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 histor
y.
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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Schnabel at his matter-of-fact best
ARTUR SCHNABEL, USHER HALL, EDINBURGH, AUGUST 1948
SHORTLY before his death, Artur Schnabel played five Mozart piano concertos in Edinburgh - a great coup for Rudolf Bing, who had already enticed him to the inaugural Festival the previous year to join Joseph Szigeti, William Primrose and Pierre Fournier in chamber music by Schubert, Mendelssohn and Brahms.
Most of us today know Schnabel only through his recordings - he was the first to do Beethoven's 32 sonatas as an entity - but here was the man himself, performing in what seemed the most matter-of-fact manner the Mozart D minor and G major concertos in a single programme, with Ian Whyte and the BBC Scottish Orchestra. "Matter-of-fact" was in Schnabel's case the highest praise. As a fellow pianist once said of him: "He represented a way of looking almost directly at the music and bypassing the instrument."
Though Whyte was never a famed Mozartian, he shared Schnabel's integrity, and these performances were the first example of a Scottish conductor and orchestra appearing on an international platform with a historic exponent of the Viennese school. Not until Rudolf Serkin presented a similar series almost 20 years later was Mozart playing of such quality to be heard again in Edinburgh. And who by then was on the brink of being appointed Festival director? None other than Schnabel's former chauffeur and secretary, a Berlin-born law student called Peter Diamand.
CONRAD WILSON
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If only the moment was recorded...
O BONE JESU, STIRLING, 1507
WE CAN only imagine ourselves present at the first-ever performance of Robert Carver's 19-part motet O Bone Jesu. It happened exactly 500 years ago, most likely performed by the singers of James IV's Chapel Royal in Stirling as part of a private ceremony of devotion.
Recent performances endorse its standing as one of the most remarkable examples of pre-Reformation Scottish music, about which we knew precious little until such notable scholars as Kenneth Elliott and John Purser delved into its glorious secrets.
The sheer opulence of its 19 intertwining voices - a number chosen to represent the 19 years of James's reign, suggests Purser in his current Radio Scotland series on Scottish music - put it on a par with Thomas Tallis's seminal Renaissance blockbuster Spem in Alium, which it predates by around 70 years.
More than that, it is a motto work of a man influenced by Northern Europe, as opposed to England. Scotland had a distinctive identity then, factors that formulated themselves into Carver's music. His importance has only recently been fully appreciated. If only someone could have recorded that historic moment for posterity.
KENNETH WALTON
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Voices soar to new heights
THE TROJANS, KING'S THEATRE, GLASGOW, 3 MAY 1969
IN THE 1960s and 70s there seemed no mountain too high for Scottish Opera to climb. Driven by the extraordinary vision of musical director Alexander Gibson and managing director Peter Hemmings, the fledgling company feared nothing, not even Berlioz's epic opera The Trojans, which it mounted in Glasgow in 1969 to mark the composer's centenary year.
The prospects were mouthwatering, especially as the company insisted on presenting Berlioz's five-hour epic as a unified whole on each of its five Glasgow performances. While elements of the production came in for some stick - the "Hollywood-Classical costumes", for instance - it was deemed a massive triumph. The chorus, trained by the legendary Arthur Oldham, was universally acclaimed. But the biggest plaudits went to Janet Baker in her first ever appearance as Dido. A year later, she was to do play the same role in London when Josephine Veasey fell ill during a Royal Opera production. Baker was begged to take over at short notice.
When the announcement was made to a Covent Garden audience, a voice from the balcony shouted: "About time, too!" But Glasgow had heard it first.
KENNETH WALTON
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Heady days when Scottish opera set its own agenda
THE CATILINE CONSPIRACY, STIRLING, 16 MARCH 1974
LOOK through the main reference books on 20th-century music and there is relatively little mention of composer Iain Hamilton, even less on his 1974 opera, The Catiline Conspiracy.
He was a Scot, born in Glasgow, whose family moved to London when he was a child, and who then worked much of his life in America before his death in 2000 at the age of 78. His music was severe, some would say forbidding - attributes that perhaps scared many potential commissioners of his work.
But Scottish Opera took the high moral ground, never mind a risk, when it commissioned The Catiline Conspiracy as the first of four major operas in the 1970s from four Scottish composers - the others being Thomas Wilson's Confessions of a Justified Sinner(to a libretto by John Currie), Thea Musgrave's Mary Queen of Scots and Robin Orr's Hermiston.
The push for such a bold commissioning scheme had come unremittingly over several years from Fred Rimmer - professor of music at Glasgow University, a board member of Scottish Opera, and himself a composer in sympathy with Hamilton's austere language.
The premiere of Hamilton's opera took place in the newly opened MacRobert Centre at the University of Stirling, not perhaps the best setting for an opera of such relentless intensity and severity.
But there was little denying the significance of the occasion, in which a large, committed cast, Anthony Besch's majestic production and Alexander Gibson's faithful musical realisation came together with a sense of belief and pride. It may have been a difficult opera for the typical Scottish opera-goer - more used to a diet of Puccini, Verdi and Mozart - to swallow, but the event was one of immense importance in the history of Scottish Opera. These were the days when the company could actually set the agenda.
KENNETH WALTON
THE TOP 20 SO FAR
||1918|| Iain Hamilton's Sinfonia for Two Orchestras, Usher Hall, Edinburgh, August 1959
||1716|| 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
