The top 20 ...Scottish Classical Music Events of All Time

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 simply 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.

8
Inauguration of a new Orkney institution
THE BLIND FIDDLER, ST MAGNUS CATHEDRAL, ORKNEY, JUNE 1978
WHEN Peter Maxwell Davies's Martyrdom of St Magnus launched the St Magnus Festival in Kirkwall in 1977, Orkney suddenly had its own version of Britten's Aldeburgh Festival, with its own resident composer, its own seascapes and skyscapes and, in St Magnus Cathedral, its own atmospheric setting for music.

Davies's opera - though he preferred to call it music theatre - gave that first festival a sensational send-off, but it was with The Blind Fiddler the following year that the achievement was consolidated.

Nothing has symbolised the event more profoundly than this interlacing of seven songs and seven dances, one of the largest of Davies's settings of George Mackay Brown's poetry, heard in the cathedral at sunset with the adorable Mary Thomas, of Davies's own (now defunct) ensemble The Fires of London, as singer. Here, in music of the softest subtlety, Davies, pictured with Brown, left, encapsulated all that Orkney means to him. Whether in conveying the menace of a storm, or the peace of a pair of pebbles, or shells, or tiny bells brushing against each other, he caught the full magic of the place and of what the festival has meant ever since.

CONRAD WILSON

7Operatic triumph enacted in Perth
COSÌ FAN TUTTE, PERTH THEATRE, 12 APRIL 1967

SCOTTISH Opera's early international success was headlined by Anthony Besch's production of Così Fan Tutte, but few remember that it opened not in Glasgow, but in the tiny, charming theatre in Perth. Peter Hemmings and Alexander Gibson, left, had wisely decided to launch it there before its blaze-of-glory opening in Glasgow. So euphoric were all concerned, there was immediate and prophetic talk of Perth as a perfect city for a festival.

Besch employed the device (by no means original) of opening the opera without colour, elegant in black and white, doubling the impact of the brilliant colour of John Stoddart's designs as the plot developed. The cast bore surprises, too. Who would have thought, then, of Janet Baker as a singer-actress of high comic talent? The more established Elizabeth Harwood partnered her. Alexander Young and the handsome Peter van der Biltand - a singer new to British audiences - were wonderful lovers. Add to that the SNO and Alexander Gibson's flare for accompanying singers, and you have one of several daring 1960s productions that launched Scottish Opera as a truly international force.

JOHN CURRIE

6A pilgrimage west for lovers of Bartók
BLUEBEARD'S CASTLE, KING'S THEATRE, GLASGOW, 1957

MOZART'S IDOMENEO, plus Berlioz's Beatrice & Benedict, Benvenuto Cellini and The Trojans, were the British premieres with which Erik Chisholm and the Glasgow Grand Opera Society earned gratitude in the 1930s. But there was another work, this time by Bartók, for which Chisholm never received the acclaim he deserved. Bluebeard's Castle, composed in 1918, was first staged in Britain in 1957 when the Glasgow-born conductor and professor, by then resident in South Africa, brought his own Cape Town University opera company on tour.

The production of Bartók's gripping psychodrama was inevitably simple. It was the music that mattered, and Scotland's Bartókians, of whom there were by then quite a number, rushed to Glasgow to experience it in a theatrical environment.

The title role was sung by the great Gregorio Fiasconaro, a resonant Sicilian baritone who, like Chisholm, taught in Cape Town. Six years later the opera reached the Edinburgh Festival, along with The Miraculous Mandarin and The Wooden Prince, in a triple-bill from Budapest. Since then, Scottish Opera has staged it twice, but it was Chisholm who got there first.

CONRAD WILSON

5The key moment in a festival that set out to heal the wounds of warMAHLER'S SONG OF THE EARTH, USHER HALL, EDINBURGH, 11-12 SEPTEMBER 1947

THIS, in the context of the inaugural Edinburgh Festival, was the big one - the performance that reunited the conductor Bruno Walter with the Vienna Philharmonic, the proof (or so it was claimed) that all was forgiven, and that a masterpiece by a Jewish composer could be performed by a formerly Nazi orchestra. Walter had conducted the work's premiere in 1912, just after Mahler's death. He had also conducted the Ninth Symphony in Vienna in 1938, just before Hitler's seizure of Austria, when all Mahler's works were immediately banned.

Even in post-war Britain, critics routinely remarked that Mahler's music was "not for every day" - though it certainly is now. But, if many people in the Usher Hall on 11 and 12 September 1947 (the work was performed twice) were unsure quite what they were going to hear, they knew it was something special.

Walter, like Mahler a Christian Jew, conducted with all his soul, and he had plenty of that. Peter Pears as tenor soloist had a voice incisive enough to pierce the thick orchestration of the long opening movement. But it was Kathleen Ferrier, in the even longer finale, who cut listeners to the quick. Her singing of the Abschied (Farewell) was heartrending, and would have been even more so if the audience had known she would die six years later of cancer.

Meanwhile she was Britain's most eloquent contralto and Edinburgh would, fortunately, hear her again, singing The Song of the Earth under another conductor, when she was even nearer her end. As for Walter, he bade farewell to Edinburgh on 13 September (though he, too, would return) with an afternoon of Viennese waltzes and other titbits, demonstrating that all was well in the best of all musical worlds.

JOHN CURRIE

THE TOP 20 SO FAR
9 The Catiline Conspiracy, Stirling, 16 March 1974

10 The Trojans, King's Theatre, Glasgow, 3 May 1969

11 O Bone Jesu, Stirling, 1507

12 Artur Schnabel, Usher Hall, Edinburgh, August 1948

13 Iain Hamilton's Sinfonia for Two Orchestras, Usher Hall, Edinburgh, August 1959

14 Béla Bartók, Stevenson Hall, Glasgow, 29 February 1932

15 Britten's War Requiem, Usher Hall, Edinburgh, August 1968

16 Carmen, King's Theatre, Edinburgh, August 1977

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. Get in touch with us, either by post or on the website at www.scotsman.com/top20