Festival diary: Strange music, odd wallpaper

Published on Wednesday 13 August 2008 22:08

"YOU caught me in this adrenalin moment. In 15 minutes you will have a dead conductor," said Francesco Corti in his dressing room just minutes after wrapping up Scottish Opera's Festival production, The Two Widows.

Staged more as comic operetta than opera, the Smetana work got mixed reviews and seemed an odd choice for a showcase. The set boasted remarkable wallpaper in bright pink paisley.

Corti, conducting for the first time as SO's new music director, was not exactly raving about the choice. "It is quite a strange piece," he said. "Scottish Opera was asked to play this and said yes.

"It's very, very challenging. It was absolutely not easy," he added, perhaps signalling that SO's new boss may be apt to speak his mind.

Morgan's boxed in his office

FRINGE director Jon Morgan's grand total of shows seen still stands at – two, says his spokesman, adding sniffily: "We don't all get free tickets." Seems he's still boxed in his office. But his choice of Polish mime king Ireneusz Krosny, in Mime for Laughs, as one of his picks (the other was Tina C) gets a big thumbs-up. "If you are feeling completely brain-dead it is a really easy laugh. It's really quite therapeutic," says a spokesman, with comedy producers and award judges "crawling all over it". Krosny, a big TV star at home, says (or gestures): "We feel very distinguished."

Moffat makes it a Davies double

DOCTOR Who fans at the Edinburgh International Television Festival can relax. Steven Moffat, who is taking over from near-legendary Russell T Davies as executive producer and lead writer for Doctor Who, also takes over his slot at the festival on 23 August. Davies dropped out citing the pressure of work.

Meanwhile, all shows of Hutsul's Year, a Ukrainian production, on the Fringe, have been cancelled after the lead actress was knocked down and seriously hurt.

An unsurprising fan for Stalin

THE historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Young Stalin, described at the book festival how he laboriously tracked down all the Soviet dictator's old haunts in Georgia. He was looking for details that might have eluded rival writers such as Anthony Beavor or Robert Service. But he found that just one Stalin fan, perhaps the nuttiest of them all, had been to every site before him: Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi tyrant took Stalin as a role model, and amassed a huge library on him.