Category Archives: opera

November 21, 2009 · 12:12 pm

musical interlude in a cold season

Oh, arf. I posted this as a draft, and scheduled it to publish today, last week – and then forgot all about it! Sorry fellas. Someone posted it up somewhere and I can now no longer even remember who, for which I am also sorry. Signs of strain, methinks. I had thought I’d have a week of peace before starting my new contract, but it was completely eaten by bureaucracy, worry and care, with the light relief of my first trip to the hairdressers in a long moon, so that I at least showed up at the place of employment looking like myself. But rather haggard with the effort of the preparations.

Unfortunately, the crazy Lemon Monkey night on Saturday, Magma launch on Monday night, insane levels of rushing around on Tues, sudden descent into 9-5, rush-hour tube, daily air-conditioning, sweaty-cold-sweaty-cold, teaching on Weds night, O&H proofs and attendant excitement & work, and the cold I’ve been fighting off for the past few weeks have all now rolled together into a ball – resulting in a truly nasty sore throat (the kind where you can’t swallow anything, & feel sick) and relapse into coughing uselessness, and – which you’ll have all noticed – a sad lack of care and attention to the Halls of Baroque. (The real actual Halls of Baroque are much the same right now, let me tell you.) So I’ve spent today – after a ten-hour sleep and a rummage that revealed a glorious cache of Vit Cs, echinacea and Nurofen – lying in bed listening to Melleas et Pelisande on Spotify, reading The Turn of the Screw, planning 2010’s Lemon Monkey readings, prepping Wednesday’s class, and looking for blog posts.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered I already had one! So tomorrow, when I hope my head will be clearer, I will essay upon Zadie Smith’s essay about essays.

Meanwhile, I do think this guy is great. Why not whistle a happy tune? Just not near me, my head is splitting.

(I wouldn’t even mind but I really had to go to the bank this morning…)

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Filed under baroqueness, opera, sleep, useless, winter

Tagged as Life, the cold season, whistling, winter, work

October 3, 2009 · 8:18 pm

cosi fan tutte: the darkest moment

I was saying yesterday that Mozart is the Shakespeare of music. He’s got me out of many’s the scrape over the years; it started with Bergman’s Magic Flute when I was 14, and went through various things till eventually I came to realise it’s Cosí I keep going back to. This isn’t by a very long stretch my favourite Fiordiligi (sorry Miah); but the other videos are either fuzzy, or out of sync, or the Ferrando is terrible, or some combination of those things. Elisabeth Schwartzkopf would have made a great post to follow the P****ski fracas, of course, and she is by far the best Mozart soprano – anyone else who comes close does so only insofar as they sound a bit like her – but there’s no actual footage, only still photos. And anyway we won’t go into that, shall we!

Anyway, this is Miah Persson and Topi Lehtipuu, with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, at Glyndebourne in 2006, and I think it’s exciting. It’s also the moment where the human complexity gets dark. But it’s Mozart: redemption is not far off.

By the way, for any Me & the Dead geeks out there: this is the aria that’s in my poem Cosí fan Tutte. One reason this video is good is that it gives you the beginning of the scene so you can see how shocking the duet is.

(An aside: Schwarzkopf, on being asked about Peter Sellars – the director, not Peter Sellers: “There are names I do not want mentioned in my home. Do not say that name in my presence. I have seen what he has done…” Ha!)

1 Comment

Filed under happy, Mozart, music, opera, the meaning of life

Tagged as cosi fan tutte, mozart opera, opera

August 17, 2009 · 7:25 am

swimming and the great Baroque

Many thanks to my friend Ben Locker for mentioning this in passing.

It may bring things suitably down to earth to tell you that I have just, in preparation for rejoining the gym and Doing Something About It, put on my swimming costume for the first time in two years. Ladies and gentlemen, here is what I look like: round. I’ll just have to hope I don’t run into anyone I even remotely know.

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Filed under baroqueness, Life, opera, useless

Tagged as baroque, barowue music, barowue opera, purcell, swimming

July 13, 2009 · 12:45 am

music by Bizet; lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein

Yes! It’s Carmen Jones. Thrilling. Still radio silence, more or less, but at least now you have pictures – and a song.

the cure

No: not that Cure! (God, remember how weird they looked in the eighties? Now they just look really… eighties.)

No, I’m talking about the cure for all the stupid kids thinking nothing exists outside their little bubble. (See my previous post, on Christopher Hitchens on anti-Semitism.) I’m talkin’ about the turning of the tide, the injection of some common sense, the introduction of real, old-fashioned commonality. Yes: I’m talking about the blond toff moppet himself!

“Arts chiefs should stop patronising young people by targeting them with hip-hop and movies, and instead offer them access to high culture,” says Boris Johnson, the London mayor, in Saturday’s Guardian.

Hear, hear.

“In a report outlining his strategy, his chief of arts and culture strategy, Munira Mirza, argues that too much emphasis has been placed on making events ‘user-friendly’.

She said: ‘Too often, it is presumed that young people will only like art that they can immediately relate to.

‘Working-class students may be steered towards popular culture like hip-hop, new media and film on the basis that they will find older art forms such as opera or ballet irrelevant’. Mirza said this was ‘extremely patronising’.

God I was sick of Ken, that weird flattening-out, all those bloody festivals, everything the same all the time. Mind you, he did create two new bus routes through Hackney, and got more buses on the 277 route.

You should have seen Mlle B’s face when I got to the part about the “arts Oyster cards” for young people, giving them cheap or free access to museums, galleries, even the theatre – eyes like saucers. And the “amnesty” for old musical instruments in people’s cupboards, so they can be given to young people to learn!

“If we achieve anything, I would like to help all people think that it is for them, or that the National Gallery, for example, is for them, that it belongs to you.”

Sorry; I’m giving you the whole thing now! And just get this deliciousness:

“Mirza said: ‘We need to have a view that culture has a value in itself, not just in terms of a social and economic value. I’ve now worked at the Greater London Assembly for six months and I’ve seen the minutes of meetings. And I get the impression there’s been a slight sniffiness about culture, that… you always had to justify it’.

…Mirza said she wanted to learn from Venezuela’s El Sistema, which nurtures more than 100 youth and children’s orchestras.

It was ‘the one thing Ken missed’ in his links to Venezuela, said Mirza.”

That, and the fact that we didn’t like him hobnobbing with Islamist extremists on our dime. Ach! Enough of that. Time for some Robert Smith, while you read your Christopher Hitchens.