A wee blaw . . .
EDINBURGH PHILIP HOPE-WALLACE
The moralist within me—and you couldn't do twenty-two Edinburgh Festivals without one— wishes to proclaim a blinding glimpse of the obvious: namely that festivals are not what they offer you so much as what you bring to them. `Lives there a man with soul so dead who never to himself hath said?' Walter Scott, I believe, or Campbell, anyhow under the Waverley Memorial this year for the first time there are little tables, umbrellas (symbolic?) and believe it or not, piped muzak! This is drowned out by the traffic and the tootlings of the elderly police pipers who once a day march down Prince's Street, an all too rare display of that national colour which I am sure many tourists would like to find in greater profusion. I know the proud Scots scorn to be thought of in terms of tartan pen wipers, but their own stuff is so good ... why come to Scotland to see Negro dancers? But there I go. One really must pick and choose and you would be a very jaded palate not to, find something delicious to make your journey worth while. Certainly the way not to do it is to come up on a train with the ussa orchestra and then complain that in the Usher Hall they played a less rewarding programme than in London at the Proms. Bethink you that there are people here from Bergen or Alberta to whom the experience is a novelty. Incident-
ally, the moralists of Edinburgh who burned Lady Chatterley have been having agonies of conscience about that banquet the Provost did not cancel for the Russians and about whether to stay away from the concerts (when one had spent all those bawbies on the tickets).
When I was in Frankfurt in 1939 a German told me that when their opera made a good- will tour to Zagreb, then crowded with refugees from Hitler's Reich, the local Jews bought every ticket for every performance and destroyed them, so that the Frankfurters played a week to emptiness and twelve usherettes/ In Edinburgh we had only a few lone protesters. The playing was marvellous, Vishnevskaya and Rostropo- vich were cheered in the recitals. As a critic I could afford, like old P. Pilate, to wash my hands or leave them folded. How applaud the work and not the players? Anyhow, I think I am on the side of No Reprisals still. (Famous last words.) The festival has been dedicated this year to Benjamin Britten and Franz Schubert..No doubt this kind of pairing and contrasting has some interest. If it means that Fischer-Dieskau can sing Blake settings by the former and song cycles by the latter well and good. Schubert seems to me the most innately musical genius ever, with a sort of dowser's ability to bring music bubbling out of the earth, to sink an in- stant line to a spring of melody. His music has been in my bloodstream ever since I can re- member. If I were younger would Britten's music course there, too? I hear BB being deli- cate, sensitive, eclectic, marvellously original in selection of simple strokes of genius, but I don't, honestly, hear the same fantastic ease of inspira- tion. Du holde Kunst. Still, it was a Messiaen
and Britten concert sung by the John Aldis Choir which will undoubtedly remain in the minds of some of its hearers as one of the rewards of the festival.
My heart heavy with Ibsen (When We Dead Awaken, just the thing for Edinburgh), my eye dazzled by the quasi Scotch-oriental art nouveau of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, my ear absorbed guiltily yet another essence. Like a taste for pear drops carried into middle age, I have to admit to love of Richard Strauss, so the Ham- burg State opera's visit, despite its much-pub- lished dissatisfaction with the King's Theatre (next week : The Black and White Minstrel Show), gave me a big helping of honey. Elektra introduced the admirable Gladys Kuchta (American Polish) and a superb baritone, Hans Sotin, Ariadne auf Naxos showed us Tatiana Troyanos and Arlene Saunders, two more American artists of talent, and a tame Flying Dutchman had the audience shouting for Anja Silja as Senta whose vocalising I simply refuse to accept as singing (it was often a sort of un- supported screaming, and flat, much of the time). But, I ask conceited, does the audience know? Cardus, who is something of a Job's comforter at Edinburgh, told me that when one concert began with the overture to La Gazza Ladra, the audience took the drum roll as the National Anthem and stood up to a man.
But there has been some superb music making and the idea is not to be given that the festival on this side has in any way fallen off. What did happen, though, and what explains the relative lessening of broadcasting from the festival, was that Mr Diamand overloaded the first week with works which had just been heard in Lon- don and so, from a news editor's point of view, didn't rate second notices. But, back to square one, it doesn't follow that the chap I met from Edmonton (Alberta) hadn't enjoyed them. He had. Wow. Gosh. Local greyheads may shake nae guid ever came of cello recitals at 11 a.m. But how the young do enjoy it all.
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