Every so often I get into a little riff with the titles in this Journal.
This month it's been plurals and it's given me the opportunity to end the sequence with the happy announcement of holiday time.
It began with a quick trip down to London to meet up with Ross and see an opera. Before that, however, I got some time to myself in the centre of the metropolis. I put it to good use.
For my birthday, Ross gave me a biography of the painter, Caravaggio. It was quite controversial when published. The dust jacket reflects this with a variety of supportive and antipathetic comments. One from Brian Sewell demands that the book be pulped. Given that Brian Sewell is a tedious old fart, this comment more or less ensured that I was likely to enjoy the work - and so I have.
I can understand why some people have disliked it, however. It does brass on about inconsequential stuff. It does pad very slender facts out. It does make vast assumptions because of the lack of evidence in certain areas. It does move rapidly between a colloquial and a critical tone. However, it is very good at setting a broad socio-political setting for Caravaggio's work (and I like that - no work of art occurs outside of a context) and I like the exposition of the paintings and the way it reveals how potentially shocking and arresting (like half a cow in formaldehyde) they would have seemed in 1600.
The main thing I have found frustrating about my experience of reading the book has been that I have had little or no idea of what the paintings looked like which were being described. So I spent a little time on the Saturday afternoon in and out of bookshops looking for picture books and, eventually, found a really good one.
I also took time out to visit the National Gallery to look at a real Caravaggio. The last time I spent any time with Supper at Emmaus was two years ago with Rod when he was on a visit here.
After all of the reading, it was good to sit with some oil paint and canvas and sweat.
Evening time, Ross and I met up to go to the Coliseum for Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
The only other time I have seen this opera was in this production when it was first done in 1987. At the time, I was living in Liverpool and working as a Trainee Programmer for AAH Pharmaceuticals. I think that I was in London for a training course or conference or something. Anyhow, I wandered into the Coliseum for the final performance expecting to have a choice of seats available and ended up buying the last of the day seats on the very back row of the top circle. The place was packed and rightly so. It was an astonishing performance musically, vocally and dramatically.
Fourteen years on, I wondered if the evening would have the same emotional and intellectual impact.
Well, it did. In fact, Ross summed it up when he said on the journey home that he couldn't remember feeling quite so tired after a performance for a long while. It was a physically and emotionally draining roller coaster ride.
Fourteen years on, there were a number of things that I could quibble with - the abattoir setting, the uneasy switch of the character Katerina Ismailova from scheming murderess into symbol of personal integrity. But I don't want to detract from a fab night out.
Best of the performers was Vivian Tierney who I've seen in recent years in a number of performances including the Royal Opera's Turn of the Screw as Miss Jessel, Ellen Orford in ENO's Peter Grimes, Salome with ENO and Katya Kabanova with Opera North. The two Britten rôles were probably her most effective. The Katya was committed but undermined by poor conducting and, although Colin thought her Salome lyrical and psychologically brilliant, I thought her sweet but underpowered. Here she came into her own as a powerful yet musical and dramatically assured performer.
Sunday took us back to Liverpool for the beginning of your holiday week together.
The video showed us that, in the Big Brother house, Josh's bum has at last been on view
Huzzah!!! 