bottles, a 2014 Montagny at £11.99 looks like being worth a try. Montagny, though not the most famous of white burgundies, is almost always worth buying, and The Times has advised us to grab this one now. I’ll be letting you know what I think of it.
6 March 2016

Worth the Small Detour

New cafes in the Morningside area of Edinburgh are ten a penny, but few of them are interesting enough to make much of a mark.

What used to be the gatehouse, and is now the Lodge Cafe, at the start of the Hermitage walk along the Braid Valley is showing ambition, however. A cramped little cottage, which once served as a tollbooth beside the clock at the bottom of Comiston Road, it was moved stone by stone to its present site some years ago and has prompted many bypassers to say it should be turned into a cafe.

This has now happened, though work is still in progress, with the promise of a terrace with outdoor service by summertime.

At present it looks like a gardener’s cottage with a gleaming espresso machine in its kitchen, the atmosphere perhaps more rustic industrial than woodland chic or walker’s dream. But it is friendly, faintly quaint, and definitely an asset to its surroundings, with parking space outside, smart new hand-made benches to sit on, and varnished Singer sewing machine treadles converted into round  tables where you can drink good Italian coffee while devouring Victoria sponge or pastries.

It opens early, too, serving fried eggs in a roll, bacon and Stornoway black pudding as well as other toothsome things  to ladies with substantial dogs. I liked it enough to try it again, so watch this space.
4 March 2016

Night Manager

The sharpest review of the TV adaptation of The Night Manager has been supplied in The Guardian by  John Le Carre himself. He makes vividly clear what has been done to his 1993 novel, and how, and why, it has needed to be made palatable for an audience in 2016.

Having read the book for the first time only a couple of months ago, and without knowing that it was about to be screened, I wondered how on earth I had missed it 23 years ago.  Seeing the first episode of the TV version on Sunday, I thought at first that the book had been fine as it was, and saw no reason for the multiplicity of changes that had been inflicted upon it by the BBC. Was the updating really necessary and did the settings need to be so ruthlessly altered?

But a book is a book, and an adaptation has nothing to gain from being a meticulous copy. To film it creatively is almost bound to change it into something else.    So Zurich, where the hotel’s night manager originally operated in the book, inevitably becomes Cairo in the film. This, as it happens,  helps to tighten the action in a quite serviceable way and we do not reach Switzerland until later, when it appears, more scenically, in the form of Zermatt in the glare of the Matterhorn, and where the suave villain, described by Le Carre as “the worst man in the world,” arrives by private helicopter instead of by taxi - though with the same entourage of people as in the book.

Meanwhile the British secret agent, a man in the original, who wants to infiltrate the courageous night manager into the entourage and thereby capture the villain, is transformed not uninterestingly into a woman - and a visibly pregnant one at that. Behind all these changes the bones of the story are, so far, faintly discernible. But would I be aware of this without knowing about it beforehand? Perhaps but perhaps not.

Does it matter? It would certainly matter to me if I myself had written the book, one of Le Carre’s most gripping in a surprisingly James Bondish sort of way, with the action shifting around the world.

Yet Le Carre’s famous touchiness as a man and as an author does not seem to have been hugely disturbed by this. He accepts what has been done. Far from dismissing the alterations as gratuitous, he finds them largely understandable, and maybe he is right.

Far from being a grossly modernistic piece of tampering, the story - at least in its first episode - actually seems to be working. Though Le Carre was not consulted, the results have not offended him. Indeed, as far as I can tell, he sees things in the TV version that he never saw in the original.

Certainly my own initial irritation is already waning. I am looking forward to episode two, next Sunday, even although I know that it omits what in the book was some wonderful material. But the film, or so it seems, has its own merits. It is undoubtedly well acted and discerningly shot. Only the critics, it seems to me, have failed to recognise its qualities and have been too eager to find fault with it.

The Night Manager is a good book but, by the look of things, it is also a good film, with Tom Hiddleston -so memorable in Archipelago and Unrelated a few years ago  - as its very definite star. And the leisurely format, like  that of the Alec Guinness version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, will surely suit it.
23 February 2006  

Where are they now?

How many of Scottish Opera’s past successes still exist?  Without looking back to early days, I am impatient to know if Berg’s Lulu and Wozzeck - good productions of the two finest operas since Debussy’s Pelleas - survive in the company’s capacious storage premises, recently pictured in Brio, the Scottish Opera magazine.    And what of Pelleas itself?

Is Britten’s Death in Venice, a brilliant production shared with the Geneva Opera, still revivable,  even if the sets rest in Switzerland?   And what of the company’s great enduring Britten cycle itself? What of Luc Bondy’s Macbeth, seen in Vienna and Bordeaux after its Edinburgh debut? Bomdy has died but has his production been preserved?

What remains of David Pountney’s substantial Janacek cycle shared with Wales, and of his vivid Street Scene?   It would be interesting to know these things, which are, after all, things that should matter more to the company than some of its less desirable revivals.

No doubt it is too much to hope that we may see the most recent of the Ring cycles anytime soon,  though every national company should have a serviceable Ring - and this one is more than that - in its repertoire, not to mention a Rosenkavalier  as good as McVicar’s, along with his dark, strong Idomeneo.

Meanwhile, in an interview in the February issue of Opera Magazine, the company’s new music director seems to be envisaging a cycle of the works of the insignificant Jonathan Dove - could this be another looming Scottish Opera misadventure?
17 February 2016

War Works

Frank Bridge, famed as Benjamin Britten’s teacher, remains less famous as a composer.  Yet his Violin Sonata, composed in the aftermath of the Great War, is one of the British masterpieces of its time, a work of passion and high originality. The opportunity to hear it at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh’s final New Town Concert of the season on February 29, will be something to seize.

Like Britten in Aldeburgh, Bridge was a product of the English coast. Born in Brighton, he died in Eastbourne, and his Violin Sonata could be said to stare across the English Channel towards Pourville, where Debussy in 1917 composed one of his last works, likewise a violin sonata, when the war was at its destructive height and the battles of Verdun and the Somme formed the background that prompted Debussy to call himself Musicien Francais.

Bridge, a  pacifist thrown into dark depression by the war, was a deep admirer of Debussy, and the linking of these two works in Jack Liebeck’s  recital with Katya  Apekisheva  as pianist will give his programme a special sense of purpose.

Framed by the bleak beauty of Brahms’s “Rain” sonata and and the sudden final vivacity of a sonata by the American composer John Corigliano, these pieces will give the Edinburgh audience something to think about. Though Bridge’s day has yet to dawn, it is getting closer.

His devotion to the music of Alban Berg - an unwilling soldier in the Great War who was later to be shunned by the Nazis - prompted him to draw Britten’s attention to that inspired Viennese at a time when few British composers had learned to love him. But Bridge did so, and it set him startlingly at odds with the English pastoral tastes of the period, helping  Britten to make Peter Grimes - as well as the subsequent Billy Budd, Owen Wingrave, and Gustav von Aschenbach  - the great operatic outsiders who could stand beside Berg’s Wozzeck.
15 February 2016

This week's wine: Chilean Chardonnay

Chilean chardonnays and sauvignons do not figure frequently on this blog because so many of them are routine and, though perfectly welcome, seldom worth championing.

Every so often, however, something turns up to remind you that Chilean wines can be better than that, and one of Waitrose’s latest is certainly worth a try.

To claim that this 2015 Montgras Reserva chardonnay at £8.99 is like a white burgundy would be unfair to white burgundy as well as to this Chilean bottle. It is not a burgundy but it is definitely a chardonnay, better than many you will find on our supermarket shelves, with enough personality and zest to make it well worth drinking.

Though it does not require a meal to accompany it, it would go well with seafood and dishes with a certain amount of spice. Waitrose calls it fruity, with exuberant notes of pineapple, apricot, and peach melba - words that are  used of many wines but seem thoroughly apt in this case, even if melba is a word too many.

Its taste is bold and bright but, though high in alcohol, it stops short of of seeming overwhelming.  It’s a chardonnay I opened this week while cooking and continued pouring it during our Chinese New Year meal that followed.

But if £8.99 is more than you want to spend on a South American white, Waitrose also sell a Touraine Sauvignon for £6.99, which is no mere bargain basement tipple. The 2014 vintage is as fresh as they come.  It is a good example of a an unpretentious household wine,with a label depicting a lawnmower as proof that it comes from the garden of France.  A few bottles would be worth keeping  at the ready in your chiller.
12 February 2016

Adieu, Terry

I was once invited by Terry Wogan, who died yesterday, to lunch with him in an Edinburgh restaurant about which, in my secondary role as The Scotsman’s food and wine critic,  I had written a hostile review.

As the local critic - the only one at that time - I frequently received invitations of this sort from celebrated commentators who operated elsewhere but who were passing through and wanted to exchange views about the Edinburgh scene.  The title of my fortnightly column - “Gut Reaction” - had presumably caught Terry’s attention, and so perhaps had my name, because, though I did not know it at the time, he was a deep admirer of the great German actor, Conrad Veidt, after whom I was named and whose film, The Spy in Black, had been set by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in the north of Scotland.

Our lunchtime conversation, nearly forty years ago,  ranged beyond eating and drinking into the realms of Irish writing - we liked the same novelists - and music. Though period pop music - a taste for which was something else we shared -  he did not stop at that. Like Gershwin before him, he could speak of the classics and his conversation was as delightfully droll as those who knew him said.

But because, when we met, boil-in-the-bag cooking had become a trend, the topic inevitably came up. Since our talk was off the record, I did not make notes, but we agreed that it was not always as bad as it was made out to be (by me among others). What mattered was what went into the bag  and whose hand was holding it.

He knew, I thought, what he was talking about. As a result, he has gone down in my store of memories alongside David Wolff of Decanter Magazine and Johnnie Apple of the New York Times, whose visits to Edinburgh I grew to cherish.
1 February 2016

Expressions of love

Autobiographical chamber music is a conspicuously Czech accomplishment, pioneered by Smetana in the nineteenth century and sustained by Dvorak before reaching its apogee in Janacek’s two string quartets, the second of them an expression of romantic love unrivalled among other works of its kind.


Though modern research has suggested that the object of his adoration - a young married woman who inspired his operas Jenufa and Katya Kabanova as well as the  quartets - did not return his love, the music of Intimate Letters, the second of his quartets, written just before his death at the age of 74, certainly speaks for itself.

With the voice of a viola d’amore sensuously replacing that of an established viola, it is a quartet like no other, though it will share Monday’s New Town Concert at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh with something that equals its intensity,  Berg’s Lyric Suite, written just across the border in Austria two years earlier  in 1926.

As Berg’s first venture into all-out Schoenbergian atonality, it makes perhaps tougher listening than the Janacek, but the passion it expresses for a married woman other than his wife is direct and unmistakable, and, as its six movements progress, increasingly desolate.  Since the two works, written almost simultaneously, complement each other, it is surprising how rarely they are placed  side by side in the same programme.

But on Monday, thanks to Berlin’s sensational young Armida Quartet, this will happen, and the opportunity is something to seize. Whatever difficulties it may contain, Berg’s Lyric Suite was adored by George Gershwin, who discussed it with its composer at their famous meeting in Vienna, when Gershwin played Berg some samples of his own form of lyricism and Berg responded with  the words, “Mr Gershwin, music is music.”

The composer of An American in Paris took the score of the suite with him to France, studying it on the train before persuading the Kolisch Quartet, who had just given the work its premiere, to play it from memory at various Parisian parties given in his honour, though what the listeners thought of it is not hard to guess.

Yet although Berg’s was a different sort of lyricism from Gershwin’s, his influence on the American composer ran deep, and his first opera, Wozzeck, was clearly responsible for the composition of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. His second opera was Lulu, which he died - of an insect bite, tended by his wife -  too soon to complete. Like the Lyric Suite it commemorated his doomed love affair, and though its completion was quite easily achieved from his detailed notes, its publication in completed form was blocked by his widow as long as she lived. Its eventual premiere, conducted by Pierre Boulez, revealed it to be a masterpiece as great as - perhaps even greater than -  Wozzeck.

So do not miss Monday’s performance of the string quartet, and do not fail to spot the touching reference to the prelude to Act One of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde amid the desolation of the last movement, a moment similar to the quoting of Bach’s Es ist Genug by the soloist near the end of his late, great Violin Concerto.

At present, in preparation for the performance, I am re-reading Bird in the Apple Tree, Raymond Monelle’s novel about Berg in its Kindle edition. Employing the mature violin concerto as its framework it is an enthralling study of the composer’s early life, though the author - a dear friend of mine who taught at Edinburgh University - died too soon to savour any fruits of its success.
30 January 2016

A big night at the MacBeth's

Though traditionally regarded as conspicuously cruder than Verdi’s two mature Shakespeare operas, which benefit from Boito’s presence as librettist, Macbeth has had a good track record in Scotland -   and not merely because of its Scottish setting.

A famous old Glyndebourne production, with Margherita Grandi as Lady Macbeth, opened the inaugural Edinburgh Festival in 1947, marking the start of those halcyon years when Glyndebourne was responsible for all opera at the Festival.  David Pountney’s Scottish Opera production in the 1970s was memorable for its gleeful witches, for its buckets of biliously green blood, and for Galina Vishnevskaya’s poshly Chekhovian Lady Macbeth, as well as David Ward’s big, noble Banquo.

A later Scottish Opera production, just before the turn of the century, gave the company the opportunity to work at the Festival with Luc Bondy, one of the greatest European directors of the day, whose production, with Katherine Broderick’s Lady Macbeth, was ensemble drama at its best. Though it reputedly cost a fortune, it was worth the millions of bawbees that had to be spent on it.

If Verdi’s Macbeth has a flaw, it lies not so much in its supposed crudity, which does it very little damage, as in the fact that Lady Macbeth is almost invariably the star of the show.  And in a Deutsche Grammophon DVD I received as a Christmas present, she is played by Anna Netrebko, a portrayal that is as good as they come.

To the New York Metropolitan, the source of this performance, she has in recent years brought a new allure.  In Il Trovatore, recently screened publicly  in the Met’s international series, she was even said to have surpassed her  surpassing portrayal of Leonora for Daniel Barenboim in Berlin - also available on DVD  and not to be missed.

As a glossily blonde and glamorous Lady Macbeth she looks voluptuous rather than murderous, and though she is given to standing on top of her bed, as well as to rolling on the floor, she supports such impetuosities with peerless singing and the richest beauty of tone. Even when reading the letter at the start of the opera, she sounds as heart-felt as Violetta in the last act of Traviata, and not at all the stern Lady Macbeth of so many performances.

From start to finish, she rivets attention, and though her smile looks devouring it does not lack passion.  She is vivaciously tipsy in the banquet scene and later a predictably enthralling sleepwalker.

But what of the rest of the cast?  As Macbeth, Zeljko Lucic gets away with a certain fuzziness of voice and a distinct resemblance to the actor Leo McKern comically wrinkling his nose as a source of emotion. He is presumably meant to look bonkers. Rene Pape, rearing up behind the celebrants at the banquet, is a lacerating and lacerated Banquo.

But it is unquestionably Netrebko’s night and she forms the heart of a production, by Adrian Noble, that updates the action to modern times, with plenty of rifles and revolvers, a gossipy array of witches with handbags, all staged without shirking the work’s historical aspects, despite the volume of bright red blood.

Fabio Luisi’s conducting has leopard-like litheness - listen to how the orchestra sizzles during Lady Macbeth’s entrance scene, and recognise that Verdi’s Macbeth is a masterpiece.
28 January 2016  

Programme Changes

If the raison d’etre for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s concert programme this week was the triptych of rare Mozart concert arias that formed its centrepiece, the absence through illness of the young Swiss soprano Regula Muhlemann, who was to sing them, sadly deprived us of this pleasure.

Mozart’s concert arias are a rare and marvellous mixture of good things and even better things, and Muhlemann’s  selection, starting with a dramatic scene based on  Metastasio’s once celebrated operatic libretto about the abandonment of Dido, Queen of Carthage, by  the roving Aeneas, was something  that boded well.

Mozart, on the brink of unveiling his great opera seria Idomeneo in Munich, grabbed the opportunity to portray Dido when it came his way with a superb Mannheim soprano (the future Ilia in Idomeneo) as soloist. Though Dido’s fate had already been indelibly commemorated by Purcell, and would be dealt with again by Berlioz in The Trojans, it was never the subject of an entire Mozart opera, even if  he gave us a glimpse here of what a Mozart Dido and Aeneas might have been like.

Partnered in this concert by two further Mozartian might-have-beens - comic arias brilliantly written as inserts into works by composers whose operas long ago bit the dust, though they were hugely popular in their time - this potent setting of Metastasio’s text (already the inspiration of many eighteenth-century composers) would have been a real experience.      

Depriving us of three such little-known gems by a mishap in programme planning - the SCO opted instead for three of Mozart’s most famous arias in a performance by the Sicilian soprano Laura Giordano, another bright young talent. In the circumstances, no doubt, Susanna’s “Deh vieni” from Figaro, Donna Anna’s “Non mi dir” from Don Giovanni, and Fiordiligi’s “Come scoglio” from  Cosi Fan Tutte formed a more than adequate exchange. But they changed the concert into something else and, impressive enough  though it was, it was not what was needed.  In concert surroundings these familiar items were simply a bunch of operatic excerpts, adding nothing to our Mozart experience but seeming simply to be flung at us as programme fillers.

But because it is always good to hear Mozart well sung, the evening was not a write-off, even though the dapper Spanish guest conductor Antonio Mendez approached it with what looked like the bravado of a young bullfighter, with Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony as the bull.   Though Beethoven in the Queen’s Hall tends to be very different from Beethoven in the Usher, and though Mendez’s  handling of the Seventh was by no means uninteresting, the overall intention seemed to be to make us think we were hearing the work for the first time, in Vienna in 1813, with the deaf Beethoven himself battling with it as conductor.  The performance, while meticulously attentive to the composer’s repeat signs, to the tramp of the allegretto and the circling swirl of the scherzo, had all the raw abrasiveness of a fist in the face.

Mendez’s is clearly a talent to watch, but not perhaps in the Queen’s Hall, where not only was Beethoven given a good thumping but the humour of Haydn’s 99th Symphony, at the start of the programme, was in danger of being changed into a concerto for kettledrums.
24 January 2016

This week's wine: Brazilian red and white

Between the World Cup and the Olympics, a good deal of Brazilian wine is presumably being drunk. But where to buy it? Unlike Chile and Argentina, it has not yet quite established itself as a safe and widespread  best-seller. Search a British supermarket and you could still have hard work tracking it down.  But Waitrose, in its wisdom, is stocking a pair of wines that smartly complement one another other - a red Merlot and a white Chardonnay - at an inviting enough price, £8.79 - to lure you into buying a bottle of each.

It is a risk worth taking, even by people who are so colour-conscious that they would generally prefer one to the other. Drink them both, for the simple reason that the one is as good as the other. The red should be sampled as a gutsy  winter tipple - though it will taste just as characterful,  I feel sure, in the summer - robust but not hard-edged, and well suited to spicy stews at any time of year.   The white - bold but not too in your face - measures up well to more familiar South American Chardonnays, and goes as nicely with savoury meat as with salmon or shellfish.

Buying a bottle of each therefore has much to be said for it.  Each works as an aperitif, and it is as simple to pass from the red to the white as the other way around. Nor is either of them too strong, though another Waitrose wine wins my prize this week for its combination of flavour and low alcohol content.

Surprisingly it comes from New Zealand and is a Sauvignon whose alcohol level is no higher than nine per cent - something you might expect from Germany but not the Southern Hemisphere.

Having been deterred by the sheer weight of many New Zealand sauvignons, excellent though they often are, I have found The Doctor’s Sauvignon Blanc at £8.99 delightfully fresh and fruity, with a tang all its own that contradicts, or seems to, its nine per cent alcohol tag.

Whether as an aperitif or with seafood, it is a captivating white, and I can confidently recommend it.
20 January 2016

The Secret Mozart

Flanked by the robustness of Haydn’s 99th Symphony and Beethoven’s Seventh, three rare  Mozart concert arias will fill the slot traditionally occupied by a concerto in the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s programme at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, on January 21 and at Glasgow City Hall the following night.

Given the close relationship between Mozart’s arias and his concertos, it’s a fascinating choice. His concert arias, many of them written as inserts into operas by other (at the time more popular)  composers, remain less familiar than they ought to be, and the three picked by the promising young Swiss soprano Regula Muhlemann, who has recently sung Papagena in The Magic Flute at several leading European festivals, as well as Despina in Cosi Fan Tutte in Zurich and Elisa in Il Re Pastore at Verbier, is clearly on the way up.

The three arias, all of them exquisite examples of their kind, form a concerto-like triptych, starting with the dramatic scene Mozart based on an episode from the distinguished  Metastasio’s libretto for Didone Abbandonata.

Depicting the fate of Dido, the tragic queen of Carthage who was abandoned by Aeneas,  Metastasio’s complete text was turned into operas by numerous composers - though not by Mozart, who contented himself with his scenic fragment and did not write an entire Metastasio masterpiece  until La Clemenza di Tito just before his death.

The two other arias are, in contrast, choice samples of Mozartian comedy which deserved a better fate than they received as add-ons to popular operas by lesser composers staged during his lifetime. With such a bright young soloist, and the Spaniard Antonio Mendez making his Scottish debut as conductor, they will surely be a treat.
13 January 2016

Happy New Year

I wish a happy and healthy new year to all my readers from around the world. During 2015 I have been very pleased to welcome readers from: Argentina, Austria, Australia, Canada, China, Curaçao, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Japan, Latvia, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States of America.

If I have missed anyone please say hello in the comments below and let me know what country you are from.

Very best wishes to all,

Conrad Wilson

Rejoice rejoice!

Intimate performances of Handel’s Messiah, at one time impossible to find in Britain, are nowadays the norm, and life has become better because of it.

Yet, despite their welcomely smaller scale, not all intimate performances are good ones, and few are quite as good as the Dunedin Consort’s in the close acoustics of the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh, where this year’s showed exactly what a good performance should sound like.

Though not always of quite the most impeccable polish, its three-hour span - even when taken fast, as it now usually is, Messiah remains a long work, with plenty of scope for minor mishaps - it was preceded on this occasion by an afternoon Messiah for Children from the same forces and was due to be followed the next night by a further performance at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery.

Despite this pressure on the tiny group of singers and instrumentalists - and the  smaller the group the more  exposed the detail -  the results  possessed an authority, vitality, and responsiveness that went far beyond the mere notes of the music.

With the orchestra mostly on the conductor’s left and the choristers -  twelve in all, four of them the soloists - on his right, detail was needle-sharp, light, alert, never limp, even in the flare-up of the Hallelujah Chorus.

Words were crystal clear, rhythms bouncing, cadences keenly pushed into the textures without old-fashioned plink-plonks, and orchestral descriptiveness - Handel’s flair for onomatopoeia - was jabbingly vivid.

The endearingly wandering sheep moved with a due sense of comedy. The soloists were Mhairi Lawson, Rowan Hellier, Matthew Long, and Matthew Brook. The little band of altos had a counter-tenor planted in their midst, an audible and striking effect. John Butt, one hand on the harpsichord, the other shooting aloft, was the irresistibly unflagging conductor.
29 December 2015

Messiah Days

Times have changed for Handel’s Messiah since I first reviewed a performance of it in The Scotsman in the 1960s.

On that occasion the Edinburgh Royal Choral Union’s annual performance, given at noon on New Year’s Day in the Usher Hall, was a heavyweight event, a penitential antidote in notoriously alcohol-free surroundings  to the previous day’s jollifications.

I dreaded it, and wrote a preview, maligned by stuffy readers, asking why it always had to be Messiah, portentously performed by a big choir and dreary orchestra, featuring star soloists who perhaps did not even know each other and a Hallelujah Chorus for which everybody, audience included, stood up. The conductor in those days was Herrick Bunney, much more of a Bachian (an admirable one) than an exuberant Handelian. He took the annual ritual as it had been handed down to him, and any changes he made were seldom for the better. In response the audience brought flasks of tea and sandwich lunches for the long interval.

“Crumbs in the corridors,” my predecessor Christopher Grier once sighed. It was hardly an event for real Handelians, who loved his other oratorios also, to look forward to.

Today such performances still exist in Britain, but circumstances have  generally changed for the better. Modern slimline performances, sung at cracking speeds by small choruses and accompanied by stylish orchestras, are the order of the day.  Colin Davis and Charles Mackerras,while still employing quite large forces, were the first to make the move towards lighter, springier rhythms, with soloists who knew how to achieve recognisable musical unity of purpose.  Today, even better, we are able to hear the work in smaller, more intimate halls, sung by choristers who are themselves quite often the soloists.

In Scotland, the John Currie Singers were the first to set the ball rolling at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh. Now it is the Dunedin Consort, directed by the effervescent John Butt, whose performance could be said to tick all the Handelian boxes. Even if you hear no other Christmas performances, make sure you hear this one at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh on December 20 or The Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow on the 21st. You will not even have to rise to your feet for the Hallelujah Chorus and the bar will doubtless be open at the interval.
19 December 2015  

This Week's Wine: Pinot Grigio

Pinot Grigio, the white Venetian wine which in recent years has spread throughout the rest of Italy with the ease - or so its detractors  would claim -  of cholera, now has other European versions as well as plenty in the New World.

But the Veneto remains its authentic home, producing bottles as good and as bad as ever, though the Pinot Grigio listed by Marks and Spencer as one of its wines of the month in fact comes from Pavia, south of Milan.

Pavia, too, routinely produces plenty of junk wine, as well as a foaming red which people love or loathe. But M&S’s Pavese Pinot, reduced umpromisingly from £11 t0 £5, is really rather good, clean, sparky, and not at all drab - in other words a genuine bargain which, drunk very cold, would brighten anyone’s Christmas party.

At a different extreme, M&S’s Macon-Villages Uchizy has not been reduced from £11, which is admittedly not particularly high for a decent white burgundy, though there are others just as good available for less.

Waitrose’s Champteloup Muscadet Sevre-et-Maine is not a white burgundy at all but is certainly a good Loire, worth every penny of its £7.99 price tag, possessing all the frisky petillance you would hope for from a wine bottled on its lees. Drink it with a bowl of mussels and be happy.
18 December 2015

Triumphant in Scotland

With the death of Luc Bondy at the age of 67, Scottish Opera lost one of the most gifted stage directors in its history.

He only worked once for the company, on a production of Verdi’s Macbeth in 1999, and its cost was crippling - Scottish Opera, at the time when Richard Armstrong was musical director, took years to recover from it.

But it was worth all the effort on the part of the company and the festival, and it was also seen in Vienna and Bordeaux.  Ever since Glyndebourne had launched the very first Edinburgh Festival with Macbeth in 1947, starring the great Margherita Grandi as Lady Macbeth, Verdi’s early drama, very difficult to bring off, had held a special place in Edinburgh’s annals.  In the 1970s, Scottish Opera staged it for the first time, in a gory David Pountney production starring Galina Vichnevskaya in a vivid scarlet dress for the supper scene, described by one critic as “a bad night at the Macbeths.”

But Luc Bondy, with Brian McMaster’s support, did it differently, as a pure ensemble piece, as good as they come, in a production in which every movement of every member of the chorus meant something. It was a riveting evening. (Bondy was also a specialist in the Shakespeare play).

Born in Zurich and once described as “Swiss with a twist of French,”  Bondy was a man of impeccable cultural pedigree. His grandfather was an impresario in Prague, his father the editor of a French literary magazine, his mother a dancer daunted by the Nazis. In Paris he studied drama and mime under the famous Jacques Lecoq. McMaster, as director of the Edinburgh Festival, had already recognised his brilliance and had presented, to high acclaim, Covent Garden’s full-length five-act version of Verdi’s Don Carlos at the Festival Theatre.  His Turn of the Screw, imported later from Aix-en-Provence, was peculiar but undoubtedly haunting, with a Peter Quint who lurched around  the stage like Frankenstein’s monster.

But with McMaster’s departure, Bondy’s opera productions in Edinburgh came to a halt.  By then his career was expanding internationally, in Vienna, Paris, New York - though his Tosca at the Met was loathed by the conservative audience, accustomed to the ornate lavishness of Franco Zefirrelli.  Facing a torrent of booing on the opening night, he tersely informed the audience that he was scandalised by the fact that they were scandalised. The production survives around the world. Bondy died last month, having suffered from cancer for most of his professional life.
13 December 2015