Maintaining Things
21 September
Well, waiting for a result from Lincoln, Ross and I have been pressing on, living life, maintaining an even keel.
For example, the Olympics are well under way and already it's been a great Olympics
for names. You always expect there to be a Russian gymnast called Sergei Ivankov and
there is. However, there's also an Eastern European athlete called Irene Fuchsova and
an American swimmer named Misty Hyman. What a treat!
I've watched a lot of the swimming. There's a young 17 year old Aussie swimmer called Ian Thorpe with size 17 feet. God only knows what he'll be like when he's 42. Maybe he'll go onto European sizes.
It's difficult to know whether the size of his feet have an affect on any of the
other traditional areas of the body as there is a new style of all over body suit
being worn by the swimmers at these Games.
There's also been a nice mateyness among rivals with Ian Thorpe and arch Dutch rival Pieter van den Hoogenband showing the way.
Pieter has been noticeable by his reticence in victory.
No such problems for the Italian swimmer, Domenico Fioravanti, who went in for celebrating in a big way.
Elsewhere in the week Ross and Colin and I took in our first opera of the season, Aida.
The performance was given by The Chisinau National Opera. No, it's alright. I didn't know either. Chisinau is the capital of Moldova, which is a real place and not something invented for Dynasty back in the 80s (it's in between Romania and the Ukraine if you must know). Oh and Chisinau is not pronounced Chizzy-now as you might think but rather Kishino.
Well, we expected the production style to hark back to the 1950s and we were not disappointed. The illustration above is obviously what they show the punters back at home and is certainly not the pared down version we saw on the stage of the Liverpool Empire. There were some good moments and some execrable moments - the harpist should have been taken out and shot as a service to music lovers everywhere. Some voices were good, there was a beefy tenor Radames from Oleg Kulko who certainly had the stature for a military leader (tenors are traditionally short and roly-poly), and some were at least adequate, the Aida (Ludmila Magomedova) and the Amneris (Liliana Lavric) both had their moments without ever being totally satisfying. One voice was magnificent. Vladimir Dragos's Amonasro would have graced any stage.
He was, however, responsible for the one moment in the opera which totally corpsed me. The Nile scene began with (badly played) harp arpeggios. On to the stage came a figure with long hair and a flowing robe. I thought it was Aida. It was, in fact, her father, Amonasro. In a fuller light, he looked like Lee Marvin in a frock. Well, I just went. It's been a tough week and I needed a good laugh.