ARTS & AMUSEMENTS

In the Caledonian Market-place

By NEVILLE CARDUS NINETEEN Edinburgh International Festivals to date. It is a far cry back to the first glamoroug year of 1947, when the sun enchanted

the castle on high, day by day, and you might see any morning Bruno Walter walking along Princes Street, and find Ernest Newman absorbed in some volume in a bookshop; or you could hear next door in your hotel bedroom the voice of Kathleen Ferrier heralding the dawn, or, let us say, the late dawn. At the first Edinburgh Festival, Artur Schnabel played the piano at a recital of Brahms's chamber music, with Szigeti, Primrose and Fournier. At the very outset Szigeti

twice broke a string, then Primrose broke one—

three strings snapped during the performance of some twenty bars. Panic was imminent on the platform; the nervous Szigeti verged on the hysterical. The situation was saved by the voice of Schnabel, seated calmly at the piano: 'Perhaps soon I also break a string.'

Halcyon times! In 1947 Europe was still licking its war wounds. Edinburgh was then the only large-scale 'International' Festival. Nowadays festivals of the arts have mushroomed every- where, from Santa Fd to St. Pancras. In 1947 you would hear in the throngs of humans jostling along Princes Street the sound of many tongues— German, Italian, French, Dutch. So far this

season of 1965 I have heard nobody in the public

crowds using any but the languages known of old, with a difference here and there, by Robert Burns, William Shakespeare and Groucho Marx.

There is no need now for culture-seekers living in distant places and climates to come to Edin-

burgh for Festival purposes. In fact anybody wishing to enjoy the beauty of Edinburgh, as a city, would do well to come here while the Festival is not 'on.'

It has become a necessity, more or less British or American, as far as visible public support of it goes. It has altered with the changing times.

It has, like the floating population which at the moment is Edinburgh's main traffic, a motley

show, disparate in content and atmosphere. The appeal is wide enough to attach the connoisseur and the brashest teenager, a Festival more of appetite than of taste . . . Haydn, Boulez, Tippett and Marlene Dietrich. In places where once we gazed on Furtwiingler and Beecham,

tread Larry Adler and a modern poet named Snodgrass. It is all invigorating and variegated. In a year of Beecham's appearance at an Edin- burgh Festival he was taken to task by austere critics because he conducted a rather light- weight programme. 'But what is a festival?' he asked. 'It is a feast, an occasion for jollification • —a jamboree.' The Edinburgh Festival is not exactly that. Rather could we, in no pejorative sense, call it a Caledonian Market of all the Arts and Talents.

In the absence of personalities of the stature of Walter, Furtwangler and Mitropoulos (not to be found anywhere today, though next week Sir John Barbirolli will manifest himself here), there is a chance for less-known names to assert them- selves. Opportunity knocks. In the past the Festi- val has not put Scottish musical talent exactly under the spotlight. This year the local boy hhs made good, none other than Alexander Gibson, born in Motherwell, trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music in Glasgow, and now conduc- tor of the Scottish National Orchestra. With his band of instrumentalists, augmented for the occa- sion of the Festival's first, night, and the Scottish Festival chorus, he took complete charge of the vast canvas of Mahier's Eighth Symphony, and not only did he go far into the work as a concep- tion but also saw to it that little of tone, choral or orchestral, ran to waste. It was remarkable indeed to hear this entirely un-English, un-Scot- tish music made to sound authentic Mahler on a Sunday night in the Usher Hall of Edinburgh. Especially engaging and musically skilful were the boys' choirs, representing the younger angels and blessed boys. Their pronunciation of Goethe's words, by the way, was much purer in consonantal clearness than that of any of the eight soloists present.

On another evening Mr. Gibson and his orchestra expounded Sibelius with a direct eloquent forcibility which did justice to a com- poser who lately has stupidly been belittled. As an original shaper of music and a thinker in terms of the orchestra, Sibelius had a tougher, tighter mind than Mahler, at present much in the fashion in this country but not in Austria or Germany. (And it is something unexpected for me to admit that I rank Sibelius above Mahler as an original experiencer and conceiver in music.) I was pleased and relieved to learn, the other day, that Henryk Szeryng, who was soloist in the Sibelius violin concerto conducted by Mr. Gibson, has spoken highly of this young or 'youngis'h Scat. Myself, I had described him already as nearly the most gifted of all British conductors of his period and time of origin. Mr. Szeryng went further than this, placing Mr. Gibson in the very front of conductors of his age extant anywhere, here or in Europe, at the present time.

During the next few days Edinburgh will hear much of Pierre Boulez, directly or indirectly. The Usher Hall was not crowded for his superb interpretation of Debussy's La Mer, with the Hamburg Radio Symphony Orchestra finely and musically responsive to his baton. I had not expected to live long enough to hear a German orchestra playing Debussy with so much vibrant energy, so much iridescence and style, as this. M. Boulez is to be classed among the few com- posers really to have the power to conduct with virtuosity (though M. Boulez is a virtuoso con- ductor of modesty). Wagner was probably the first to combine creative and interpretative gifts; and we can put the names of Berlioz, Mahler and Richard Strauss in this category. During the last hundred years conducting has, of course, become a specialist's job. What were the per- formances like, as organised sound, conducted by, say, Brahms, Dvorak and Debussy?

As I write this article rehearsals have just ended of Pli selon pli, the most important work so far, I am told, of Pierre Boulez. A colleague assures me that it is to be counted second in genius among the musical masterpieces composed during the present century. From what I have heard of the work at rehearsal I rather suspect that this claim on behalf of Phi selon phi goes a little too far. The sounds emanating from the conglomeration of instruments, electronic and other, were not entirely unfamiliar to and in my ears. I had heard them before in different places and circumstances —here and there a falling tea-tray, a subterranean rumble, a steel guitar, 'a xylophone (as Bottom says, 'I have a reasonable ear for music. Let's have the tongs and bones'). But M. Boulez uses these more or less familiar aural phenomena in a fresh surprising context, associating them with Mallarme. Three of Mallarmes poems are insinuated into the peripatetic texture and sung painfully and spectrally. Boulez is a musician superbly bred and cultured. We (or, at least, I) must assume that behind Pli selon pli there is controlling rationale and cesthetic. All I can say at the moment of Pli selon pli—wittily translated by another colleague, 'Fold on the dotted line'— might easily cause Schonberg to sound, by com- parison, as mellifluous as Massenet.

One of the important and refreshing events of the Festival to date has been Carlo Maria Giulini's attack on 'producers' of opera. 'Opera is for ears as well as for the eyes,' maintained the handsome favourite Italian conductor, 'and if all sorts of irrelevant things are going on all over the stage during a lovely aria, where are we?' Where indeed? In Bayreuth, for one place among many places. Critics have for long tried to put the 'producer' of opera, and of stage plays, in his place. Perhaps something will be done to tame his vanity and musically ignorant irrele- vances now that a renowned and respected direc- tor of opera has spoken his protest.

Maybe a Festival of all the arts is likely always to seem a little alien in this beautiful (or once beautiful) city, where cars obscure the handsome spacious squares and crescents. Walk along them in the quietness of a depopulated Sunday morning and the sense of the past stirs in you. But on any Saturday afternoon, with the crowds coming from football, the Festival—and Scott and David Hume—seem alien and unnecessary names and substances. In Princes Street, this very Saturday, I saw a Scot consulting the latest edition of the evening paper. Eager about the Test match at Kennington Oval I asked, 'What's the score?' 'Celtic 3,' he replied, `Dundee United 0.'