Wednesday, November 12th, 2008
Joined up with Rachel and Chas to go and see Aida at the Coliseum, Rachel had got us tickets for Matt’s birthday. We had lovely dress circle seats at the front so we could lean and look out over everything, and the sound was pretty good.
I really enjoyed this opera: it’s storming stomping Verdi and visually utterly over the top, with fantastic costumes and sets designed by Zandra Rhodes. So all the chorus men are wearing golden skirts and blue facepaint, the pharoah and his daughter have great big headpiece, an enormous turquoise elephant makes an appearance at one point, and there are lots of great dance scenes to keep us entertained in the musical interludes.
Nothing is very subtle at al, but I like it that way. Besides, in days of yore, the pyramids were probably polished to a shine, topped with gold cladding, and buildings would have been whitewashed and brightly painted, I can imagine ancient Egypt was probably just as gaudy as Zandra Rhodes, if not more so.
Afterwards, we met up with Chas’s friends Nigel and Trisha and had a late night dinner at Joe Allen’s, the marvellous New York theatre land style late night restaurant. The last time Rachel had been was in the 1970s shortly after it had opened. Rachel’s got an ear infection at the moment, and Trisha is going deaf, so we sat them in the middle and had some amusing translation going on. In contrast to my own strategy which is to nod and smile when I don’t hear something, Trisha has a fun policy of leaping in with whatever she thinks you might have said.
“So I went to Pakistan for a month.”
“Cheese grater?”
“Not exactly, but I did try very spicy food for the first time.”
“You decided to make tomato salad?”
They haven’t yet adopted hearing aids and lip reading so I was rather at an advantage for once!
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Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
Matt and I were perched up in the slips watching La Calisto at the Royal Opera House last night. La Calisto is Francesco Cavalli’s 1651 baroque opera telling the story of Callisto, one of the many nymphs who fell prey to Jupiter’s lust. She’s a chaste follower of Diana, “the empress of all the virgins” I think the opera calls the goddess at one point, but Jupiter cleverly disguises himself as Diana and has hot woman on woman sex with her. The goddess turns Callisto into a bear, and she’s nearly killed by her own son by Jupiter, who averts disaster by turning them both into constellations in the sky.
It’s a great camp comedy opera, a bit like Orpheus in the Underworld, with a quiet baroque sound from the orchestra, which is all harpsichords and lutes, and lots of dancing as well as singing, and completely insane sets and costumes, including people dressed in outlandish chameleon, pegasus and horse costumes, and a rather revolting Pan character with a willy hanging out of his furry legs.
Great fun, lots of lewdness, and with a surprisingly quiet, beautiful and moving ending.
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Saturday, July 19th, 2008
Matt and I went to see The Rake’s Progress at the Opera House last night. It’s a Stravinsky opera, with a rather lovely libretto by WH Auden, about a young man who inherits loads of money and is lured by the devil into drinking, gambling, loose sex and finally Bedlam and madness! The supporting cast were particularly fun, playing lots of different varieties of character rather than coming on all looking exactly the same in identical brown peasant smocks as normally happens with these things. Their finest moments were during the final Bedlam scene when they all adopted different guises of wild haired rocking laughing madness.
We ate Divine white chocolate with strawberries in the interval.
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Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
Matt and I went to the Royal Opera House last night to see Figaro. I think this is the most enjoyable opera I’ve ever watched – Mozart’s music is so easy on the ear and the opera has a constantly twisting comedy plot, with all sorts of cross dressing, people hiding in cupboards, jumping out of windows and making up amusing excuses on the spot.
The gannets were out in force around the Opera House, wheeling around in their pearls during the interval and diving upon plates of crustless sandwiches, perching on the edges of glasses of champagne.
Matt has a theory about the sandwiches: the thing about the upper classes is, if you don’t cut the crusts off, it makes them MAD! Don’t let them near those crusts! Or they’ll really lose it. That’s why you never see crusts in places like the Royal Opera House.
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Thursday, March 6th, 2008
Went to see Salome at the Royal Opera House, perched up in Matt’s favourite spot up in the low priced commanding heights of the upper slips, the glorious expanse of the opera house and orchestra spread out below us.
It was full of blood and nudity, set in what looked like a stained tiled toilet, a rather camp laugh all in all. The surtitles (the opera itself is in German) reminded me of the glory of Oscar Wilde’s sensuous biblical text.
Thy body is white, like the lilies of a field that the mower hath never mowed. Thy
body is white like the snows that lie on the mountains of Judaea, and come down into the valleys. The roses in the garden of the Queen of Arabia are not so white as thy body. Neither the roses of the garden of the Queen of Arabia, the garden of spices of the Queen of Arabia, nor the feet of the dawn when they light on the leaves, nor the breast of the moon when she lies on the breast of the sea…. There is nothing in the world so white as thy body!
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Friday, March 16th, 2007
Matt and I went to see the Thomas Ad’s opera of The Tempest last night. This is quite an amazing adaptation – set on a huge book-like set illuminated in fluorescent nightclub greens and blues, with a raggedy rock and roll Caliban and a human theremin singing the part of Ariel. OK, so she’s not actually a theremin, but the part of Ariel is so stratospherically high in pitch that at times it is hard to believe that a human being is singing it.
The libretto is a simple paraphrasing of the play in modern rhyming English, with just a few sections where some of the original words break through, such as in the magical scene where Ariel sings Full Fathom Five (“Five Fathoms Deep”), her silvery voice dancing over the slow swell of the orchestra as a vivid image of gently breaking bright blue waves are projected onto the stage where Ferdinand lies.
Prospero is very much the stern autocrat, finally outmanoeuvred by the love of Miranda and Ferdinand, releasing Ariel to freedom at the end of the play and leaving the noble but tragic Caliban to be the lonely king of his own island…
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