July 2, 2009

Norma

 

Made it.IMG_0012 

And it was pretty fabulous. 

* * *

I woke up this morning at 8 am because the phone was ringing.

 My alarm was set for 8:30. 

The person on the other end of the phone was a robot.  From my credit card company.   Their fraud division is having kittens (again) over my peculiar card usage.  I suppose I do have peculiar card usage–I pay it off the end of every month, which is peculiar enough, so anything I do flags my account.  Not to mention the fact that I’ve told them at least four gazillion times that I am not going to have an intimate conversation with a robot.  This thing rings me up, says it’s from my credit card company, and wants my secret password?  Go boil your hard drive. 

The day was getting off to a great start. 

Hellhounds and I went for another hot slow dawdle.  When we got back and I went to turn on my hideously expensive, less than five years old Bang & Olufsen, which has already had one major breakdown, I discovered that its automatic doors were stuck open and it was making a pathetic cheeping noise, like a chick caught in a fence.  

I rang Bang and Olufsen.  They said their engineer would ring me. 

At about this point Computer Man* showed up, bearing the new plug-in-the-wall internet connection, so I can waste time on the web all over the house.   I’ve had the plug-in gizmo now long enough to be utterly disgustingly dependent on it . . . I have one both here and at the mews . . . which is why this one died thirty-six hours after the guarantee ran out and I’m sure the other one, which is a few months younger, is counting the days.  I was totally not ready for what it cost.  Gods, saints and devils, I could buy Grange Opera and install it at Third House for the money.  Nearly.  Oh well, said Computer Man, delicately accepting my cheque.  At least the new ones don’t catch fire. 

What?   

Meanwhile it was spontaneous combustion temperature outdoors.  As I was waving Computer Man off, my eye was caught by the little old clock that sits on the cabinet by the front door, which was saying nine o’clock instead of noon.  I hate it when I let clocks run down.  It makes me feel like a Bad Person.  So I picked it up to wind it and discovered it didn’t need winding:  it had stopped.  I looked at the ceiling, on the other side of which stands my Bang & Olufsen.**  I looked back at the clock.  I rang the clock shop.  I had paid almost half a B&O’s worth to get this clock running again:  It had been sitting on a shelf at the old house for the last 200 years or so and I like it:  it’s sort of good fake chinoiserie.  It’s one of the things that made the final cut when we left the old house, but I’m never satisfied, I wanted it to run.  The local fancy clock shop said oh yes, well worth repairing . . . and then told me what it would cost.***  When you pay enough to buy a new car† to get a clock running you kind of expect it to stay running.  Oh dear, said the clock shop today.  Bring it in. 

At this point I was thinking, I don’t dare go to the opera:  a chandelier will fall on me and I will die of perforations.  And the hellhounds will never eat again because no one can exert moral force†† the way I can. 

I actually spent lunch not working on PEGASUS†††  but cravenly looking up reviews of Norma at the Grange Opera  . . . and discovered, okay, if I was walking and unperforated and the heat hadn’t killed me yet either–have I mentioned that I get spectacularly heat sick too?  It’s not just the hellhounds–I had to go.  So I put on the same dress I wore to Glyndebourne in a heat wave last year . . . and a pair of Birkenstock sandals, because I was not going to cope with walking across a field in lady shoes, and I don’t have a footman.‡   They’re really very nice sandals, with a thin white leather strap, and no one could possibly object.‡‡ 

It was so hot I nearly had to hire a porter to carry me.  And the Grange is trying pretty hard to be another Glyndebourne, which, for those of us who are allergic to the Very Wealthy‡‡‡, is a little trying.  But the Very Wealthy are always good for frock-watching. 

And then the opera.  In the first place I’d forgotten it was another front-row seat.  I could get used to the front row.§  It’s a small theatre and a small stage–and what I want to call a tiny orchestra, although there are about 40 of them, so it’s not all that tiny–and you really are right there.  I had some trouble with the production–when do I ever not have trouble with the production–it’s trying to be modern and relevant and I don’t think grand opera really does modern and relevant.  I think more and more indeed that the attempt to make opera ‘relevant’ as a way of dragging in more punters is inclined to backfire:  much better to say opera is the best fantasy going, and come along for the melodrama and the swash.§§  

But the reviewers who say that Claire Rutter is a Norma for the ages . . . yes.  She’s divine.  Not only does she have a heart-stopping voice–she made me cry twice, and while I’m an easy crier generally I’m a bit resistant to deliberately over the top effect-pulling singing–but she projects a real human warmth and emotional truth despite some astonishingly grisly surtitle translations.  And this Adalgisa, whom I have irresistably been calling Analgesic for thirty-odd years, manages to hold her own against Norma, despite some Very Weird Acting Tics, particularly of turning the corners of her mouth down like a cartoon clown or a four year old about to have a tantrum, and jutting her chin like she’s trying to be the new Joan Sutherland, which is not really the Sutherland characteristic you want to be remembered for.  But their second act duet, the one I call One of the Best Things Opera Has Ever Produced, was glorious.   And I was pleasantly surprised in the Pollione:  it’s a completely thankless role and there’s basically no frelling way to make the jerk sympathetic.  And this fellow isn’t one of your rivetingly subtle actors either:  he’s the classic twitch-and-stagger-to-show-emotion school.  But in the final act when it’s all over and it’s only a question of how he’s going to get his, he develops some real authority:  you at least half believe that the character is accepting his death as his redemption. 

 And it’s true that I unsettle easily–there are down sides to having an extremely well developed imagination–but watching Norma and Pollione’s pyre being built while they sing their last is creepy.  And at the very end they climb up it, and she puts her head on his shoulder and he puts his arms around her (and anyone who has read anything about being burned to death is thinking :  smoke inhalation:  pray for smoke inhalation) and these guys come on stage with real frelling torches lit with real frelling fire and start waving them around in a way too practical manner under the pyre . . . and then suddenly the whole front of the stage goes up in flame.  Briefly.  But those of us in the front row may have jolted backward just a little.IMG_0023

 I still haven’t heard from the Bang & Olufsen engineer.  And the hellhounds, of course, did not eat for the dog minder.

 And it got to 95°F in my garden this afternoon. 

* * *

 * We have kissed and made up about yesterday.  I think. 

** Which is no longer making a funny noise because I pulled its plug.  It’s still stuck open though. 

*** You are saying, well they would say it was worth mending.  I think they were probably telling the truth:  they have a reputation to keep up.  They’re the sort of place that when you go in there in your jeans and All Stars you can feel them being liberal and tolerant about it.

† Okay, a small car 

††  Colloquially known as bullying 

††† Bad me!  Very bad me! 

‡ Although it turns out the Grange has porters, for those of you who take your picnicking really seriously.  I imagine I could hire one to carry my shoes . . . but I didn’t. 

‡‡ Maybe I’ll wear them to Buckingham Palace. 

‡‡‡ I tried to take a picture of Wolfgang and 400 BMWs, 80 Mercedes, the odd Rolls and a large double handful of glittering tank-sized SUVs, but it didn’t come out.  The thing I found especially funny is that as you walk along the unpaved road at the edge of the field, with the car park on one side and the house on the other, there are a couple of short rows of cars on the house side of the car park field, and these are all normal cars, like Wolfgang, some of them old and beat up–like Wolfgang.  All was explained when I saw the little sign that said ‘cast and orchestra parking’.  

§ And the crick in my neck from trying to read the surtitles.  Norma is not one of the operas I know by heart, and I can use a little prompting on where we are in the plot. 

§§ I may talk some more about this tomorrow.  But just for example:  Norma has two sons by her faithless lover, and she considers killing them to save them being slaves when they’re discovered.  In the first place, how has she managed to keep them secret for oh, eight years or so?  Not to mention the two pregnancies that produced them?  And second, in a trying-to-be-realistic setting I become a little testy at the idea that kids aren’t going to be a little freaked out by waking up to find Mum holding a knife at their throats and then pick up their teddy bears and go along with it when instead of killing them she gives them to their dad’s new girlfriend.

July 2, 2009 | Filed Under music, wow 

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