CHOOSING the top 20 classical and opera performances of all time in Scotland - as we have done for the arts pages all this week - was never going to be easy, nor necessarily conclusive. The legacy lies in the individual memory, or someone else's memory etched in writing.
The task was not to judge a piece of music, but to assess the quality of a performance together with the significance and context of its presentation. Here was an opportunity to consider the furthest-reaching moments in Scottish musical history.
I am indebted to our panel of experts, who have a collective musical memory of almost 200 years. Conrad Wilson was staff music critic of the Scotsman for 27 years, and has attended every Edinburgh Festival since it began. John Currie directed all of Scotland's major choruses, working with all the great conductors in the process. Hugh Macdonald is a former head of music at BBC Scotland as well as the former director of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.
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Cleaned-up stage directions ... and musically flawless
CARMEN, KING'S THEATRE, EDINBURGH, AUGUST 1977
WHAT eventually fledged into the Edinburgh International Festival's most celebrated opera production had been incubating for years, starting with Teresa Berganza's and Peter Diamand's ambitions to stage a "cleaned-up Carmen" free of the bad habits the opera had accrued since its inception. The result was a revelation, hailed by critics, visited by royalty and loved by audiences.
The performers were a sort of dream team, with Berganza and Placido Domingo heading the cast, but its strength was never simply as a star vehicle.
Abbado, with the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) fresh from triumphs in Salzburg, assured musical quality and overall control.
Stage directions that conflicted with the music were quietly eradicated by the conductor, despite the fame of the director Piero Fagioni (once an Italian film matinee idol). The young Scottish Opera chorus and Edinburgh schoolboy choristers excelled, and the LSO played with a passion and fire seldom heard from an opera pit.
Backstage the production had its difficulties. To say that the relationship between Fagioni and the designer Ezio Frigerio was volatile would be the understatement of the century. And how on earth could such a production be staged in the King's Theatre, while Edinburgh still disputed plans for a new opera house? The miracle happened because the Berganza-Diamand vision burned through the whole thing. Abbado made sure that it was musically flawless.
JOHN CURRIE
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Diamand sweeps all before him
BRITTEN'S WAR REQUIEM, USHER HALL, EDINBURGH, AUGUST 1968
PETER Diamand's reign as Edinburgh Festival director lasted from 1966 until 1978, and Carlo Maria Giulini was the jewel in his crown. Giulini set unmatched standards as a conductor, but it was with Britten's War Requiem that he stepped into the 20th century.
In 1968 - Diamand's Britten year, attended by the composer - he was given the conditions he sought for his performance. Galina Vishnevskaya, Peter Pears and Dietrich Fisher-Dieskau, the Russian, British and German soloists for whom it was written, were to sing it together for the first time. With them, and the splendour of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, the Italian conductor had the ingredients he required.
The performance began late, but once it started it swept all before it in power and poignancy. Giulini - a man who, in the words of a London critic, wore his modesty with a capital M - never performed a work until he was ready for it. He was ready for Britten's masterpiece, and the performance went down in the Festival's annals.
CONRAD WILSON
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An audacious, expensive invitation pays off for Chisholm
BÉLA BARTÓK, STEVENSON HALL, GLASGOW, 29 FEBRUARY 1932
MUSICAL life in pre-Edinburgh Festival Scotland was not quite as parochial as we might suppose, and one man who did more than most to give it an international dimension in the inter-war years was the young composer and conductor Erik Chisholm. Aided by some fellow students - as impecunious as they were insanely ambitious - he founded the grand-sounding Active Society for the Propagation of Contemporary Music to promote concerts by some of the world's leading composers. He made a list of the most famous names he could think of and (before the age of public arts funding) invited them to come and perform their music in Glasgow. Hindemith, Szymanowski, Walton and several others accepted, but the biggest catch of all was Béla Bartók, one of the most important composers of the past century and a virtuoso pianist, who agreed to give a recital of his own music at the Stevenson Hall. The audience for this historic concert was sizeable and the critics enthusiastic, and Bartók enjoyed his visit to Scotland enough to return in 1933. At any rate the great Hungarian folk-music collector took a chanter and a book of piobaireachd home with him, though sadly he never seems to have got round to incorporating it in his own music.
HUGH MCDONALD
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Beginning of the Gibson revolution with the SNO
IAIN HAMILTON'S SINFONIA FOR TWO ORCHESTRAS, USHER HALL, EDINBURGH, AUGUST 1959
IN 1959 the Edinburgh Festival decided to commemorate Robert Burns's bicentenary by commissioning an orchestral work from a young Scots composer. Iain Hamilton, Glasgow-born and very much a rising star of British music, was asked to produce something for an Usher Hall concert by the Scottish National Orchestra (SNO). As it happened, the young Alexander Gibson, who had recently been announced as the first Scots-born principal conductor in the SNO's history, was to be in charge of the concert. In the grand circle sat senior officials of the Burns Federation - eager, no doubt, to hear how the young composer would incorporate well-loved Burns melodies into his new piece. Except that the Webern-influenced angular lines and dissonant harmony of the Sinfonia made no reference whatever to anything that a Burns lover might recognise. Hamilton was at that point in his career an uncompromising modernist and his new piece was the first by a Scots composer to cause a scandal (though not a Rite of Spring-style riot) that reached the front pages of the popular press the next day. The President of the Burns Federation (which had agreed to pay half the commission fee) told the Daily Express that he thought the music "rotten and ghastly" - and it was said that he asked the festival for his money back. Observer critic Peter Hayworth reported that the audience had been "slightly stunned", but Alexander Gibson, undaunted, programmed it again that winter in his first full season with the SNO, giving due notice that cutting-edge contemporary music would be featuring regularly in their concerts from then on. And though Hamilton's music is sadly rather neglected today, that 1959 premiere can truly be described as a watershed in Scottish musical life, and the beginning of the Gibson revolution.
HUGH MCDONALD
THE TOP 20 SO FAR
17 Parsifal, Edinburgh Festival Theatre, 12 August 2003
18 Berg's Wozzeck, King's Theatre, Edinburgh, August 1966
19 Jessye Norman, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, 14 November 1990
20 BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Osmo Vänskä, City Halls, Glasgow, 1 May 1997
DO YOU AGREE?
WHATEVER you think of our choices - and our omissions - we'd love to hear your views. Please get in touch with us, either by post or on the website at www.scotsman.com/top20
