I'd taken a couple of days holiday after the funeral. So Ross and I have been gadding about.
We were both supposed to be going to Opera North's new
production of Britten's Albert Herring but Ross cried off because he's
been under the weather recently. Frankly, he didn't miss all that much. After
the triumph of the company's Gloriana which I caught last autumn in
Barcelona, this really didn't cut the
mustard.
Good, solid comic support from the minor characters including Eric Roberts, John Graham-Hall and Elena Ferrari. Excellent singing from Susan Bickley, Jeremy White and Richard Whitehouse. Josephine Barstow was dreadful and Iain Paton as the eponymous hero did not convince. The lack of production did not help. And the updating once again removed the social context for which the story was conceived.
The most positive thing I can say about the whole experience was that it was all OK.
Saturday took us over to the Lady Lever Art Gallery over on the Wirral for
a display of 10 drawings by Leonardo from the Royal Collection. The drawings
are interesting - part of da Vinci's lifelong obsession with understanding how
things work. It's just that everyone could have done with more of them.
It's a long while since I was last at the gallery itself. I had forgotten just
how many well known paintings of the 18th and 19th centuries are on display there
- works by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Turner, Constable ("The thing about Turner
is that everything breaks down into light, whereas with Constable everything
breaks down into movement." D Guy 23/2/2002
), Millais,
Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones, Rossetti and hosts more.
I am sure that Ross and I will return often here.
We finished the holiday off with a matinée showing of Ocean's Eleven
which was slick, gave us George and Bradley to look at and passed a couple of hours
without too much sweat. Superior no-brain entertainment.
Bedtime brings tapes of BBC Radio Four's serialisation of Tolstoy's War and Peace. From the Prokofiev opera to the King Vidor film to a BBC2 dramatatisation in the early 1970s, my main impression of this work is that it is more about peace than war with Andrei and Natasha's love match being the core of the work. This adaptation makes it far clearer as to how war, its threat, its actuality, its aftermath, are ever present throughout the narrative.
We've also been catching up with a videoed showing of Stephen Poliakoff's TV play Perfect Strangers which is just stupendous. The man has a true gift for writing engrossing drama. It's all about history and family and how things link together and yet can still be kept apart. Michael Gambon is awesome and Matthew MacFayden is very appealing.