Music at Edinburgh
By DAVID CAIRNS
EDINBURGH, 1964, begin- ning in gloom, has con- tinued in triumph. I cannot remember a week of music which so de- lighted me—enlivening dull responses and making me as near to being happy in my work as a critic can be—as the second week of the Festival has done.
At first it was very dif- ferent. Nothing was right. The hatred of the Corporation of Edinburgh for the Festival (which it cannot forgive for so obviously enriching it) seemed to be taking apocalyptic and avenging form. A grey, mean, malevolent rain fell like a pestilence, discreetly covering the Paps of Fife, carrying the message that all festivals are a pleasure-seeking presumption and a sin, but par- ticularly one that provoked divine vengeance by whoring after false gods with unpronounceable Czech names and totally forsaking the sym- phonies of Brahms and Beethoven. Richter post- poned his visit, deferring two concerts till the final week and cancelling the third, thereby letting in (in place of the Stravinsky Capriccio and a Bach concerto) the fastest performance of the Fantastic Symphony I never hoped to hear. It looked as if Jehovah was determined to punish the Festival and had sent the Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion-Television Fran- caise to do it.
The difference between the first and second weeks was partly the difference between French slovenliness and mediocrity and Czech tradition and vitality. The Prague National Theatre was in possession. of the King's from the opening night of the Festival, but it did not, to begin with, show its strength. One was more conscious that the company has few good voices than that it has developed ensemble playing and staging to an unusual pitch. In Smetana's Dalibor, with which the season opened, the small and wretchedly equipped stage of the King's Theatre played havoc with the work's Lohengrin-like pro- cessional splendours. The revelation of the com- pany's superb Kenya Kabanova was to come. At the same time, during this opening period, the French Radio Orchestra was playing nightly at the Usher Hall--two concerts under Munch, two under Maazel. This, one had to keep reminding oneself, was the orchestra that recorded Carmen, the Bizet Symphony, the Franck Symphony and the Fantastic, with Beecham. To judge by its Edinburgh appearances, it has sunk—or perhaps it was always there—to the level of an orchestra that needs Beecham to lift it out of the mud.
Perhaps the first violins are capable of approxi- mating more closely to a secret, breathless ppp than the coarse, perfunctory mezzo forte which was their response to the mysterious arcs of unaccompanied melody at the opening of the second part of Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet; but it seemed clear that Maazel had despaired of making them do so. Maazel's record-breaking gallop through the Fantastic (in which only the slow movement, admirably done, moved at a tempo that allowed the phrases to shape them- selves and make their effect) did not dispose me to regard him as a conductor sympathetic to Berlioz's music; but the performance of Romeo and Juliet suggested that with a less tinsensitive instrument he might have done great things. Where the players were not asked for anything as visionary as a pianissimo, and only energy and attack were required, Maazel galvanised them to quite a show of energy. The frenzied disinte- gration of the love music in the Tomb Scene was thrillingly done. The long trombone recita- tive in the Introduction came out as a single, purposeful discourse, gathering authority as it went along. Intermittently the work lived. But its poetic core was missing, while the Queen Mab Scherzo's gauzy, insubstantial web of sound was rent by hob-nailed boots at a thousand points.
Munch's Requiem was no more definitive. It was on the whole less capricious than the per- formance he conducted at the Leeds Festival in April; but after the sublimities of the St. Paul's performance, conducted by Colin Davis at the City of London Festival, anything less exalted, and less faithful to the score, must seem inade- quate. And less resonant, one should add: for the reverberant acoustics of St. Paul's explained much that is normally puzzling, like the famous flute-trombone passage in the Hostias, and made it once and for all clear that the work, conceived for a large church, should always be performed in one. I heard only the broadcast of the Usher Hall performance; but for those listening in the hall it must have been the same, to judge from the way each antiphonal chord between orchestra and organ at the opening of the Te Deum snapped off like celery instead of resounding across the silent bar Berlioz had carefully pro- vided for it.
But the Te Deum (spiritedly performed, with something of the right monumentality, by the Scottish National Orchestra and the Scottish Opera Chorus under Alexander Gibson) came to- wards the end of the second week. By that time the ON de la RTF had vanished and the Usher Hall evening concerts had been transmogrified out of recognition first by the LSO (concerts under Rozhdestvensky and Colin Davis) and then by a wonderful series of Mozart concerto per- formances by Rudolf Serkin with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Alexander Schneider. Here at last was a great music festi- val in all-round action, every concert a special one. Novelty: the premiere of Henze's Ariosi, commissioned by the Festival—a beautiful set- ting of Tasso poems of unhappy love, for solo violin, soprano and a large orchestra handled with mastery and great imagination—and Rostro- povich playing Shostakovich's reorchestration of the Schumann Cello Concerto (wrong-headed but a genuine festival event); restoration : the Elgar First Symphony presented by Davis and the LSO, stripped of all Edwardian splendours and miseries, as a vital and sustained piece of symphonic thought; redefinition : Serkin play- ing K467, K413 and K414, and later the Rondo in D (in a recital which included magnificent performances of the Waldstein Sonata and the Schubert posthumous A major), with a sense of continuous melodic flow, a rhythmic strength and suppleness, a grasp of organic form and of the endless variety of mood and nuance which goes to make it, an eloquence, a comic spirit, an inspired play of fancy, a seriousness, in a word a rightness which no other Mozart pianist I know of can equal; and revelation : the Prague pro- duction of Katya Kabanova.
Katya has been seen quite a lot at Sadler's Wells in recent years; but this production, com- pletely natural (without being naturalistic) and unexaggerated, integrated in every detail, with a cast that were right inside their roles, and with all the musico-dramatic advantages that come from performance in the original language, re- vealed a fierce and poignant masterpiece that I had never dreamt it to be. The House of the Dead, later in the week, was less successful, be- cause the anti-representational character of the staging went against the reality of the work (in contrast to the way the reality of Kcitya was matched and enhanced by Thanus Hein's pro- duction and the spare, stylised realism of Josef Svoboda's designs). But again the whole en- semble was exemplar*.
It has been Janacek's year rather than Ber- lioz's. The Berlioz performances at Edinburgh in 1963 and 1964 have been a mixed bag: on the debit side, the Requiem, Rotneo and Juliet, Harold in Italy, Maazel's Fantastic; on the credit side, The Damnation of Faust, the Fantastic and Lelio, The Childhood of Christ, Nails d'Etd (the' best of the French Radio offerings, with Munch and Marilyn Home) and, on the whole, the Te Deum; but no Symphonie Funebre and, because of the theatre problem, no opera—which means that the grand Berlioz survey has had to omit his greatest work, The Trojans. The Harewood principle of the special survey remains a brilliant one, and in three years out of four Schoenberg, Shostakovich and now Janacek have decisively vindicated it. But the theatre problem becomes more and more acute, despite the Czechs' largely successful defiance of it. The number of good companies that are prepared to cram their productions into the King's is small, and it diminishes relentlessly as each one goes there and discovers what it has been let in for. The logic is obvious; but there is still no sign of a new opera house.
The fundamental incorporated attitude of the burghers to the Festival remains irremediably footling. (Where else could the main art ex- hibition open for only three hours on a Sunday, between two and five?) The right hand can ap- parently go on wagging the finger of puritan disapproval while the left hand rakes in the shekels. It is an unedifying spectacle. One tolerates it for the sake of the sublime city they squat in and the splendid Festival which Lord Harewood continues to organise in spite of them. When the sun comes out and the performances attain the level of this year's second week, it is as good as any in the world. May it continue!
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