Just last week The Old Man and me did potter off to The Opera at the
Hall for Cornwall in Truro ... which by the way is due to close this
summer for at least 20 months whilst being redeveloped into a bigger and
better venue ... they do say.
Where will us West Cornwall opera folks get to see an opera in the meantime?
But I do digress. English Touring Operanever fail. They are a great company that do save our opera-going bacon. This time we attended their version of two of Puccini's short operas: the dramatic and moving "Il Tabarro" (The Cloak) set aboard a barge on the Seine ... and the comic "Gianni Schicchi".
Despite viral throats having struck some of the singers, I was duly moved by the tragic Il Tabarro with its minimal, rusty iron, dockside setting.
But Gianni Schicchi did steal the evening. Everything about this ETO production - sets, costumes, singing, movement, acting were as ensemble, sharp, and knockout as can be. Stylised, yes, but it triumphed. The audience laughed out loud - and not just polite titters. Really - if you get a chance to see this version of a comic tale of scoundrel scam vs. rampant greed, you must give it a go. You've got till June!
Muggy late summer weather. Out in the garden, hanging me washing, besieged by swallows swoopin' and chatterin'. Why flying so low? Flying ants, that's why, and the birds was swooping in for a meal of fat queen ants on the wing.
But sometimes this weather gives me a right old headache, or the feeling of the start of one. This happened the other weekend and I took to me workroom, feeling sorry for myself, unable to read and nothing on the radio... until I do have a brain wave and try the internet and the Opera Platform. And I found a piece from the Komische Oper Berlin (same director, Barry Kosky, that brought "The Nose" to Royal Opera House).
Dear friends I spent a pleasant couple of hours, forgetting my headache and lounging around to the streamed pleasure of Moussorgsky's "The Fair at Sorochintsi" Berlin style: farce, love story, devils and curses, drama, pigs heads and stilt-walkers. And great chorus singing. My kind of opera production.
You can stream it from Opera Platform until 21st October 2017 and I suggest you do.
I love Verdi's "Otello" and was not going to miss this week's live broadcast with German tenor Jonas Kaufmann in the lead role. I enjoy both Kaufmann's singing and acting. He has emerged as one of the greats. Although doubtless somebody will disagree.
Verdi's opera is based on Shakespeare's tragedy "Othello" in which a Moorish general (Otello), who serves the Venetians, is maliciously played
upon by his aide (Iago) and led to believe that his new, young, Venetian wife (Desdemona) is unfaithful.
Iago is the driver - his jealousy, envy and
pathological psychology moving him to ruin and warp everything around him. Othello is the subject, the man played upon, whose passions are worked and driven so that all that follows is tragedy. And Desdemona's constant good faith pushes her relentlessly towards her fate. This drama has always summed up tragedy to me - a collision of people's psychology and the turns of fate which explode into a terrible outcome - and we the audience can see it coming.
Verdi's opera has the drama and psychology of the original play together with beautiful music and a vocally challenging lead role in Otello. Domingo has been one of the great Otellos. I never managed to see him singing it live. But this week I got to see the broadcast of Kaufmann's debut in the role. Of course it seals him into it. I was relieved that he was not "blacked up". (School age trauma caused by my class being taken to see the film of Sir Laurence Olivier's awful performance as Shakespeare's Othello, whom I expected to drop on one knee and sing a rousing chorus of "Mammy" by way of encore.)
This production's sets involve partial walls (they appear as towering, dark, wooden walls or screens) which move around to change the space. As such the set has been described as minimalist. But I don't think it is. I can cope with minimalist. If a production and music is wonderful who needs a box of tricks? But here it seems as if movements are made sometimes because they can. For instance why does Desdemona appear to rise up from the ground in one scene? As
does the Herald announcing the arrival of the Venetian delegation? Throughout, performers have been walking on and off as usual, so why are these two entrances singled out as "magical"? No good dramatic reason that I could see.
And there are glaring additions to the design's "minimalism". A huge statue of the Venetian Lion is hauled on by the visiting delegation and in the final scene it re-appears, "broken". OK, I'm not a fan of heavy symbolism if it is not handled well but poke it into a relatively severe set and it's impact is disproportionate.
Never mind, I bicker ... because I can. The singing and acting of all the main roles is wonderful: Kaufmann (Otello); Maria Agresta (his wife Desdemona) and Marco Vratogna (Iago). It's a moving opera and a moving evening which we both did enjoy very much. And as usual The Old Man particularly looked forward to his interval ice cream.
... in which a pair of seniors do experiment with the Internet.
There are new ways to "go to the opera", I decide. We can try watching it via broadband. The Royal Opera House was streaming a live performance of "The Nose" by Shostakovich the other week (my word that do sound funny, put together like that) and The Old Man says: "Let's do it." ... Much to my surprise.
Rural, granite cottages are not very amenable to house-wide wi-fi. So it do mean that we have to watch the opera in the same room as the router... which is Mrs D's workroom (and feels like the coldest room in the house, except for the downstairs bathroom).... And on her laptop. Fortunately the laptop has a pair of additional speakers so we can listen quite nicely thank you... but sitting closely, side by side, peering at a laptop enthroned on an animating table, do make me long for ... opera glasses.
Never you mind, it was an enjoyable and, dare I say it, "exciting" if cramped experience in our sheltered life. We do only "buffer" twice!!
And the opera itself was a theatrical delight full of wonderful performances... though I would have liked it to have explored if possible even more of the plot's surreal absurdities caused by the flight of a civil servant's nose to live a life of high prospects and social success.
In fact our cramped viewing, despite its nature, proved so successful ... we have come up with an achievable technical solution ..... More of that later.
Last week The Old Man put on his best pony tail and braces ... well, OK, it is now my daily duty to do his hair as the mystery of constructing such a style is beyond him. Anyhoo... last week we both donned our Sunday Best and set off for the opera at Glyndebourne ( Berlioz's "Beatrice et Benedict") ... courtesy of a live broadcast at a local cinema, so sadly we did have no champagne on the grass.
Now I wasn't too sure I wanted to see this. Frankly, I was frightened by the lengthiness of his "Les Troyens" and so ... assumed that serious, lengthy works was what Berlioz did. But The Old Man wanted to go, so I gave a Gallic shrug and booked the tickets.
And I am glad that I did. With a story recounting the tricks practiced by friends and family in order to get verbal sparring partners and anti-lovers, Beatrice and Benedict, to recognise their love and to marry (based on Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing"), it turned out - in this production - to be a witty two-acter full of lovely tunes and not frightening at all.
There has been some critical grumbling about the production: a set composed of stacked boxes and monochrome 50's style costume and makeup. But what do you know? I loved it, for sometimes I like a bit of a "stripped-down" production. Done well and consistently, such a thing can focus my attention on the music and performances. And I very much enjoyed Stephanie d'Oustrac with her fine singing and a performance full of suppressed fury as Beatrice. Paul Appleby, as her anti-beau Benedict, is also very good. And I loved the funny (satirical?) musical director Somarone, played with full farce and pointy-toed splendour by Belgian baritone Lionel Lhote.
A surprising and jolly evening. An extra surprise when the screen went blank ten minutes or so before the end of the opera. Apparently this was something to do with satellite time booked.. or not. The tiny audience was duly recompensed. (Yes... down here these things seem to be attended by few... and we is usually all... quite old.)
The Old Man is hard at work washing the old 33s that I do find in Truro ... in the record shop in Pannier Market quite rightly called "Music Nostalgia".
I found some culture from Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert but, setting my feet thumping and my own voice howling along, perhaps even more joyful is the find of Swamp Music Vol 1 - Les Flemmes d'Enfer aka Flames of Hell. Being a collection of Cajun - Zydeco music from Louisiana released on a German label around 1989.
You can get a flavour with this video over on YouTube.
The Old Man and me sat ourselves down in our local cinema last week for the Royal Opera House broadcast of its new production of Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor".
I'm quite happy to see new interpretations of operas and this production has certainly caused controversy and do give a melodramatic deal of blood and savagery albeit perhaps not in the form anticipated. Director Katie Mitchell relocates it from Donizetti's Scotland of the 1700s to the mid-1800s by way of bringing the action closer to Donizetti's own era (she says in an interview on the ROH site) and
because she views Lucia not as a young "victim" but as a mature, cultured woman... and the mid-1800s was a period filled with "brilliant [unmarried]
women artists".
OK. But perhaps "pax" to earlier feminists such as Mary Wollstonecroft(1757-1797). Not to forget Wollstonecroft's daughter, Mary Shelley, who happened to beat the boys (Byron and husband Percy) at late-night horror stories by creating Frankenstein in 1816 and succeeded in publishing it, albeit anonymously, the year before Sir Walter Scott's own publication of his original "Bride of Lammermoor".
Mitchell's production has a split stage to enable a continuous line of action for Lucia. We see her dressing, reading letters, waking up in the morning, etc, regardless of whether she is part of the musical scenario, which takes place on the other half of the stage. Cinema-goers watching the live broadcast version with its close-ups and
different points of view may not have been exposed to the full
effect of this device. I do wonder if it
proved distracting for the theatre audience, certainly in the case of the silent masque murder-scene which traditionally takes place off-stage. And what also troubled me about this scene was that it seemed to depart so much from the traditional view of poor innocent Lucia that I couldn't really make it lie
down with the notion that she then proceeds to go mad...
tout suite. Though I did enjoy the addition of Donizetti's originally scored glass harp accompaniment to Lucia's hallucinatory insanity. Certainly Diana Damrau as Lucia earns her keep and sings pretty lovely as well and we were both impressed by the acting and singing of Charles Castronova as Edgardo.
I enjoyed my night out at the opera thoroughly. In retrospect the production is device-heavy and overthought in its details... which don't always hang together. (But then Donizetti's own scenario doesn't leave much room to "explain" the sudden descent of madness onto poor Lucia's head). But I enjoyed the performancesand if the director enabled some of these, then so be it. Ultimately, me and The Old Man were still arguing and discussing the whole thing
a couple of days later which many would say was a mark of a good, meaty
show. Or is it? Dunno ... but I'm glad I went.
No... I don't mean cutlery when I write "women with knives"... but a long lost phrase in my head to do with plots in opera. The English Touring Opera production of "Iphigenie en Tauride" provides "women with knives" in spades ... and axes... with its opening scene of human sacrifice on the shores of Tauride. The orchestra plays an overture whilst ladies dressed in impressive butcher aprons of bloodied white subdue their struggling but unseen captive and wield knives and axes, draining blood into bowls and through grills and chopping up various bits (again unseen but inferred) and thrusting them into sacks. Members of the Truro audience were heard complaining about the gore in the ice cream queue during the interval. But... naturally... I thought they did it rather well.
I think if I had any complaints about the violence it would be the inaccuracy of the torture of Orestes's friend Pylades, whose suffering as mimed by his tormentors would have deprived him of enough body parts to prevent his participation in the rest of the opera. In the spirit of crime review I must say... "If you are gonna show violence... make it relevant. You went a little over the top there, boys." And in the main the violence of this production is relevant I think. Gluck based his opera on the play by Euripedes in which the saved sacrificial victim, Iphigenie, is made a priestess by her saviour Diana and as such doomed to sacrifice any foreigner who steps on to the shores of the tyrant king Thoas. What follows is a catalogue of family disaster, culminating in Iphigenie finding herself about to sacrifice her own brother, Orestes. Labelled a tragedy and a melodrama, the company's own programme notes point to the Euripedes work as an anti-war drama. And my word, seen from that point of view it do fit in with the spirit and geography of the times.
I can't praise English Touring Opera highly enough. This is the third year we have managed to see one of their productions. Their sets and designs are necessarily stripped down but work well given that, with us, they manage just two consecutive night in the theatre with a different performance each evening. Well that's a triumph of packing if nothing else. But above all the performances are smooth, the productions brave and the singing and orchestral work are good. I have to single out Catherine Carby as Iphigenie in this one: warm and singing beautifully. If you live far from metropolitan delights and miss an evening at the opera... you must look out for ETO.
I just wish we got a sample from their autumn tour as well ... but we never do.
It's time for me to creep out of my wintry shell and kick a best foot forward into the night. I've booked tickets for the opera, the opera what visits Truro's Hall for Cornwall that is. So thank heavens for the English Touring Opera and its annual visit to the HFC. Two nights only, a different production each night, bless them.
Seats are popular for their Mozart's "Don Giovanni" on March 15th but we have opted for the considerably less well known "Iphigenie En Tauride" by Gluck... on the basis we don't know it and we might never get the chance to see it again. A risky policy this one... but when the walking frame looms... why not give it a whirl. So we are off in a few weeks time to sample the fleshpots of Truro. Erm...
I'd have liked to share a sample video with you but there isn't one. So let me just quote the blurb/plot: "Vampire-like villains and human sacrifice form a bloodthirsty backdrop to this timeless tale from Greek myth. A brother and sister are thrown together at the end of the Trojan War, and find their path to redemption. One of the most refined and perfect of operas, from a composer who influenced future generations from Mozart to Wagner..." Oh la-di-da says I. Better put my best frock on.
Another of my musical heroes has packed his guitar and left the stage.
I have listened to the one and only West Coast man Dan Hicks for some decades... my first purchase being a cassette of his 1972 album "Striking It Rich". Like many others I listened to the track "I scare myself" until my head whirled. I don't know about you but I frequently did scare myself also. The Old Man became a convert and, cos that's what he does, he set about buying up all the Dan Hicks vinyl he could find. And when Hicks started recording again as Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks, signing with Surfdog Records and releasing "Beatin' the Heat" in 1998... The Old man scooped up a couple of CDs also.
Actually... The Old Man's habit of buying up everything he can find of a favourite (a man's thing perhaps) has in the past annoyed me to the point of putting me off my own faves cos he do play everything day and night until I do scream and leave the room. Is he obsessive? Well, the thought do never cross my mind, officer. But the splendid consequence, this time, is that we have quite a few recordings of the man himself - Dan Hicks and his scat-singing, swing-playing, off-the-wall Hot Licking ensemble.
I'm embedding this YouTube video ... which was a trailer for Dan Hicks' 2009 album "Tangled Tales" .. cos to me it serves as a good tribute to the man and his music as well.
We are taking advantage of the live broadcast from Covent Garden again... via our local cinema in Penzance. This time it is The Old Man who makes an agonisingly slow decision to have a go at "Cav & Pag" - more properly known as the pairing of two short operas: "Cavalleria Rusticana" by Mascagni and Leoncavallo's "Pagliacci".
In truth I don't know anything about the "Cav" bit and can only think of clips of numerous well-known tenors taking turns to be tragic in pierrot clown suits for the "Pag" offering. So... as with all things so familiar as to be parodied on a regular basis ... I am a bit reluctant to try them out. But a new production directed by Damiano Michieletto and a night away from the Telly means I say yes and off we will go. I tell you these live broadcasts be a lifesaver for those of us who fancy some big opera but live in ruralia far from the big theatres.
PS. I'd like to have found you a trailer but to be honest the Opera House trailer be like a short advert clip promoting tours of Italy. Oh my word... just thought... perhaps that was the intention? I do keep getting caught out by the possibilities of irony....
Last night I went to Manderley... and did thoroughly enjoy Emma Rice's production of "Rebecca" at the Hall for Cornwall. The Kneehigh approach, working well, makes for a wonderful ensemble piece - and so it was. I admit that you might be lost if you have never read the book or seen the classic 1940 Olivier/Joan Fontaine film of same name. With this dramatic but quite rollicking production there is music, lights, flashes, booms, spirited dancing (Aah! The wonderful Katy Owen as houseboy Robert... I did love her... as did the whole audience, I think.) and a puppet dog. No. I said "puppet" not "puppy". I was not so sure about Emma Rice's final vision of the post-traumatic heroine, the ever nameless second Mrs De Winter, though. The set - an already partially ruined Manderley which embraces both boat and cove - worked well. The Old Man do ask why it was part-ruined already. And I was a bit puzzled... but decided to meself that in some ways the book/work is a recounting of memories... so a ruin is OK. Lord knows what the set designer thought... but contemplating what one has seen is about pondering what is/was communicated as much as having a good time. And I did have a good time. It be all good stuff. Give it a go if you can. It's still touring the country until Dec 5th.
So what's next for us furious gadabouts (more furious than gadding) confine to West Cornwall? Ah! That be a touch of the live relay opera again at our local cinema. Soon... early October... "Marriage of Figaro" from the Royal Opera House. Jolly good!
Today we have walked about on Long Rock beach... which is full of activity. People jog, run and cycle along the path and the air above the waves be full of surfing kites and waves be covered in kite-surfers and wind-surfers. The tide is out, the sand is firm and so above all the place is full of dogs... running, ball-catching, meeting each other, trotting, jumping the waves... it looks like Lowry on sea out there.
So of course I ogle dogs. Part of me is a frustrated dog owner but the other part is the irresponsible flibbertigibbet that can fantasize about owning one... without taking the little critter for a walk or in any way looking after it. My latest passion has been a French Bull dog... and these must be "the thing" cos I saw two more on the beach today.
But it is all academic cos The Old Man be not keen. And the reason is, I do believe, that he be a dog himself. All the signs are there. The rushing to the door when someone knocks... followed by frequent growling and snapping if it is a stranger... and possibly over enthusiastic greeting if it be friend. Frequent requests for walks and an overwhelming interest in food do complete the picture... and the rushing out into the garden when he do spot a cat. So you see... there can be no competition indoors.
We come home. I bake a cake. And we indulge in an Incredible String Band fest.
Old curmudgeons... we try to make life sweeter.
And another musical outing be coming up. The September chamber music concerts from the International Musicians Seminar.
Got to book some tickets soon. The concerts take place 11th to 27th September and are pretty local to us. No way of knowing yet what they will be playing but we look forward.
A dark look at that little bluebird.
From Belleville Rendezvous's Sylvain Chomet for Belgian rapper/songwriter Stromae.
(I lurve Belleville Rendezvous aka The Triplets of Belleville). Edit: Have just discovered that Cornwall based animation company Spider Eye also had a hand in this. Brilliant.)
Oh. Wow. I enjoyed that "Mahagonny" at our local cinema. The rural me can now sample opera on a scale larger than a dvd/telly combo. Great.
Live broadcast via cinema screen is a hybrid beast of an experience. We're not sitting in our seats peering at a stage with a single viewpoint. Here we get edited and interposed shots... like a film.... close-ups, long shots, cuts. It is all very jolly. And we do get interviews and such during the Opera House interval.
To add to the surreal quality of last night's relay broadcast.... Covent Garden had been hit by the electrical fire in Holborn. Fortunately the stage and auditorium were powered from another source.... so we got our show... but the punters at The Garden were in darkness elsewhere in the theatre, I believe. Bottles of water their only interval drinks. No nice bar snacks. In Penzance, popcorn and ice-cream be still in plentiful supply.
The production (and I had been a little uncertain before seeing it) is successful. Brilliant video projection on a great cargo-container set. (For do we not live in a Mahagonnesque world with people smuggled in cargo containers, slaving in cargo containers and living in cargo containers?) And wonderful performances. The great Willard White. Kurt Streit who as Jimmy McIntyre does a powerful job (both voice and acting) in a role which becomes very grueling by the end. And Christine Rice is no slouch in the theatricals either. The Old Man do say... she needs to match Streit's Jimmy McIntyre punch for punch.... and she does. I also greatly like Peter Hoare's performance as chain-smoking, money-man, Fatty. The production is much more powerful than my listening of the radio broadcast led me to believe. A dark, stark, ironic piece anyway, this version emphasises its timely link to a world where money and consumption are prerequisite values.... and ... an Easter equation for Jimmy's trial and martyrdom. I just don't think that poor Jimmy will be making a re-appearing act soon.
So. Opera at the local picture-house has been sampled and considered a success in this household. Trouble is.... The Old Man have noticed that Rossini's "Guillaume Tell" will be on offer as well. It's four hours long!
And me, I am not a Rossini fan. I had a frightening encounter with "Comte Ory" once that led me to extreme self-brutalising in order to stave off coma. And I had to ditch The Old Man in the interval and run off home...... Oh surely he cannot be serious.
Well... Not tonight, you understand. That would be too much.... For us to go out on a Saturday night.
But our "Scottish friends" (do sound like that play... The Scottish Play... don't it) say that they have swanned off to the opera via their local cinema and it was an all right thing. So we are trying it too and I've got tickets for a live broadcast of Weill and Brecht's"The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny" at one of our local cinemas. If this works... we may be on the town all the time!
A love of Kurt Weill music be one of our early bonds... The Old Man and me. I made an impression on The Old Man, decades ago, with a quick Surabaya Johnny in the foyer of a concert hall....but I'm too old for that kind of thing these days. And of course we have seen "Mahagonny" before. And we did listen to the Covent Garden production recently on the radio. But this will be a chance to see the production. I am quite excited. Possibly over-excited. We do now have a quiet life, you know.
PS. The Old Man Speaks.
This morning I be a bit grumpy over breakfast while The Old Man do chunter on. Finally I sigh and do say: "Oh...barble barble barble... that's all you do!"
Indignantly he do say: "I have been quiet all night!"
For one night only as they say... but I have my tickets in my sticky little hand for we rarely get a chance to nip out for an opera. So - at Truro's Hall For Cornwall... which sadly be not a theatre but.... a Hall really. The English Touring Opera and Donizetti's The Wild Man of the West Indies - now rarely performed - for whichever reason we shall soon find out.
Mar 18th. 7.30pm.
And Tuesday 17th is their production of Puccini's "La Boheme". But we thought we'd take a chance on something we have never seen before. Cos we are adventurous like that.
Adventurous... but nowhere to go! And we did enjoy the ETO's production of "Paul Bunyan" last year, so I'm up for this one too.
I do love my vinyl playing set-up now that it is in place. The only change I have made, after a few playing attempts, is to order up a replacement mat. The deck comes with a thin felt mat which seems to increase static. Fluff and stuff fly to the record surface. And like some escalating slapstick scene .... when I lift up the record to change it, the mat sticks and tries to come along for the ride. As I try to sort that out... the rubber band what keeps the whole thing turning falls off. And we all do know what a trial it is when your rubber band falls off.
My solution is to buy a cork mat, a "Cork It" in fact. Bliss. No more fluff and static... and it do sound better also I think.
So I catch up on LPs I haven't played for decades.....
....and my "new" treat.... which is "Rock Bottom" by Robert Wyatt...alayered dreamy thing, full of some kind of jazz and including an appearance from my favourite and late Scottish poet, Ivor Cutler.
So it's not just The Old Man that is crazy for that black vinyl. It's me now. And I do mean the stuff that's flat and round and revolves at 33 rpm.
Cos we do go into Falmouth and the lovely Jam Records and I really just want to get downstairs where the records live... I just can't concentrate on the CD racks no more.
And I do go down stairs and stagger back with not one but two albums. Jazz... jazz... jazz. Thelonious Monk is my man these days.... and Monk's Dream has been remastered and re-released on 180gm vinyl.
And I also go out on a limb with a very early The Jazz Epistles with Hugh Masekela - "Verse 1", similarly re-released on vinyl. Indeed this is so early that The Old Man do pull a face and make cutting remarks.
But I don't care.
