EDINBURGH
Tattoo blues
PHILIP HOPE-WALLACI
Aria: 0 Edinborgo citta the adoro. Th, accent is Italian this year, the twenty-third Early on a fine blue sky morning, the crisr clear view from George Street out over tilt Forth to the cornfields of Fife is a marvel What beauty, say the Italian soprano• and tenors. 'Che cambiamento di clima' they add, clutching new purchased deep stalkers and Hunting Stuart scarves again the keen north wind. Myself, I adore rather less in Festival time by reason the overcrowding, indoor fug and con petitiveness. Traffic snarls. Even McVitti caught fire.
There are local cries of 'Ichabod' an gloom about the absence of Festival spin But the Scots remain wonderfully patiet and kind. Nothing like being locked or for knowing your friends. My hotel bool ing having gone Burnsianly awry, the receptionist performed miracles to keep m: unbooked under one roof by shuffling m like a broken chair from one bedroom t another as it fell vacant. Princel behaviour! But I was disposed to feel ii Housman mood: where's the young ma, who came up here at the start when all the world was young, war clouds and war gratuities were rolling away and a glut of everything, not least music, was just what the doctor ordered? Still, one must think of those for whom everything, even the Sco:t memorial or Rieoletto, are first time treat:. Not that the audiences are conspicuously young, and perhaps I was glad there were not more schoolgirls to witness the ghastly death of Marlowe's Edward H, which I fear inexpressibly shocked the audience at the Assembly Hall. In fact, many audiences seem to consist of lesser Sybil Thorndikes lapping up the Dame's joyous recitals, or entranced by the Czech mimes who supply an element of disciplined movement other- wise in short supply—except, of course, at the Tattoo, which continues, quite rightly, to wow the ladies from Idaho, Toronto . . . and Florence.
The twin city of Florence has, it is true, hugely subventioned the visit of her opera company, but the results in the King's Theatre are richly rewarding. Not perhaps that Scottish practical good sense was entirely satisfied with Donizetti's opera called Maria Stuarda (exciting but not what Verdi gets out of Schiller), in which Elizabeth the First, as you must be careful to call her here, is portrayed by a black American mezzo. But it was handsomely mounted. Likewise Malipiero's, Sette Canzoni, sub-Puccinian and appealing short stories half in mime with one singer apiece, and Dallapiccola's grim The Prisoner, where the orchestral comment is undeniably pungent, though I hate hearing luscious Italian voices set a-howling. Another interesting group has been Alexander Goehr's Music Theatre, which aims at illustrating music by slides, minimal costumes and props to make something which is operatic in appeal without opera's costly pomp. Most of the recitals are of superb quality : no hole or cranny where some endeavour, be it only poetry-reading, is not active.
To call all this .a 'ferment of creativity', as the local prints are apt to do. may be unrealistic, but I am sure the balance, if water only finds its own level, is favour- able. It is only the critics who feel there is too much : others consume according to appetite. But my fear is that a good many hopes among Fringe performers are dashed. Hope is a common name here betwixt Linlithgow and East Lothian. A new minister who began a sermon, `Brethren the world is full of blasted Hopes', lost his pulpit. But Fringe boys could well be discouraged. They want critics to come and write them up. What they need are adjudicators. It's no use, in print, telling a madly ambitious bunch of students that they're not quite up to it yet, after spend- ing a miserable night in a cellar with an audience of six, three of whom left at midnight.
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