Travels with a Steinway

Sviatoslav Richter, for me, formed the starting point.  Bruno Monsaingeon’s substantial documentary film of the great Russian pianist, a biographical memoir long available on DVD, remains a haunting masterpiece of musical observation and perception that led to others of its kind, not least the more recent two-hour DVD (Amazon £15.53) of the winter journey by train across Eastern Europe with the gifted  young Polish pianist Piotr Anderszewski in company with a shiny Steinway grand.

Playing on a train is not an engagement in the art of the tranquil, as I discovered when I journeyed on the revamped Orient Express with another music critic, the avuncular John Amis of the BBC, from Verona to London, enticed by free tickets, sleeping berths and meals with the chance - at least for me - to write a commemorative article in the Herald newspaper.

There was also an entertainment factor in the form of a Beethoven recital on a grand piano in the cocktail bar by the modish pianist (already heard during John Drummond’s day at the Edinburgh Festival) Jan Latham Koenig, who was working his passage across Europe for a fee, it was said, no more than the price of a ticket. In other words, like me, he probably had a freebie.

It was not, however, the noise of the train which got in the way, even though Koenig seemed impervious to it.  It was the frequent plunging into tunnels, which coincided with that portion of the journey through the Alps.  Drink, at Orient Express prices, was no sedative, and when Koenig, looking stunned that there were critics on board, joined us for dinner he said we should not treat it too seriously. It was all just a piece of fun.

I cannot say I laughed, except at his embarrassment.  But Anderszewski’s impeccable film is another matter entirely. The rightful winner of major awards, it is made for smiles not  laughs. It has a scrupulously devised screenplay and is a nostalgic journey, entitled Unquiet Traveller, around his Polish past, with stops for concerts and rehearsals in Warsaw and elsewhere, including some delicate moments of Brahms with Gustavo Dudamel and the Philharmonia Orchestra, slotted into  Monsangeon’s probing scenario. The result is musical portraiture of the most entrancing sort.

Seated alone  at the keyboard while snowy vistas sweep past the windows, Andreszewski dips into favourite pieces, talking quietly as he plays. If the green train stops at a station - he finds all stations thought-provoking - he steps outside, then climbs back on board, maintaining the continuity of his private dialogue and the sounds he draws from the keys. It is all utterly personal and holds you in its grasp.

I have treasured this disc  for a while and, because Andreszewski, an articulate Bachian among other things, has become a familiar figure in Scotland,  it is something easy to                       take pleasure in.

No mere travelogue or conventional interview, it delves into an inspired pianist’s persona, watches what he does, listens to what he says as he sits there unfurls some Schumann and switches straight from the depths of Szymanowski to Mozart, softly singing fragments from The Magic Flute, which obsess him as the snow scene gleams outside.

Snow: ah yes, snow certainly comes into it as the train trundles along then pauses to let him disembark for a visit to a vegetable market with his granny in Budapest. Later, back on board, friends and colleagues materialise for an illuminated supper with frozen schnapps while the end of The Magic Flute rings out in the background.

No it is not the Orient Express and all the better for not being.
21 September 2016

The unforgotten

Half a century ago, on 17 September 1966, the unforgettable Fritz Wunderlich, Germany’s most vocally perfect young Mozart tenor, died after reputedly falling down a staircase in his home. It was a demise which, in its different way, reminded people of President Kennedy’s fate three years earlier  They said they would always remember what they were doing at the precise moment it happened.

I certainly could. I was standing in Stockholm railway station, phoning home on a nordic night after a performance at the Swedish festival, when the news was broadcast.  I shall not forget it.

In fact Wunderlich’s final appearance had been a fortnight earlier at the Edinburgh Festival, where with his customary sweetness he had sung at the Usher Hall. As festival programme editor at the time, I had been urgently phoned on the day of the recital to see if I had a copy of the Schubert songs that were to launch the programme.   His pianist, Hubert Giesen, had evidently left his own copy of the music at home and, on an Edinburgh Sunday in those days no music shops would be open.

I had the right songs and there was no problem. An hour or so later, from my seat in the hall, I could see Fiesen sitting at the keyboard, my copy of the music in front of him, methodically tearing out the relevant pages in readiness while Wunderlich stood waiting.  Happily they were returned to me later, so I was able to piece them together again.

Wunderlich, of course, sang exquisitely, without a hint of tension.  He had appeared as Ferrando in Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte with the Bavarian Opera at the King’s Theatre the previous year, and was already adored here.

I never thought that, at the age of 36, his life was almost over. Years later a German radio station rang me to interview me about the Schubert incident. I had not forgotten.
19 September 2016

Views from the stalls

I have been re-reading, with even deeper admiration, Sir Peter Hall’s diaries about the founding of the National Theatre in the 1970s. I have been told, more than once, that I should not have enjoyed them - that Hall was a vain villain, that he was totally self-centred, evasive, and that he got things wrong.

Yet I cannot see it that way. He remains a man who, perhaps knew too much, whose abilities were too wide, and who paid more attention to directing plays than being an administrator. His enemies, Michael Blakemore and Jonathan Miller among them, have made that perfectly plain.

Yet in their kindle edition the diaries are riveting, wonderfully written, illuminating and also greatly touching - the story of a fascinating, complex man of the theatre, obsessive and, on his own admission, paranoid, in the throes of dealing with rivals, writers, actors, backstage wranglers, aggressive unions.

Sometimes, his hopes and desires bit the dust.  Was he over-ambitious? It often looked like it. But not only was he a voracious reader and stage director, he made films (the inspired                Akenfield about his native Suffolk more than a century ago), acted in them, ran a high profile television programme (Aquarius, featuring lengthy, absorbing interviews with Dame Janet Baker and others), spent whole nights devouring play-scripts, was constantly tempted into opera production, where he was much at home - including his original, unmutilated Cosi fan tutte for Glyndebourne, perfectly observed and enacted until an assistant got his hands on it and spoiled it when it went on tour.  

His knowledge of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Chekhov, Ibsen, Pinter profoundly pervade the diaries, along with delectable walk-on appearances by Ralph Richardson and John
Gielgud. The book, though very long, remains unputdownable.

His Suffolk boyhood - he was the son of a kindly station master - provides the backcloth. But in the end the bomb dropped.    Entering his eighties, and long retired from the National Theatre, he suddenly disappeared from public view.  He had gone out one evening to see a Chekhov play and started shouting insults at the star actress from his seat in the audience - an unforgettable scene of embarrassment for those who witnessed it.

After what can only be called a full life, including four marriages, dementia had attacked him.  He promptly offered himself to Charterhouse, a one-time monastery, now a sort of monastic care home in London where he could live in privacy. He is now in his mid eighties.

Seize your chance and, whatever you thought of his diaries the first time you read them, read them again.
13 September 2016

Cosi fan fascisti

Taking operas -and their audiences - away from their comfort zones can be a nasty modern habit and rumours had it, when the new Edinburgh Festival  production had its first airing in Aix-en-Provence earlier this summer it was that sort of experierce.

Another Aix production of Cosi, rather a  good  one recently screened on you tube and staged in semi-darkness, turned out to be a different version altogether, which might have been good to see in Scotland.  The new  Cosi  however was set  outlandishly in wartime Eritrea during the Mussolini period.  Fascism and rape ran rampant in it. Scottish dignitaries who saw it before it reached the Edinburgh Festival Theatre warned audiences off it.

Such warnings have been delivered  before about Edinburgh events.  I once delivered one myself about a Holland Festival production of Don Giovanni whose conductor Carlo Maria Giulini was threatening to walk out of it before it came here. But the softened revision of it which Giulini conducted in its place was, if anything, worse.

I warned nobody off the new Cosi from the hands of a modish French film director, for the simple reason that I did not see it. But, though film directors are seldom good opera ones, Richard Morrison in The Times liked this  Cosi  enormously, and since  he is a deservedly respected critic, critic  it must have had something in its favour.

Yet my reason for not going was simple enough. Cosi fan tutte is a Mozart masterpiece with a good Da Ponte libretto which does not need an entirely new plot superimposed on top  it. I was not attracted to what had evidently been done to it, so let it pass me by. My loss, perhaps. But perhaps not. Like his two other Da Ponte operas, Mozart’s Cosi is a work I love.  I have seen it change considerably in my lifetime, but usually within the range of feasibility, and often for the better.

If I did not go to Aix’s extremist version of Cosi, it was because I could not see that it had anything to do with Mozart and I felt no desire to write about it.
31 August 2016

Changing places

Our recent house move - our fourth in twenty years and in all ways the most traumatic - has left us shattered but confident that we chose the right place.

Shattered has been the word. The removal men never melded as a team, leaving behind them a trail of damage, losses, and breakages. Storage in July was a nightmare. Two fine Jack Firth paintings were damaged. Two beds have had to be replaced ad two more await replacement.  The Bosendorfer piano was noisily dropped on the doorstep  (by a firm, moreover, supposedly speclialising in pianos) and awaits professional inspection. The glass surface of a hand-made wrought-iron table, designed for my parents more than half a century ago, has been smashed.  Our array of art deco lamps are no longer functioning.

Though more may come to light, we are coping.  The mighty  Bosendorker has its window-space in the front room.The view of the stately Reid Memorial Church across the road gives us pleasure. Good double-glazing shields us from traffic noise. The handsome one-sided Victorian terrace rises gradually towards King’s Buildings.  The Avenue Store, mentioned by Kate Atkinson in recent novels, is an easy walk. There are buses to Morningside, Marchmont, and Cameron Toll.

It is very different from the isolation of Buckstone, above the gusty Fairmilehead snowline, where we lived happily for a while.  We are in town again.

Our kitchen has a snug corner - once a bed recess - for living and dining in.  The back garden, rising towards the red stonework of Ladysmith Road, has won the approval of the dogs.

So, despite our troubles, we are pleased. My desktop computer, whose main lead had vanished in transit, functions. My blog has resumed. My wife, too, is recovering.
26 August 2016

The biggest in the world

The sensation of this year’s Edinburgh Festival has been the composer James MacMillan's diatribe against Scottish politicians  and the ignorance  shown of the arts  - classical music especially - by people who should know better.

The bragging about Edinburgh’s being the biggest arts festival in the world cuts no ice for someone of MacMillan's perception, and in this respect I wholeheartedly support him.  What matters is not size but quality, and the quality of the Edinburgh Festival is something that has conspicuously dwindled in recent years.

But apart from Brian McMaster’s valiant attempt to restore the standards and integrity of the days of Lord Harewood the festival has consistently failed to show what it is really capable of.  But the slide into mediocrity and irrelevance has proved inexorable.

The treating of Scottish Opera in recent years as no more than a commodity has resulted in the company’s transformation into little more than that.  The Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s aims seem increasingly to confuse musical ambition with routine richness of tone. The Edinburgh Festival Theatre, designed to be a musical  powerhouse, now falls far short of that.

Yet when MacMilan dares to say such things he is told he has got it wrong. Does he not know that the arts in Scotland are flourishing as never before?   The scale of the Edinburgh Festival proves the point.

But of course - as a musician of Macmillan’s astuteness knows very well - it does nothing of the sort. The festival is an increasingly sprawling mess in the middle of which the international festival, as it is now identified, struggles to seem something special.  But without genuinely creative contributions from Scottish Opera and the RSNO the old sense of exhilaration has evaporated, leaving the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the ever-resourceful BBC SSO to fly the flag. But, as this year’s glossy programmes show, it is no longer enough.
17 August 2016

Changing places

We are moving house. Three years of living above the snowline on the heights of Fairmilehead, much as we have enjoyed them, have prompted us to think again about our environment, which has been prey to lusty breezes from the Pentlands.

So we are heading back a bit closer to town, though still on the south side, to that stretch of Blackford Avenue where a one-sided nineteenth-century terrace, complete with stepped  chimney stacks  and  attractive curlicues, rises beside the Reid Memorial Church towards King’s Buildings and the stone archway marking the approach to the Royal Observatory.

We think we are going to like our ground-floor flat, with window space for our old but still admirably functioning Bosendorfer grand, which I inherited a few years ago from Raymond Monelle, a dear friend in the university music department as a replacement for my Bechstein upright.

Fairmilehead never displayed it to good effect, nor enhanced its warm  Viennese resonance but in the room where it will live now  I think it will feel at home.

Simultaneously with moving house we are staying for the rest of this month in a favourite Galloway chalet, beside a sandy beach loved by the dogs and close to the charming village of New Abbey where we have found a cafe restaurant that suits us.

While there we shall be visited By Gerald Larner, former music critic of The Guardian, a Manchester friend of long standing and critic of impressive austerity - as well as piquant humour and erudite knowledge - with whom we like to spend time.  There is good seafood where we are going and not a bad wine shop, which makes us feel we are somewhere on the French coast.

So as usual this blog will be on leave  for a spell, before resuming in August in time for what looks like an unappealing Edinburgh International Festival. But you never know. If Robin Ticciati has recovered from his spinal affliction there will be Berlioz’s complete Romeo and Juliet with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, a work on which they will  shed the most luminous light.  So here’s hoping for this, as well as for Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder conducted by Donald Runnicles.
6 July 2016

Too much Schicchi

The Los Angeles Opera’s new Sony DVD of Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi is, perhaps inevitably, a disappointment. As so often, too much goes on in it - even the sight of the conductor Grant Gershon laughing uproariously during the opening bars borders on the manic.

But the sight of Placido Domingo in the title role, wagging his fingers at everybody while sporting a gangsterish pin-stripe suit an example of over-the-top updating.  Adriana Chuchman’s smooth young Lauretta, in slinky black, is unmoving in the few minutes of what should have been touching  repose provided by O mio babbino caro.  The relentless updating takes Puccini too far into the realms of Menotti. The final evocation of Florence makes no effect.

How did it happen?  Though the Los Angeles Opera never misses a chance to exploit the presence  of Domingo, as a tenor or baritone or conductor, this time the result is an example of too much being thought to be not quite enough.

It is not that Woody Allen, as director, is necessarily the culprit, though he certainly does nothing to retrieve the situation.  Allen in his films is invariably musically sensitive and his use of Schubert’s great final G major string quartet on the soundtrack of Crimes and Misdemeanours haunts the memory. But most of the comedy in this Gianni Schicchi is just jokiness of a sort that quickly wears thin, the way some of Peter Ustinov’s operatic ventures used to do.

I do not think I shall be watching this DVD again, which is a pity because Gianni Schicchi is a small masterpiece of subtle musical wit, as Tito Gobbi, if I remember rightly, once confirmed in Edinburgh.
30 June 2016

A Bergian Grimes

Among the annual pleasures of father’s day - or faither’s day, as my daughters prefer to call it - I have received a bottle of one of my favourite white burgundies, good French and Italian cheese, some specialist chocolate, a jumper and two unexpected items. From my wife came a black linen cap, bought in Marks and Spencer, which I have been wearing indoors and out, like a rustic Italian or an old-fashioned journalist with an eye shield;  and from my son a recently issued and fascinating DVD of Britten’s Peter Grimes, filmed at the Zurich Opera, a handsome, intimately scaled auditorium under the conductorship of Franz Welser-Most, whom Private Eye once nicknamed Worse Than Most but who is now becoming conspicuously Better Than Some.

Though I do not lack DVDs of Peter Grimes, this one was new to me. Switzerland is not a country in which I would expect to encounter a truly  illuminating performance of the first great modern British opera, but here it is in all its glory.  The cast, admittedly, is English-speaking, and the director is the ever-progressive David Pountney, Scottish Opera’s, one-time director of productions, who gave us a Macbeth with green blood, a brilliantly minimalist Magic Flute and a romantic Seraglio, as well as the company’s great Janacek cycle and Kurt Weill’s Street Scene.

For the Swiss company he devised, aptly enough, a Peter Grimes without much sea. Whatever shock value lies in its shunning of the more recognisable aspects of a Suffolk fishing village - and which Britten himself had insisted on being included in Colin Graham’s Scottish Opera production presented at the1968 Edinburgh Festival under the composer’s own attentive aegis - Pountney’s mind was clearly on Britten’s  adolescent desire to become a pupil of Alban Berg in Vienna but from which he was forced to refrain by the British musical establishment, which raised its eyebrows at such things as atonality and Viennese expressionism infecting an English composer.

Yet just beneath the surface of Britten’s first operatic masterpiece lies the world of Berg’s Wozzeck and of the downtrodden soldier who ends up stabbing his mistress.

The outsiderish elements of Peter Grimes, and the contempt of the villagers for him, are fundmaental, of course, to Britten’s opera as we know it.  But by stripping it to its essentials, in this unusually abstract and surrealist production, Pountney has highlighted, as surely never before, its Bergian roots.  The principal characters - Christopher Ventris’s Grimes, Alfred Muff’s Balstrode and Emily Magee’s piercing   Ellen Orford - are vividly observed, but so, quite lacerating in their effect, are the minor ones. The whole cast is enthralling, as is Welser-Most’s lean and sharp-bladed conducting, with its shrill Swiss woodwind. The DVD, from EMI Classics, is on two disc,
23 June 2016

A Timely Honour

In 1953 a young Scottish composer, still in his teens, made one of his first visits to Covent Garden for the controversial  premiere of Benjamin Britten’s coronation opera Gloriana.  The performances, attended by the poshest and least appreciative of audiences, were a famous fiasco, from which the work - a masterpiece - took years to recover, but John McLeod, for one, never forgot the music.

Two years ago, around the time of of his eightieth birthday, he was in the process of producing a fascinating bundle of works, in which his inspiration was showing notable new developments. One of them was a substantial Guitar Fantasy on themes from Gloriana, written for the gifted young guitarist Ian Watt to play at the Aldeburgh Festival, over which Britten had presided for most of his career.

For McLeod this has been a creative period, marked last week by the award of the CBE in the Queen’s ninetieth birthday honours. The thought of a forthcoming trip to Buckingham Palace to meet Her Majesty is pleasing him greatly. Though the award, he admits, has come as a surprise, he has encountered the Queen twice before, first at her coronation itself when he was Clarinettist No 25 in the RAF band which marched seventeen miles to pay tribute to her, and then in 1983 when she visited Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh on its 150th anniversary and he, as music teacher, composed an anthem for her.

By that time, as a music critic and friend, I had got to know him and was aware of his high ambitions on behalf of Scottish music and musicians in general. He had conducted the Perth Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in a celebrated performance of Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in Chabrier’s glittering Marche Joyeuse in Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall  Proms. As conductor of the Edinburgh Royal Choral Union (the only conductor I have ever heard who stripped the orchestral accompaniment from And With His Stripes in the annual performance of Messiah) and, in John Currie’s absence, of the progressive John Currie Singers, he might have developed a career in quite different directions. But composing music was his challenge and that, after Peter Donohoe played his Piano Concerto at the Perth Festival (he wishes Perth would repeat it sometime), that was the way he went.

In recent years his music has gone in strikingly new directions, making it more and more interesting to listen to. He is not a composer to rest on his laurels. His Edinburgh home, which he shares with his wife Margaret, a distinguished piano adjudicator and examiner, resounds with to  the strains of her Steinway and his Bechstein, though he remains a clarinettist at heart. But vitality his Fifth Piano Sonata, another product of his eighties, has gleamed around the world in performances by Murray McLachlan, its Scottish exponent (hear it on You Tube).    

What next? From the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, after his recent tribute to Carl Nielsen entitled Out of the Silence, has come a commission for a viola concerto for their principal viola, Jane Atkins.  Viola concertos, among which Walton’s stand high, though McLeod has an affectionate memory of Edmund Rubbra’s, long dead and gone, are rare and special compositions.  McLeod says he sees the instrument as a source of energy in the middle of the orchestral  strings, just as his beloved clarinet holds a similar place amid the woodwind (Brahms’s two poignant clarinet sonatas can also be played by viola).

Not for nothing was it Purcell’s, Bach’s, Mozart’s, Dvorak’s and Britten’s personal instrument of choice. So McLeod’s concerto will be a work to look forward to.  He has time, two years yet, in which to write it, which will leave him space for other surprises.  Meanwhile I send him, as Scotland’s senior composer, my congratulations on becoming a CBE.
16 June 2016

Saul in Sussex

Ivor Bolton’s brief spell as the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s principal conductor was one that left no lasting impressions. The players, if I remember rightly, thought of him as one of those conductors who are referred to as visually distracting. He for his part failed to draw from them performances that sounded as interesting as they looked. Interviewing him once in Edinburgh, I found him alert and direct, a conductor with distinct, attractive enthusiasms which for some reason   he was perhaps  not yet wholly transmitting.

But now, on the international scene, he is certainly doing so - and with a vengeance, especially if the composer happens to be Handel. His Salzburg Festival Theodora with the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, directed by Christof Loy, was more gripping than Peter Sellars’s famous but fussy Glyndebourne production, presented with relentlessly semaphoric gestures from the singers though coolly conducted by William Christie; and last year Bolton himself was at Glyndebourne, conducting, with high intensity,  Barry Kosky’s no less irksome staging of Saul, another great Handel oratorio ingeniously, or not wholly persuasively, transformed into an opera.

One of the signals that Glyndebourne’s annual summer  season has begun is when one or two of the previous year’s highlights begin appearing on DVD. Saul has now done so, but is it really worth buying? Musically the answer is yes. Bolton’s unfolding of the rich score, filled with glorious choruses and moments of drama, is a triumph.  But Kosky’s sumptuous production, much of it eye-challengingly dark and quite meldramatic, is diminshed by being viewed on a domestic screen. Much of it simply looks too crowded. Whatever it was like in the theatre - and it did earn some admiring reviews - is largely lost at home.

But not the music. It’s true that Bolton, seen in close-up in the Glyndebourne pit, looks as jerky, if not more so, than in his Scottish days, but the sounds he draws from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, not least the exquisite oboe tone, are ravishing.

Here is high Hendelian emotion. Even when the stage is over-stuffed with candles, as it is in Part Two, the music shines through. But too many of the singers, particularly Christopher Purves madly articulating the title role, veer frequently into grotesquerie. Saul, after all, is a grand  oratorio, which I would like to hear from Bolton on the concert platform, and not a Handelian  version precursor  Ligeti’s Grand Macabre.

Despite the performance’s  many beauties - and Iestyn Davies’s counter-tenor voice is of the sweetest tenderness in the role of David -  the production on screen can only be called  disconcertingly over the top.  A bit more of Bolton at Glyndebourne, however, will not go amiss.
7 June 2016

Cosi again.

With a little patience, I have managed to track down what appears to be the new production of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte which is being brought to the Edinburgh Festival this year. Though somewhat murkily filmed last summer, it at least provides hints of how it may look at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre.

So what is it like?  Certainly very different from the first Aix-en-Provence Cosi I ever saw, back in 1965, with Teresa Stich-Randall (looking like Barry Humphries and Tersa Berganza as the sisters.)

The old production was a mostly sunny example of how Cosi used to be staged, with lots of laughs and little despair.  But times, as the new production confirms, have changed. The new one is Cosi Fan Tutte as opera seria.

From being a piece of Mozartian frivolity and certainly not his greatest opera - both Wagner and Ernest Newman, we should remember, despised it -   it has become the emotional peak of his achievement, quite as good as, if not better than, Figaro and Giovanni, the other comedies to libretti by Lorenzo Da Ponte.

The latest Aix version certainly has no doubt about its status.  Staged in semi-darkness and entirely indoors in what seem to be mostly windowless rooms, it is strangely phantasmagoric in effect. The disguises - presumably  deliberately  - are hidden in darkness. The characters seldom look directly  at each other. People not directly involved lurk mysteriously in the background. The nudity promised by the Edinburgh Festival advertising is an idle threat.   There are no parasols, no placid seascapes; Vesuvius is invisible.

So, it must be said, is the fun of the piece. Guglielmo’s comic aria is like a dirge.  Even Despina, impersonating Dr Mesmer, loses her falsetto voice, though she regains it in time to play the notary in the last act.  The ending, which I shall not disclose, is not optimistic.

How it works with cast changes  and a different conductor in Edinburgh remains to be seen.  But it is not uninteresting, though the jury must remain out on whether it is one Cosi too many.
3 June 2016

Saints and sinners

Amadeus was Mozart’s middle name, which he liked in its French version, Amedee, and preferred to Wolfgang. It is the title of a famous play by Peter Shaffer, later triumphantly filmed by Milos Forman, and of a Deutsche Grammophon DVD of operatic excerpts, starting with the sight of Wilhelm Furtwangler conducting the overture to Don Giovanni  but thereafter degenerating into something of a ragbag.

Amadeus has been the title, moreover, of many a Mozart essay and the occasional  book. You cannot escape from it, any more than from a box of Mozart chocolates, but was it Mozart’s fault?

In the case of the 1984 film, it would undoubtedly be the falsest of accusations. Despite the statement on the front of the DVD version  that “everything you heard is true,” the film is known for its inaccuracy, and the “director’s cut” - not an abbreviation but a twenty-minute extension  - has not improved matters, though this  is the version now most readily available on Amazon.

The sight of an open-mouthed Mozart exuberantly conducting The Seraglio - though in fact he would have directed it more modestly from  the keyboard - may or may not be an irritation  but it is certainly a trivialising element.  Films, however, are films, and in order to make an impact - as this one does - they can be, as we say, economical with the truth.    

Yet watching Amadeus  again, and re-encountering all its extravagances,  as I did the other day,  I thought that it continues to make at least one  valid point. The dialogue may be embarrassingly Americansed. The personalities of Mozart and Salieri, and their relationship, may be distorted. “Known truths” may seem less and less trustworthy - not least because, since the film was first issued, the truth about Mozart has been increasingly clarified.

But one fact, on which Peter Shaffer’s original play depended, is still important, which is that great artists are not always as nice as they seem. Though Shaffer and Forman  dressed up their biography  in a mantle of glossiness, signifying that too much dramatisation  was not nearly enough, their point  was nevertheless  worth making.

The basic premise, on the one hand, was that Salieri, Vienna’s distinguished court composer and Mozart’s senior rival, was not a great composer but believed  his inspiration came from God, whereas, on the other,  the raffish Mozart was a self-centred, foul-mouthed, lascivious, whinnying little squirt who happened to be the genius Salieri was not.

But the contrast,  while  vividly portrayed, fails to convince.  The religious Salieri, much respected in his day, was hardly as bad as he is made to seem. Nor, for that matter, was the irksomely irreverent, spendthrift   young Mozart, whose fate was a pauper’s grave - a recommended form of burial at the time, as we now know.

So the premise, in this case, is a falsely cinematic one, something we can regard as a theatrical fuss about nothing.

Yet it does, as we have to admit, make a good and very credible  story, as it has always done, right down to the composing of the unfinished Requiem,  and it certainly resulted in a   celebrated - surely over0celebrated -  film, winner of forty awards.    Seeing it again, I liked it even less.  What mattered, however,  was the music, and we did hear quite a lot of it, more cherishable than ever, in spite of its dramatised  surroundings.

Applied to someone else - Wagner if we must name him but there are plenty of other contenders - the premise could be more satisfactorily made to stick, reminding us that great composers are not necessarily saints.
20 May 2016

Better or worse?

With four new main-stage events, four concert performances, and a Mozart revival, a Mozart revival, Scottish Opera’s forthcoming season harks back just enough to whet the appetite and bring back memories of the company’s brave ambitions in the early 1960s.

The new Pelleas and Melisande from Sir David McVicar, with the long-awaited new music director Stuart Stratford as conductor, sets the tone. No work is more redolent of Scottish Opera’s original hopes and designs than Debussy’s masterpiece, staged by the newborn company along with Madama Butterfly at a time when the Scottish National Orchestra was free to play in the pit of the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, and the performance was the most revelatory operatic event in Britain that year.

A new production created by someone of the calibre of McVicar bodes well, and we must cross our fingers that it will bring back a touch of the old magic that existed here in Scotland 54 years ago, when the founding of the company was the highest aspiration in Scottish musical memory.

Though the new Pelleas will not be staged at the Edinburgh Festival - though there is certainly space for it - its performances in Glasgow and Edinburgh next February will be something to look forward to.

A new production of La Boheme by Renaud Doucet inspired by the Parisian jazz age of Josephine Baker, a co-production of Bluebeard’s Castle with a new piece of music theatre, The Eighth Door, by Scottish Opera’s composer-in-residence Liam Paterson, and another co-production - with Music Theatre Wales, Covent Garden, and the Magdeburg Theatre - of Philip Glass’s opera based on Kafka’s The trial are the other highlights.

A small-scale touring production of Donizetti’s Elisir d’Amore, updated to the time of PG Wodehouse, will travel from Stornoway to Newton Stewart, and the Mozart revival, which opens at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, in October, is of  Sir Thomas Allen’s racy version of The Marriage of Figaro with Anna Devlin as Susanna and Eleanor Dennis as the Countess.

The concert performances, all at the Theatre Royal, are to be ”curated” - Scottish Opera’s word - by music director Stuart Stratford with a Debussy rarity, L’Enfant Prodigue, and Puccini’s equally uncommon Le Villi as links with the main season. Mascagni’s L’Amico Fritz and Rossini’s La Scala di Seta are the other works, with the Scottish Opera Orchestra accompanying every performance.

So, better or worse?  Much better by the look of things. Indeed, if the performances prove fine enough, it will be an inspirational, and very interesting, season.
18 May 2016

Wine choice: Verdicchio

Verdicchio is a safe, basic white from the northern Adriatic coast of Italy, buyable in most British supermarkets for around £6.99 or  £7.99, and all the better if the label calls it Classico or Superiore.  

It comes usually, but not necessarily, in an inviting amphora-shaped bottle.  Its flavour, slightly astringent, is pleasant and thoroughly Italian. It is the sort of wine - the very  taste  of Italy - you grab, as I do, when I am shopping  speedily in Sainsbury, Tesco, or Morrison’s (whosewine shelves are often more interesting than they are reputed to be).

But Waitrose sells, apart from its standard Verdicchio, a posher one called Monacesca, which customarily costs £10.99 but which, for the moment, has dropped to the basic £7.99. It is the sort of Verdiccio I recognise from meals in Pesaro (Rossini’s birthplace) or Urbino, up in the hills above the sea. The flavour is typically mineral, but more subtle and worth, perhaps, the extra expenditure when it is at full price.  

There are other, even dearer versions of Verdiccio, well worth exploring when you are on the northern Adriatic, or what is known as the Marche.  They are an ideal match for pasta with clams and other seafood dishes, and restaurants can usually serve at least one of these. 

So the Waitrose bargain is worth sampling while it lasts. And, if you are in Italy itself, Pesaro is a delightful seaside spot, home of a fine Rossini festival and a lovely university, to which  people cycle, as well as a fashionable resort. 
15 May 2016

The name is Rachel Cusk

I have rather liked reading about an English novelist who is disdained in Britain but gives delight abroad, who has been compared (favourably) with Virginia Woolf, who admires DH Lawrence,who has written a book about childbirth that has prompted people to hiss at her from car windows, and who briefly joined a women’s reading group whose members she insulted before rapidly resigning.

She is Rachel Cusk, whose books I have been reading, and greatly enjoying, for some time, while knowing that it is an pleasure many other readers would disapprove of. But I appreciate her detachment, her powers of observation, her keen-edged sense of humour, her vocabulary, her command of figures of speech (even if she is conspicuously prone to overuse, however skilfully, the words “as though”).

I think her novels - including her latest, entitled Outline, about the narrator’s literary adventures in Athens and the people she encounters there  - unfold with fascinating precision and with a brilliant, if deliberately subdued, sense of surprise.

Best of all, perhaps, I have savoured her solitary travel book, describing a three-month trip to Italy with her husband and two young daughters, for its pointed responsiveness to whatever she sees and experiences, whether it is high Italian art or basic Italian food.

Yet, when Faber first published it, this book had to be pulped - for which she had to share the cost  - because it invaded the privacy of someone she met on her journey and he lodged a complaint about what she said about him (writers, I understand, have to be increasingly wary of this possible predicament, if someone claims he can be recognised by a perhaps indiscreet comment).

By good luck, having bought Cusk’s The Last Supper as soon as it came out, I have been able to read both the original and the reissued versions of the book, so have managed to work out, I think,  how she caused offence, though the reasons, to my eyes, would seem somewhat trivial, though admittedly perhaps riskily outspoken.

Nevertheless the episode has endeared her to me rather than the reverse. Yet Britain’s star  newspaper interviewer, talking to her afterwards  in The Guardian, complained that the book was “slackly written,” a verdict with-which I would wholly disagree.

But Cusk is now inevitably a controversial figure, who can arouse fury through what seems like  a mere handful of words. I shall continue reading her with pleasure until the day comes when I, too, am unforgivingly enraged by her. Somehow I do not see that happening.
13 May 2016

Wedding Interlude

The receding of the snow a week ago coincided with a family wedding, which took place on a cool but sunny day in the Fife fishing village of Anstruther.  Scott, third son of my wife’s cousin Meg, was marrying Isla in the local town hall, a charming building and an appropriate setting for such an event.

Though weddings are not usually a feature of this blog, the music at the ceremony included Peter Maxwell Davies’s touching little piano piece, Farewell to Stromness, a more northern fishing port, performed during the signing of the register. Davies, whose recent death has been much on my mind, composed it in 1980 for the St Magnus Festival in Orkney, where he lived in a bothy near the Old Man of Hoy, and where it formed an interlude in the Yellow Cake Revue which he wrote for Eleanor Bron (with himself on that occasion as pianist).

The cabaret was a characteristically political attack on Orkney’s new-fangled interest in uranium mining, a big issue at the time, against which Davies led a vigorous campaign - yellow cake was a pejorative nickname for uranium ore.  But Farewell to Stromness (Orkney’s second largest township which lay close to the projected uranium site) did not reflect the ferocity of his opposition. It was a quiet and wistful keyboard meditation with a recurring, gently prodding Scotch snap rhythm, musically more to the point than the jollity of his  famous Orkney Wedding with Sunrise, the orchestral showpiece he wrote for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, whose success was dependent on its bagpipe climax.

But the bagpipes, it seems to me, have never been a particularly Orcadian instrument - fiddle music is more relevant to the place -  and the piano piece, though serving as background music, was more appropriate to last week’s wedding in Anstruther than the rollicking Orkney Wedding with Sunrise would have been.

It was good to hear the music  again and to know that, though the Yellow Cake Revue, like Orkney’s uranium plan, is in the past, the eloquent simplicity of Farewell to Stromness lives on.
8 May 2016

The Ustinov Version

In response to my thoughts last week on The Magic Flute - with the evidence of three DVD productions showing how not to stage it - my old friend John Duffus has drawn my attention to a fourth version, in the hope that it might interest me.  It can be seen, complete and at no cost, on You Tube, and, though it looks rather the worse for wear, it is good enough to oust many performances that have recently come my way.

Dating from 1971, not necessarily a good time for Magic Flutes, it was clearly a success in its day and there is no problem in seeing why. One of the highlights of the Hamburg State Opera repertoire when the great Rolf Liebermann was the company’s intendant, it reminds us how fast Hamburg recovered from the fire-bombing it received during the Second World War. Emerging like a phoenix (as was said at the time) from the chaos, the company brought six productions to the 1952 Edinburgh Festival, including a valiant Fidelio with Martha Modl, a sterling presentation of Hindemith’s little-known Mathis der Maler, a vanguard Der Freischutz in abstract decor, a Meistersinger and Rosenkavalier the like of which had not been seen in Britain for years, and - last but not least - a merry Magic Flute conducted by the young Georg Solti with the black-voiced  Gottlob Frick as Sarastro amd Horst Gunter and his family portraying Papageno, Papagena, and their children (born and growing up by the end of the performance).

Though the city was not yet fully rebuilt, the opera company was alive and  kicking. A decade or so later, as The Scotsman’s music critic, I saw a handsome production of Verdi’s Nabucco there, performed in German but with the title-role (thanks to the resourcefulness with which Hamburg faced last-minute casting problems) sung in Italian by an Italian baritone. It was good enough to stick in the memory.

But the Magic Flute filmed by You Tube in 1971 was not the idyllc Solti one. By then it had been replaced by another, staged by Peter Ustinov at a time when he was getting into opera and had already staged Massenet’s Don Quixote, a work that suited him admirably, in Paris. On the evidence of the You Tube film, however, his Hamburg Flute contained little of the whimsicality that was to surface a few years later in his Don Giovanni at the Edinburgh Festival, where an eighteenth-century Sherlock Holmes, complete with magnifying glass, tried to discover what happened to Giovanni at the end of the supper scene.

Ustinov’s Magic Flute, though comic, was straightforward and admirable in a way that few Flutes now tend to be. His Papageno was the Puckish young American baritone William Workman. His Sarastro was the noble Hans Sotin, splendidly secure and serene.  Edith Mathis was the predictably sweet and sparkling Pamina, Nicolai Gedda the heroic, but lyrically heroic, Tamino, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau the  quietly eloquent Sprecher. Star-casting indeed, showing what sort of performers Rolf Liebermann liked to have at his disposal.  The Three Boys (real choirboys) descended by hot-air balloon - nowadays common enough practice but then a touch of Ustinov originality.

Only the Dutch soprano Christine Deutecom - though she would soon be an impressive Amelia in Verdi’s Masked Ball  for Scottish Opera -  seemed dowdily miscast as the Queen of Night. Horst Stein was the thoroughly alert, adept conductor.

It was a performance that lost none of its impetus as it progressed. Today its flaw lies in the fact that the film involved transferring it from opera house to TV studio and in the obvious lip-synchronisation of the singers.

But the fact that it costs nothing to watch does make some amends for this, and for the murky photography.
5 May 2016

To view the Hamburg Magic Flute key in Magic Flute Ustinov Hamburg 1971 to You Tube.

Wine choice: Gewurztraminer

The best-loved Alsace white is a wine with one drawback: for most people it costs a little too much for everyday drinking.

Apart from that, however, Gewurztraminer is a wine the sight of whose label is always welcome. Its taste of lychees makes it more easily identifiable than almost any other white , yet this is not a shortcoming unless the only Gewurz you have access to is bad Gewurz, which is possible if unlikely, rather than good.

But bad Gewurz is usually a cheap version of the real thing - perhaps from eastern Europe or somewhere in the New World, though the latter source can be very pleasant in its own right and certainly worth buying for a pound or two less than than the real thing if you find one you can trust (think New Zealand).

But the real thing is really what matters, and it always comes from Alsace and will cost you £10 or more a bottle.  Even at that price it is not quite invariably delectable. It can be a bit aggressive - or, to put it another way, over-lycheed - a little too sweet (a problem that goes with Alsace wine) and lacking in the back taste that makes it the special wine it is.

That can happen, which is what prevents me from buying it as often as I would like.  But Waitrose for the moment (alas a very brief moment) has reduced its standard and excellent Gewurztraminer from £9.99 to £7.99, at which price you can buy the 2015 vintage for a week or two. Produced by the reliable Cave de Turckheim, it is an enjoyably floral springtime drink, not over-assertive, a delight to sip before dinner and a joy with something lightly spicy to eat.

Though many people like to drink Gewurztraminer with a Chinese meal, make sure that it is a good Chinese meal and not a humdrum takeaway. Waitrose do other Gewurztraminers also, at prices up to £14.99. If you are feeling flush, try one of these. But this one does very nicely, so drink it at its currently inviting price while you can.
3 May 2016

A Five-star Flute - No such luck

There was a time, in and around the nineteen-sixties, when The Magic Flute, for all the sublime simplicity of its inspiration, seemed the hardest of Mozart’s great operas to bring off.  Failed productions of it littered the European operatic scene as depressing evidence of the directorial blunders of which this lovely work, written in the last months of Mozart’s short life,  was constantly  the unfortunate victim.

Are things any better today? The balance between simple fun and Masonic severity remains a precarious one, which all too easily prompts the more theological aspect of  this remarkable yet strangely self-destructive score  to topple into inertia.   That The Magic Flute is a masterpiece of the choicest sort  is indisputable. Why, then, does it so often go wrong?

Three famous DVD recordings of it,  which have recently come my way, have provided no answer. Indeed, choosing between David McVicar’s clever and resourceful Covent Garden production, conducted by Sir Colin Davis, the Salzburg Festival’s Mozart birthday  production with Karel Appel’s marvellous decor,  Pierre Audi’s polished staging and Riccardo Muti’s musical expertise,  and Kenneth Branagh’s maverick movie version  set amid the trenches of the First World War, has proved in various ways quite dismaying, leaving behind a desire never to see any of them again.

Forced to make a decision I would probably opt for the Covent Garden version, even if Davis’s conducting, after an exquisite Act One and a deeply moving Pamina-Papageno duet,  grows increasing slow and stately, and Franz-Joseph Selig’s Sarastro is insufferably ponderous. But at least Simon Keenlyside’s clodhopping Papageno is a pleasure,  McVicar’s priests (particularly Thomas Allen’s crabby old Sprecher) are diverting, and Dorothea Roschmann’s Pamina is genuinely touching, even though her Tamino lacks any sort of masculine charm.

But Covent Garden is really too  grand a setting for Mozart,   and the same must be said for Salzburg’s vast Festspielhaus, where Appel’s Alpine rocks look alluringly climbable and the veneer of the Vienna Philharmonic is as good as it gets (though the Covent Garden  orchestra plays more sweetly for Davis).

But impressively though the cast sing, their characterisation  amounts to surprisingly little. Papageno’s arrival in a clapped-out Citroen Deux Cheveux is a joke that cannot be sustained, and    Christian Gerhaher’s portrayal is an empty vessel - as unfunny as Papageno can be.  Diana Damrau’s verve as the Queen of Night is, however, undeniable  and Rene Pape’s Sarastro is a grandly sonorous, if not greatly likeable, presence.

Pape, fascinatingly, is also the Sarastro of Branagh’s movie - and a very different one, young, casually dressed, not at all the dignified high priest we are accustomed to seeing. Here he is the man in charge of a field hospital, perhaps also of some sort of Findhorn community around which he rides on horseback. Though by no means ostentatious, he is quite the most watchable character on view.

Filmed at Shepperton studios near London, the action is  explosive, rain-swept, muddily entrenched, acoustically divorced from opera as we know it. Yet, irritating though all this can be, including a panoramic vision of war graves,  it does not lack ideas.  Tamino, smartly uniformed, is a tenor whose voice you initially expect to be that of a counter-tenor in some new-fangled Handel production.  Papageno is a cheery trooper whose pigeons are trained to detect poison gas.  There is a suicidally crazed Queen of Night, vocalising at virtuoso speed.

Many of the singers, including the pretty Pamina,  are novices - lovely to look at if not always to listen to.  But the atmosphere of twentieth-century warfare is certainly caught, even if it distorts the story. Where the orchestra is situated is anybody’s guess but  the American conductor James Conlon, a fine, firm Mozartian who was once  principal guest conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, brings vivacity  to the accompaniments.

If asked to supply a star rating, I would confine the Branagh movie to one star (plus half a star for expensive effort), the Salzburg version to two, and the Covent Garden to three.   In other words, hardly enough.  A five-star  Flute is elusive on DVD, though I still have a soft spot for the good old Ingmar Bergman film.
29 April 2016