Bonnie wee halls of Edinburgh ARTS
CHARLES REID
Since Carlo-Maria Giulini has been renowned for years as a conductor above all of Verdi's Messa da Requiem and isn't in any case a con- spicuous pedlar of the German masters, it was probably considered the smart, pathfinding thing to have him do the B minor Mass of Bach with the redoubtable New Philharmonia Chorus at an Edinburgh Festival Sunday night. For an inner ring of connoisseurs such innovations or departures are piquancy itself. Whether they mean quite as much to the average ticketholder in the Usher Hall's half-guinea gallery, or 'upper tier' as it calls itself, I have some doubts.
Listening to the performance over the air. I judged that the average gallery-goer came away satisfied with his half-guinea's worth. Some of the choruses went more briskly than what may be called English standard tempi and were not necessarily the better for that. When it came to the `Crucifixus' Mr Giulini seemed concerned to spare us some of the agony. I longed for a touch of ball and chain. But, looking back on the performance as a whole, solo singing as well as choral, what resilience, shine and solidity! I am tempted to add that in sound and spirit alike this was the stuff that festivals are made of.
The difficulty is that I'm not clear what a festival, especially the Edinburgh one, is sup- posed to be about. Lord Harewood, recently its artistic director, had a shot at definition when he took over in 1961. On the musical side. he said, Edinburgh must aim at performances by first-rate artists not of miscellaneous or `standard' programmes but, conspicuously, of programmes whose substantial core, at any rate, should be devoted year by year to a given com- poser or pair of composers.
To justify 'conspectus' treatment--and sell enough tickets—the chosen composers must, of course, be great ones. A snag here is that some of the 'greats' we already hear enough of, perhaps too much, in the ordinary way. Who would trudge to Edinburgh for a Beethoven, Mozart or Tchaikovsky orgy? As to the remain- ing 'greats' the question arises whether there are enough of them, at the rate of two a year, to see the century out. The ideal choice, under the policy which Lord Harewood so brilliantly initiated, is of once despised, neglected or under- rated geniuses who have been recently exhumed or 'discovered.' Edinburgh's Berlioz, Liszt and Schoenberg years are on this account remem- bered with admiration and, certainly as to the first two, with gratitude. Even the Shostakovitch year wasn't grudged, although some may have asked whether it was necessary to give us, in something under three weeks, quite all those symphonies (six) and string quartets (seven), not to mention a brace of concertos, sundry sonatas and a swarm of miscellaneous pieces.
This year's joint pets are Bach and Igor Stravinsky. The first is always with us. As to Igor, one's mind goes back to 1947, the Festival'i founding-year. He was then as despised a genius as the sentimental biographer could find in a year's march. His name now fattens the gramo- phone catalogues. The last piece on the last Saturday night will be The Rite of Spring, which hasn't made a philistine blink these thirty years. In pursuit of plugworthy composers. then, the Festival is sure sooner or later to walk off the end of the pier. In what year, I wonder, will it come back dripping through the turnstiles with Shoenberg and Shostakovitch, Lord Harewood's opening pair?
On top of these perplexities are two others: the sort of audience you are playing to and where. There is no town in Europe with a stronger genius loci than Edinburgh, so long as you stay out of doors. Who tires of Arthur's Seat and the Salisbury Crag or the blue of the Firth as seen from the Castle's ramparts? But who, down the years, nurtures equally happy visions of Usher Hall, where the big concerts are held, or of Freemasons' Hall, which dispenses morning chamber music, sometimes bursting at its marble seams? (About the pathetic inade- quacy of the King's Theatre as an opera-house I'll not say a word. Since 1947 it has been be- laboured enough.) Marmoreal and prim, both places smack of a rigidly stratified society in which classical music, whether enjoyed or not, was an apanage of the upper layers, Neither is fitted either by style or, more importantly, size, to the needs of a radio- and gramophone-trained generation in which musical taste is far more widely spread than when Usher Hall was built.
People who have paid up to three pounds for a grand tier seat may be delighted to learn that Strauss's Don Juan, as done by George Szell and the Cleveland orchestra the night before, was the finest ever heard by experts who have been comparing one performance of Don Juan with the next for most of a lifetime. But in an age of new class deployments and of public subsidies it all seems a shade remote, Edwardian and cliquey. The mood today, with the dry acoustics of new, standard-size concert halls falling out of fashion, is for big halls, holding big crowds, including a high ratio below the age of thirty. In short, our notions of what a musical festival might be are coloured by the Proms. Thousands of all sorts, types and social sizes flock to the Proms on this night or that not because it's the thing to do and they want to be seen but because music is one of the things that are central to their lives and natures.
I won't go so far as to say that all Prom per- formances are the best that money can buy or the kind that devoted score-readers dream of at their firesides. Last week's 'Grande Messe des Morts' (Berlioz), one of the scores which Sir Malcolm Sargent was to have conducted, was indifferent in several ways. It was not merely that I didn't see eye to eye, or pulse to pulse, with some of George Hurst's speeds and gear changes. What troubled me was the watery tone
produced on exposed passages by the big pile-up of choirs, and the first tenors' forte entry a bar late on `Quantus tremor' in the Dies Irae, a mishap which muddled nearly forty bars of run-up to the apocalyptic entry of Berlioz's supplementary brass groups. Even so. between one end of the score and the other, enough of grandeur came through to give the occasion an authentic Proms seal. The crowd stood in the hollow of Berlioz's hand.
Stravinsh's Les aces, which concluded last Monday's concert, ga‘e an even deeper sense of performers' and hearers' identity with the com- poser's inflections, idioms and purpose. Pierre Boulez conducted the BBC Chorus and a finely- groomed solo quartet, everybody singing away uninhibitedly in Russian. The whole thing went electrifyingly—and ended so. After the bride- groom's final paean came the 'bell chords' en four pianos and tuned e± mbals. The astonishing thing was the pindrop silence in which the last of these was allowed to die away, cushioned on the Albert Hall's vast cubic footage.
Edinburgh. of course, has no Albert Hall. But once I went to a National Eisteddfod in a Welsh mining valley. Beethoven's Ninth was played and sung (giant Welsh choir, naturally) in a sheet-metal pavilion holding 8,000 which had been run up on a levelled-off colliery tip and was dismantled at the end of the week to be run up the following year somewhere else.
Couldn't Edinburgh invest in something of the kind? Multitudes would replace cliques, ticket prices might come down—and it would all be very common. And salutary.
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