Pan-galactic finals
Grandson did not win. Grandson came fourth in the vocal category. I wouldn’t have expected him to have stage nerves—he’s been in amateur and semi-professional gigs pretty much since he was old enough to toddle on by himself, and was eye-catching enough at one of the latter to have had the offer of a scholarship at one of the big flashy London performing-arts schools but decided for himself he didn’t want to be that single minded and that far away from home yet—but my guess is that there were some nerves in attendance. He’s a charismatic performer, and that was a little muted today.*
But it was a much more interesting show generally than either Peter or I was expecting, I think. The first thing that happened was a reprieve. The order of performance is done by lot, and his mum said that he always draws early, so we were going to have to be there for the first shot over the adjudicators’ bows. And then last thing last night, news—he was going to be in the second half, after the break. So we could drift in in an idle and well-rested manner at about 11 . . .
Except we didn’t. We didn’t leave that much later after all, had an easy soar down there** and only missed the first performer.*** And . . . what it was was a free concert with great seats. I’m not sure what I was expecting—these are the national finals after all, and the Pan-galactics are no slouch. But. Wow.
In the absence of pianists† I was far more interested in the singers, not only because we had our hero to cheer for (who was, just by the way, the only boy). But (as I emailed Nadia, because I had to talk to somebody who would understand) while before Blondel and Nadia I would have been able to pick out the bits these young singers haven’t quite nailed yet†† I wouldn’t have been so aware of how they were trying to do what they were doing—and of some of the pitfalls on the way they have successfully negotiated. I don’t think anyone who cares deeply about music and listens intensely is ever unaware of what a lot of work doing it well is, but there is definitely a difference in kind of your appreciation if you’re having a small stumbling whack at it yourself.
There were a few repertoire choices that I thought were a bit ill advised, but the slightly unsatisfactory deliveries may also have been nerves rather than that the singer was overfaced by her material. And there were a few real jaw-droppers. The girl who won looks about twelve. She came quietly out and announced her pieces with perfect self-possession but no particular panache . . . and then started to sing. Big major yeeeeep.††† Golly she was good. She was one of the first, and was instantly one to beat. And then as it happens the last song by the last performer was the other real jaw-dropper, Cherubino from the Marriage of Figaro raving about love. She sang it with exactly the right wildness for the adolescent male‡, but it was also the most fully realised complete performance: an ordinary teenage girl in a nice party dress suddenly transformed into a lust-maddened teenage boy. It was extraordinary. She came second. The girl who came first was probably the more polished performance but this last babe had passion.‡‡
And I got a lot of knitting done. I really am going to have a pair of leg warmers by next autumn.‡‡‡ Possibly conceivably just-believably even two pairs.§
* * *
* I admit I’ve never heard him in public before. But he knocks the back wall of the kitchen out when he sings here. His voice has got amazing over the last few years. I remember him as starting out a perfectly nice light tenor and he says he’s still a tenor but I’d call him a baritone. He’s got the baritone boooom at the bottom of his range, although he says it’s the top end that’s stretching. Well, I bet the bottom end will stretch too. Or maybe he’s just going to grow up to be one of the heldentenors of our time. Unfortunately he’s not the least interested in opera and unless he has a voice teacher at some point who wakes him up to the glories of the operatic repertoire I think we’ll lose him to the West End. Feh.
** My gods. The Jaguar. Yeep. I don’t ride in fancy cars all that often and I forget. The sensation of gliding rather than sitting in something with mere wheels. The way you are forced back into the leather upholstery if your driver decides to pass some mere vehicle.
Caligula
What sort of Jag was it?
I haven’t the faintest idea and they didn’t know. (It originally belonged to Saxon’s dad.) I did ask.^ Georgiana said that it’s a Sovereign, and I can tell you that it’s the xj type, but in the great hierarchy of Jags I haven’t the slightest.^^ I’d be surprised if it was more than about ten years old, but then Jags age well. But speaking of charisma. . . .
^ I said someone on the blog wanted to know. Most of the members of the immediate clan are aware of my curious nighttime activity.
^^ Slatey blue-grey with creamy leather insides. You want to have brushed hair and clean fingernails when you sit in it. Hellhounds need not apply.
*** Okay, here’s an oddity that perhaps some music teacher out there can explain. There was one cello and one violoncelle—I don’t even know what a violoncelle^ is and it’s the one person we missed—and everything else you blew into, and all but one were winds. The one blowing-into that wasn’t, was a euphonium, which I wouldn’t have been able to describe to you either, but I can tell you now it’s a bit like a big rectangular French horn and has similar big fat scary notes and I have no idea how he managed to get so many of them out of the thing so accurately. The rest were three flutes, a clarinet and a very snazzy recorder. No violinists? No pianists?
^ And the only on line definitions I can find are in French. Is it the French word for cello? There has to be some reason to call it a violoncelle rather than a cello?
† !!!!!!!!!!!!!
†† Someone sang Dove Sei. Snork. But the irony about her performance was that she didn’t take advantage of her opportunities to hit that note and hold the freller till your audience begs for mercy. You come in on a fermata: Doooooooooooooove sei, and there’s another one in the ‘vieni’ before your top G, which is as hair-raising as it gets in this innocent-seeming little aria^, but that little phrase is set up for you to go for it. Nadia, whose mission in my life is to loosen me up, has even said go for it, and that (if I need a light whip of vengeance to get my blood circulating) here is my opportunity to make Oisin follow me, because this is the Singer’s Big Moment. You even repeat the vieni-with-top-G phrase on the second go-through—and then run down the last few bars to the end. I can’t do it, but I do grasp that it’s rife with opportunity. And this little girl with the lovely sweet voice and the appealing manner went straight through all her hot chances without anything remotely resembling a fermata. This may, of course, have been her stage nerves, but I’d’ve said the accompanist was expecting it.
Speaking of the accompanist(s): most of the performers brought their own.^^ There was one fellow who appeared several times whom I had little trouble identifying as the one laid on locally, and I wasn’t too impressed. Till the introducer mentioned that he had in fact stepped in with about forty-eight hours’ warning when the fellow they had booked went down ill. Yowzah. Suddenly he’s a hero too.
^ Nadia keeps telling me it’s not that difficult a piece and I’m just reacting to the fact that it’s from an OPERA.
^^ Our hero’s accompanist is lovely.
††† She sang an aria from Cosi fan tutte, where Despina is chirpily and dancingly telling her mistresses (she’s their maid) how to catch a bloke, and then this moooooournful legaaaaaaato lied by Brahms.
‡ Yes. It’s a trouser role for a mezzo.
‡‡ Other standouts for me included one of those Italian arias from the notorious soprano student’s ARIE book that I sing: Se Tu M’ami. She did it a lot better. Surprise. Not. And ‘Batti batti’ from Don Giovanni was also charmingly and flirtatiously done—which is the only way to bring it off. Mozart is so frelling tuneful you can forget what complex personalities his characters are.
‡‡‡ Barring rogue yarn-bomber raids where masked individuals steal your projects to wrap around lampposts and bollards.
§ Well I need an assortment of COLOURS, don’t I?
Roses
Milk Wine
I work at the Antique Rose Emporium in San Antonio, and Madame Alfred is one of my absolutely favorite roses. (: If people are looking for a fragrant climber, I always lead them to her, as long as they have the room. I put her on my parents’ front fence, and she blooms a treat.
The Antique Rose Emporium! Squeeeeee!
https://www.antiqueroseemporium.com/
The very last year I was in Maine, I . . . planted stuff. In a clearly prescient sort of way. Gardening had never really occurred to me, except as something that other people did.* I’ve said this (often) before: gardening in Maine, while other people certainly did do it, looked way too much like hard work. Gardening in Maine is the Xena Warrior Princess end, with evil gods and zombie unicorns and person-swallowing landscape and so on and I’m much more the Gabrielle before she started going to the gym end. If there are any zombie unicorns around I am definitely looking for somewhere to hide.
But I had a silly fit, and, that last summer, went around digging holes and putting things in them. Including three roses. Which actually, you know, grew, and produced flowers—I mean, roses, yipe. I have no idea where this might ultimately have led: my little lilac-enshrouded house was heavily shaded by not only the two ginormous lilac hedges but several boulders as tall as the house in the back, and a huge, gorgeous old maple tree in the front. I never was going to have a lot of opportunity to grow roses there—which is just as well, because the joke is that roses are annuals in Maine, and I’m pretty sure my three didn’t survive their first winter. But I might have learnt about the roses that will survive serious winter, and how to help them do it.
Instead I fell in love with an Englishman and moved to England and his two-acre garden where he spent hours every day eeeeeeeeep.** And after I got my breath back I started putting roses in left, right and centre, and learning the hard way about growing the beggars. To do this rigorously*** involved ordering catalogues—this was before the web began infiltrating us hoi polloi: I didn’t have a computer yet† let alone an internet connection—from every rose seller I could get the address of. This included several in the States. I don’t remember if The Antique Rose Emporium’s was one of the ones I had to draft in an enabling American friend to lay my hands on—quite reasonably a lot of plant sellers won’t send catalogues overseas when they won’t ship their plants overseas—but the whole ‘rose rustlers’ thing was very attractive††, and little old country cemeteries in England sometimes have drifts of ancient roses with great gnarly stems as big around as trees.
The Antique Rose Emporium is pretty much the only American rose nursery I pay attention to any more. If I want an American perspective on a rose, I look it up there first. And if I didn’t already have Mme Alfred, on the say-so of Emporium personnel, I’d be looking her up for details of her English performance record.
I originally bought her, back at the old house, by accident. Well, I was very young in terms of rose-growing, and Peter was no help, him and his frelling herbaceous borders.††† I think I’d actually ordered something else, and this thing arrived with a label saying ‘Mme Alfred Carriere’ and I thought, oh, fie, and heeled her in in a blank-ish spot, because I didn’t know what to do with her and I had a lot of other roses to plant, and I’d look her up and figure out what to do with her later. Only I never quite got around to it. And she rioted, as she will do, and took over a large swatch of that end of what had been the vegetable garden before my first rose-beds went in. I probably somewhere have photos of her pouncing over the trellis that several more modest climbers were dutifully scaling from the other side, and engaging Dortmund in mortal combat. Dortmund was another of my errors—I made a lot of errors—a single, cherry-red rose, white at the base of the petals, and not at all my sort of thing, except that I loved her. As I loved Mme Alfred. And her big double creamy flowers looked fabulous tumbling among Dortmund’s dazzling single red.
I totally had to have Mme Alfred even in my handkerchief-sized garden at the cottage.††† I put her in my first year there and her tallest stems started reaching above my neighbour’s two-storey-plus-attic roof a couple of years ago—and since I’m looking out my first-floor‡‡ office window, this is not a trick of perspective.‡‡‡ When she’s in flower I get gusts of her perfume through my office window. Yes. She’s one of the best.
Oh . . . and guess what I was doing today? Ordering roses. Remember I said I needed another climber? Just one climber . . . ?
* * *
* When I shared a house on Staten Island for a while, one of my housemates was a zealous, not to say fanatical, gardener. That back yard makes my tiny garden at the cottage look large in comparison but by golly it was INTENSIVELY PLANTED. It was impressive but somewhat intimidating—you could barely squeeze out the back door without being attacked by a radish.^ I felt I wouldn’t have the authority to boss so much plant life around and I was sure it knew it. I felt no impulse to try for myself.^^ And mostly I used the front door.
^ Or a banana-sized slug. Ewwww.
^^ Being assaulted by the occasional house plant was enough. I’ve had house plants catapulting off window sills most of my life.
** Speaking of zealous.
*** Is there another way? says the woman who is now waiting for her book on Japanese particles to arrive.
† shock horror
†† Even if the Emporium’s ‘our story’ about Mermaid as a rose that will withstand ‘droughts and blue northerns’ and thrive in the wilderness makes me feel like I’m living on another planet. I lose Mermaid. Repeatedly. She’s one of the crankiest madams ever to grace these mostly verdant shores. And I’m not the only one who thinks so: she has a bit of a rep around here. And then there are her thorns: which are long, curved and prehensile, the better to make you bleed. She’s very beautiful though. So we all keep frelling buying her when she conks out on us again.
††† The English cottage garden style has roses. Peter did have roses. He just didn’t have enough.
‡ I don’t have Dortmund now: she’s one of these great stiff angular things, about eight foot square.^ I do keep thinking about putting her in at Third House, but Third House’s garden is still small, it’s just bigger than the cottage’s.
^ She also has almost no scent. And you have to draw some lines somewhere. Sigh.
‡‡ Second floor in American English
‡‡‡ Although as I’ve said elsewhere, it’s surprising how many rather too large roses you can wedge into a rather too small garden if you’re stubborn enough. And don’t mind the sight of your own blood too much.
Sublime and Ridiculous
ERNANI may be the dumbest opera ever to approach becoming standard repertoire. The fact that it doesn’t approach it any closer, despite a good deal of ravishing Verdi music, is probably because it is so dumb. Gods, heavens, demons, miscellaneous spirits, and anything else floating around—IT IS SO DUMB. I have it on CD, of course, I have pretty much everything Verdi ever wrote on CD, but I’ve never seen this one staged before.* I’m not sure this was a virginity worth losing. I am not the first person to point this out, but possibly its chief purpose in the Verdi compendium is to make the insane plot of IL TROVATORE look sensible and well put together.
Also, the tenor/hero in TROVATORE is a twit, but he’s not such a whinerpants. Ernani spends the entire opera moaning about what a hard life he’s had and begging people to kill him. Come on, de Silva, you old brute, do it now at the end of act one and get it over with. How did the wet, whinging Ernani, supposedly the brave daring leader of a brave daring band of bandits, meet the globally irresistible Elvira in the first place, let alone long enough for them to fall in love with each other (not that this usually takes more than an aria to accomplish in any opera)?
Anyway. Elvira is, for reasons unspecified, mewed up in de Silva’s castle, where he’s going to marry her by force. De Silva is old and he comes on and sings this self-pitying aria about how he wishes that the ardour of youth did not beat in his aged breast . . . but it does, so he’s going to marry this girl even though she wants no part of him. If this is the choice maybe I’ll take the whinerpants after all.
But there’s a third entrant to the Elvira stakes: Don Carlo, the frelling king of frelling Spain. Played by Dmitri Hvorostovksy mmmmmmmmm okay, did you say there are two other male principals? I seem to forget. But the king sneaks into de Silva’s castle—he what? The king what?—to try to persuade Elvira to run away with him** and at the point where things may be about to go badly wrong for Elvira because the king is not a graceful taker of the answer ‘no’ both the other blokes show up and start shouting at one another. Because this is all so plausible and well thought out.
But the really cute bit is the deal with the horn. In Act Two Elvira has decided, for more unspecified reasons, that Ernani is dead and has agreed to marry de Silva after all.*** Ernani then randomly shows up dressed as a pilgrim and asks for shelter. Guests are sacred to the de Silvas! says de Silva, and then finds out who it is. Cue gnashing of teeth. Then the frelling king shows up, demanding that brave daring bandit Ernani. Nothing to do with me, says de Silva. I shall search your castle, because I know he is here! says the king. A de Silva’s word, once given, even to a lying sneak of a fraudulent pilgrim, must be kept, says de Silva. Then I will TORTURE EVERYBODY, because I am the king, and a really bad loser! says the king. Go for it, says de Silva.
At this point Elvira rushes in and says no, no, no, Mr King, please don’t do that, all this testosterone is giving me a headache!
For you, anything, says the king. Come away, come away, you pretty thing, I am going to wrap you up in flowers and ::drools:: I am taking your fiancée hostage, okay? he says to de Silva. Whatever, says de Silva. Exeunt everyone but de Silva, who is standing around looking oppressed, and then Ernani bursts out from the hidden priest-hole equivalent and says, you mean you let the king take her AWAY? Don’t you know he is our RIVAL?
WHAT? says de Silva. —Yo, elderly moron guy, that would be why he was going on about how he was going to make her happy, you know? And all the pleasure that awaits her at his . . . ahem . . . court. Yes, that would be it: his court. Jeez. Maybe you’re a little hard of hearing? And a little forgetful? You were cross when you caught him in her bedroom in act one . . .
So now we have to form a brotherhood to kill the evil female-plot-device-stealing king! says Ernani. How do I know I can trust you? says de Silva. A little late to be thinking about that now, isn’t it? When you’ve just made the violent and unstable king really mad at you by defending me?† But listen, goes on Ernani, I’ll tell you what. You can trust me because I’m giving you my hunting horn. The moment I hear you blow it I will KILL MYSELF.††
We will pause here for you operatically inexperienced blog readers to absorb this concept.
You know how it ends. But it still takes a few avalanches of credibility to get there. Carlo—this is Charles V in the history books: it’s not a nice likeness—is hoping to get elected Holy Roman Emperor. He may or may not have been a very good king, but the startlingly large band of assassins de Silva and Ernani have brought together still seem to be founded on the idea that he stole someone’s girlfriend. It’s not any more doolally than the hunting horn business in the previous act. And then Carlo is elected emperor, by a council of evidently seriously underinformed Electors, and promptly does the miser-leans-against-wall-and-becomes-generous thing, pardons the entire band of assassins, and as they’re standing around gaping at one another, he pulls Elvira out of the scenery somewhere and hands her over to Ernani.
Um. I realise that in the context of what’s about to happen in the next scene, where Ernani is, of course, going to hear the damn horn, Carlo is supposedly giving Ernani and Elvira their happy ending and until de Silva does his Al Hirt thing it’s chirping birds and rose petals all the way. But we all saw the king in the first act. Is this a man who is going to have been coming round for a cup of tea in the afternoons and meekly continuing to put his suit forward? I don’t think so. I think he’s just got tired of Elvira a little sooner than anticipated. . . .
Anyway. It’s Ernani and Elvira’s wedding day. Chirping birds. Rose petals. And the distant sound of a hunting horn. And then de Silva comes around and gloats. And . . . after some final moaning about what a hard life he’s had (although in the circumstances I suppose you finally can’t blame him) Ernani kills himself.††† Usually Elvira merely faints. In this staging she snatches the knife away from her brand-new (dead) husband and offs herself as well. And in what I can’t help but think is an acknowledgement of the outstanding gobsmackingness of the whole shebang . . . there’s no blood. They die (singing) utterly unbesmirched by stage blood or believability.
PS: It is fabulously sung. And a lot of the music is finest kind. Ignore what the hell is going on and just suck it in. Anyone who had the sense to stay home and listen on the radio will have had a terrific time with it. Angela Meade. My new heroine. My golly can that woman sing. Big Verdi soprano voice: wow. And she’s got those soft floating high notes too, as well as all the power to knock you over. Dmitri, well, we know about me and Dmitri. The square-mouthed Marcello Giordani has the classic Verdi dramatic tenor voice—but he’s not enough of an actor to bring off the flaying absurdity that goes with all the gorgeous notes. Ferruccio Furlanetto as de Silva has an easier time: he’s got the voice, and his character is a total creepfest: all he has to do is slouch around looking grumpy, vain and evil, and sing. And the staging is fine: nothing too meretriciously in your face in the name of art and excitement. But oh, the plot. . . .
* * *
*First breathtakingly anti-relevant footnote: I’ve told you I’ve been prodding a couple of beginner books of Japanese kanji in a dubious and lightly hysterical manner. One of the first characters they all seem to give you is a blank square, which is the kanji for ‘mouth’. I think of mouths—I assume we’re talking about human mouths—as being more oval. This is known as falling at the first fence.^
ERNANI begins with a rousing chorus, while our hero, the tenor^^, broods backstage on an artfully ruined bit of masonry. At the end of the chorus he turns towards the audience and opens his mouth to sing . . . and his mouth is perfectly square. It’s about the squarest thing I’ve ever seen.
^ Although ‘sun’ is worse. It’s a rectangle with a line through it. Yes. That so looks like the sun to me. Not. And kanji started as pictographs? Sure they did. Drawn by aliens from another universe. Where the sun is rectangular and has a line through it and the females of the pictograph-writing species look like folding TV tray tables.
^^ The hero is always a tenor. Or anyway if there’s a tenor he’s the hero. And if several blokes all rush onstage and down to the front together then the short one is the tenor hero.
** I want to believe that the translation leaves something to be desired but I’m afraid it’s probably pitiably excellent. So Don Carlo is apparently offering Elvira either to marry her or to install her as his ‘favourite’ and I’m (again) thinking, what? Not that he doesn’t look like the worst husband material ever, but like yeah get set up as his mistress so he can throw you over after he gets bored with you six months from now. What a good idea.
Although six months of Dmitri . . . hmmm . . . But then I’m self-supporting. And I’m sure I could get a story out of it. But Hvorostovsky is alarmingly good at playing horny villains. He was the Count in TROVATORE.
*** Take the king.
† Boy ideas of honour. Spare me.
†† Boy ideas of honour. SPARE ME.
††† BOY IDEAS OF HONOUR. FRELLING SPARE ME.
Bells, Books, Baths
I SHOULD BE CLIMBING INTO A HOT BATH* RIGHT THIS MINUTE. Barring a few good pages of SHADOWS it’s been a stupid day. I was out this morning bashing on with some I-should-have-done-this-last-autumn tidying of the cottage garden and noticing with dismay that this last really cold spell has taken out a good deal of stuff I wouldn’t have expected to lose—including at least one species-type rose that I wouldn’t have thought could be killed by mere weather. I’ll cut her back hard a little later in the year and see if she comes back. But I was reminded that I have never quite got my spring plant orders in and decided, in breaks for SHADOWS-related thought to flow back into numb brain channels like getting up and stamping around when your leg has gone to sleep from sitting on it for too long**, to try and finish these off. I find I have to do my plant-ordering in as few giant clumps (so to speak) as possible, so I can at least half-remember what I’ve already ordered and where, without endlessly having to look it all up again. Of the five web sites I tried to order from . . . one of them ate my order. One of them refused to accept my order, demanding further credit-card identification numbers that don’t exist. One of them crashed off the air halfway through the check-out process—and my order had disappeared when I yanked it out of the darkness again. One of them has a bizarre system of postage that was going to charge me more for shipping than the order was worth. (Um. No.) I managed to order from one. . . . And it’s pretty much the least crucial. Of course.
So I thought I’d leave you with a couple of BELLRINGING links. The first one is via Ajlr and CathyR and you’ll have to forgive the roundaboutness of it, Facebook and I are not the best of friends, and I can’t figure out how to do it more efficiently.
. . . Although the first photo reminds me, there’s a newspaper article I pulled out a while back that I was going to complain about because it’s some idiot celebrity claiming that she used to like to ring bells when she was a kid, because the danger of it appealed to her: you know you can get DRAGGED UP TO THE CEILING AND BREAK YOUR NECK. You’re a lot likelier to be hit by a meteor simultaneously with being killed by a terrorist*** than dragged to the ceiling of a ringing chamber and breaking your neck. Has anyone ever broken their neck this way? If the stay breaks and the bell tips off its balance point backwards, yes, if you’re holding the rope, it will pull you off your feet and you will find yourself on your way to the ceiling. I should know, I’ve done this (once).† And you know what? You let go of the rope.
Southdowner sent me this one:
http://smgcbr.heralded.org.uk/?q=node/194
YES. WHAT HE SAID. ALL OF IT. And he’s still left a few things out: the odd struck bell, for example, which doesn’t sound at the point in the rhythm of pulling that you’d expect it to. Which you then have to adjust to by ringing one or the other stroke (since bells are generally not evenly odd struck on both strokes: that would be way too easy) either sooner or later, so the bong SOUNDS in the right place in the row. Bells are highly individual: it is not that unlikely that a good ringer will be unconsciously adjusting very slightly FOR EVERY STROKE because every bell in the tower is very slightly odd struck. This is the sort of thing that makes us mediocre ringers cry in our beer. (Beer is very important in bell ringing. See previous link.)
And then there’s weather. Quite well-mannered bells may become possessed by demons in very wet or very cold conditions, and the ones that are less than well-mannered to begin with may become . . . indescribable in inclement weather.
But you get the idea.
Now I have to go take my bath. I was supposed to go to bed early tonight because I seem to have agreed to ring handbells tomorrow evening and I need to get my stint of SHADOWS in first. And maybe a little Japanese. And maybe even a little entanglement.††
* * *
* With a good book. Hey, did you know that in Japanese, the word for book, ‘hon’, is the same word as for real, genuine: ‘hon’. It’s the same kanji too—the same not-Roman-alphabet character. Or at least it looks like it. Japanese is bung full of traps for the unwary, both because any other language(s) than the one(s) you know is and because this one has such a different cultural base—plus that you’d be expected to learn 1945 characters [sic] if you wanted to read the newspaper. Fortunately I don’t. But the characters, except for the brain-blasting aspect, are fabulously cool. I’m beginning to feel about Japanese the way I feel about Oisin and the pipe organ: if I were thirteen and talented I’d be learning both.^
But ‘hon’ of course makes me think both of ‘hon’ as in The Hon Mrs Peter Dickinson and ‘hon’ as in short for ‘honey’. I can totally call favourite books ‘hon’ as I pull them off the shelf, and ‘honourable’ is always good, except when it’s a bogus title you have no, ahem, genuine claim to. But here’s one of those what? things about another culture’s approach to language. I’ve seen/heard it in several books/web sites/podcasts now that you mostly try to avoid both ‘iie’, no, and ‘anata’, you, because these are both too direct for the Japanese concept of politeness. But ‘anata’ also means honey, sweetheart. So you call your beloved something that is too blunt for either strangers or friends—and which parallel behaviour here in the West, where we use ‘you’ freely, you’d probably get punched out by an offended beloved for. Wowzah. Who needs aliens and feys when pure human nature can come up with such delicious variables?
^ I was thirteen when we left Japan and I’ve never been back. It is strange in a lot of ways to be cough-cough studying Japanese almost fifty years later, even at this slippery superficial level, the stuff it throws up about who I was when I was a kid, and how much I’ve changed, or haven’t. One of the things that hits me hardest is that I genuinely believed (which might be hon shinjimashita but I wouldn’t count on it) I was too stupid to learn Japanese and therefore let most of it flow past me without trying to catch it. Sigh. Being a kid is rough.
** I’ve told you before that I’m almost incapable of sitting in a chair the way you’re supposed to sit in a chair, with your butt on the seat and your feet on the floor. I tend to sit on an assortment of pillows . . . and an assortment of my own limbs. Which periodically go OW OW OW OW OW. I have no idea how I survived all those years in school. It’s possible that one of the reasons I found education more trying than educational was the effort it took to sit straight on all those chairs.
*** Some of you will remember the ‘women past 40 are more likely to be killed by terrorists than get married’ study: http://www.salon.com/2006/05/24/newsweek_marriage/
It took a surprising time to get debunked however, while all of us late-30s single women were looking at each other, raising our eyebrows, and muttering about fish and bicycles.^
^ http://www.answers.com/topic/a-woman-without-a-man-is-like-a-fish-without-a-bicycle
† Yes, it’s like knitting and riding. You have to break a stay . . . but in the ringing world you’re only supposed to break a stay ONCE. Once is PLENTY. Stays are expensive and a major ratbag to replace. Not that pulling out a lot of rows of knitting is something you want to do often. . . .^
. . . AND IT WASN’T MY FAULT when I had my little ride to the ceiling. I was still a beginner, and someone else’s beginner had been hammering that bell, and had cracked the stay.
^ When I told Fiona I’d had to rip out eight rows she heartlessly said ‘Be glad it wasn’t twenty’.
†† http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement Speaking of OW OW OW OW OW.
The Enchanted Island*
. . . is fabulous. FABULOUS.**
When I was signing up for this season’s Live from the Met operas I ordered a ticket for this one automatically when I read the cast list and it included Joyce DiDonato, but I wasn’t very happy about it. It’s a pastiche, or a mash-up if you want to be groovy***, with the storyline bodged together from THE TEMPEST and MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM and music stolen freely from all over the Baroque (I believe): Handel, Rameau and Vivaldi (I think†) are the chief sources. And there are Baroque costumes. And Baroque sets. I’d seen some stills and . . . ewww. However, I had the ticket, and there was going to be Joyce DiDonato.
I loved it. And the production, which is way, way, WAY over the frelling top, is one of the best things about it—and therefore proves that not merely low-key or tactful things but positively reckless, attention-grabbing and silly things can be done successfully on the opera stage.†† Yesss.
The singing is delicious, and even if I am prone to DiDonato worship, Danielle de Niese nearly steals the show. The story: Prospero, countertenor David Daniels, is sulking on his island. This is one of the interesting choices ‘writer and deviser’ Jeremy Sams made: this Prospero is a jerk. I’ve never liked Prospero—all right, all right, I’ve never liked Shakespeare, but I’ve thought that the whole mage thing was over-emphasized: he’s a self-pitying bully with some (fading) magic powers. Which is exactly what comes through here. Daniels does it very well: I had no problem with his voice on that stage, and he has authority which Prospero must have. He sends Ariel, played and sung with enormous charm and humour by de Niese, to shipwreck Ferdinand and then do the Puck trick with the potion to make sure he and Prospero’s daughter Miranda fall in love with each other. But Caliban††† has stolen Prospero’s dragon’s blood so that his mother, Sycorax, can reclaim her powers, which Prospero, that fine upstanding gentleman, stole when he stole the island from her. Without dragon’s blood the spell goes wrong, and Ariel instead wrecks a ship containing two honeymoon couples: Helena and Demetrius, Hermia and Lysander. Add Miranda and Caliban and there’s lots and lots of inappropriate pairings-off. Ariel, in a panic, with Prospero having tantrums and threatening to lock her‡ back up in her holly tree, asks Neptune for help. Neptune finds Ferdinand and gives him a shove in the right direction, the lovers are sorted, Prospero frees Ariel, Sycorax regains youth as well as power‡‡ (and her island), and all ends with general rejoicing except for poor Caliban who liked having a girlfriend and doesn’t have one any more.
There isn’t enough of Sycorax. Her first aria is amazing. DiDonato goes from being a crippled hag to being a powerful woman in the prime of life over the course of the opera‡‡‡ but that first aria when she gimps out and yowls about what has happened to her—DiDonato makes some genuinely ugly noises, snarling below her range, and it’s riveting. ISLAND is such an ensemble piece nobody gets a lot of solo time . . . but I still wanted more of Sycorax. One of the dumb reviews that I’m refusing to link to says that ISLAND is all fluffy and throwaway—um, Sycorax is not fluffy. And Caliban really is the one who isn’t saved. He’s sung with dignity and pathos by Luca Pisaroni, who I had some caveats about as a rather too twitchy Leporello, but he’s excellent here. He’s not a particularly nice monster, but he still has his feelings and his dreams, and he’s the only principal at the end who hasn’t got what he wanted.§
. . . I can’t frelling believe that the Met is so cheap and/or careless not to produce a complete cast list, but I’m failing to find it, and the synopsis they give you at the door of the theatre does not include the four MIDSUMMER NIGHT lovers. How totally crap is that? Miranda and Ferdinand are present, however; poor Miranda, Lisette Oropesa, has one of the most thankless roles I’ve ever seen. She comes on at the beginning singing, oh, dad, I Yearn For Something I Know Not What, and then wanders around falling for a new bloke every time Ariel makes another mistake with the fairy dust, till at the end she falls for Ferdinand. It is done for laughs but I found it still a bit cringe-making. I thought Ferdinand, Anthony Roth Costanzo, was one of their few real mistakes. He’s another countertenor, but of the exquisite variety which does not do well on the opera stage, and furthermore he’s a willowy young man and they dress him in gold, white and peach. Ick.
I’m trying to think how to tell you about the ridiculously glorious staging. It’s—well, it’s Baroque. There’s too much of everything, and it’s all curlicued and then super-curlicued. But it’s also gorgeous and appealing, and the special effects, of the island and the high seas, are terrific—when the MIDSUMMER lovers’ boat is drowned it’s genuinely scary. But the best—the best—is Neptune’s court. Ariel comes on stage wearing a diving helmet so you know you’re supposed to be underwater, and there are mermaids floating overhead to reinforce this idea.§§ And the chorus breaks into ‘Zadok the Priest’ and everyone in the audience breaks up: Neptune is played by Placido Domingo.§§§ But his court . . . well, there are all these ladies in semi-transparent leotards with scallop shells over their boobs, making wafty hand gestures, and behind them most of the chorus is standing behind, with only their heads showing, this gigantic series of painted props of naked people getting it on both with each other and with a variety of Things with Tentacles. I loved it. And Domingo is a cranky Neptune: at one point he says, I’ll listen to you but I may be too old and tired and irritable to help you. Here’s a god I could get along with.
It was a splendid evening out. I would guess ISLAND is still a work in progress; it seems to me there’s stuff they haven’t quite figured out yet—the duet between Sycorax and Caliban at the beginning of the second act, for example, to my sensibility, isn’t quite there yet. But it seems to me very much the best of Baroque: the lovely music without all the sing, sing with twiddles, sing something slightly different, sing the slightly different with twiddles, then do it all over again several times, that tends to weary the uninitiated. I was dismayed to hear the two women behind me not liking it and saying, well, why? What is it for?, and that they wouldn’t see it again. I’d see it again like a shot. I want to see how it goes on evolving, and wholly in love with DiDonato (and now de Niese) as I am I’d also love to see what other singers might do with those roles.
Yaay. Five stars.
* * *
* http://www.metoperafamily.org//opera/the-enchanted-island-tickets.aspx?icamp=Enchint&iloc=hpbucket
** Also, I knitted a fresh eight rows of my LEG WARMERS during intermission which I think I’m not going to have to rip out. Which would be a first. This is also my first attempt after having shifted to easier yarn—this is just basic, uh, pink, cheap, acrylic, 6mm. Hellhound-blanket yarn in fact. No variable threads, no confusing heathery colour notes. I can see what I’m doing and I’m not forever getting hung up in weird little fuzzy artistic filaments. I’VE BEEN KNITTING FOR A YEAR AND I HAVEN’T FINISHED ANYTHING YET.
*** Feh.
† I could look all this stuff up, yes. But I wasted way too much time trying to find a sensible review to link to and failed, and even if I don’t have to get up for service ring tomorrow morning^ I would like to get to bed some time.
^ Waaaaaaah. I was thinking, on my way to the theatre tonight, that it is a small kindness I have an opera on the night before my first official Sunday morning non-ring. Sunday mornings after an opera, and especially after blogging about an opera, are—were—especially gruesome.
††Moron from FAUST, take note.
††† Somebody tell me why Microsoft Word has Prospero and Ariel in its dictionary but not Caliban.
‡ Her? Him? There are plenty of trouser roles in opera, so that de Niese is a girl is not definitive. But Prospero calls Ariel ‘son’ and ‘boy’ in the first few minutes so I thought, okay, boy. But at the end, when Prospero has done the miser-leans-against-wall-and-becomes-generous thing and gives Sycorax back her island, Caliban says he wants a queen, and Ariel looks nervous and steps backward into the shadows. What? Since Caliban had spent a happy scene or two as Helena’s lover, I don’t think we’re supposed to be second-guessing Caliban’s gender preferences.
‡‡ Where can I buy some dragon’s blood? Is it good for writing novels?
‡‡‡ And oh how I want her dress from the beginning of the second act. Not the bright upbeat one at the end, which is too cheerful, although it’s a very nice cape. I want the dark cranky one with the sparkles.
§ In this version Prospero and Sycorax got it on before Prospero cast her aside like an old shoe and stole her island, her son, and her sprite. Such a nice guy. I believe his apology at the end about as much as I believe the Count’s at the end of FIGARO. Get out fast, Ariel, before he changes his mind (again), and Sycorax, keep your flying piranhas handy, and don’t be afraid to use them. But because I have a low mind^ I’m thinking this may cast an interesting light on the father of Caliban and the mother of Miranda. I totally see Prospero’s character coming through in his son.
^ So what do fanged muffins get up to when no one is around?
§§ Although the mermaids come back in the last scene, which is supposed to be on dry land. Never mind.
§§§ Maybe this is an in joke. Never mind . . .