Drugs
4 April

In spite of what The Verve used to sing - the drugs do work.

24 hours after getting the right hayfever tablets and the correct ventalin inhaler and I am feeling almost human again.

Certainly well enough to attend Welsh National Opera'a performance of Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito at the Liverpool Empire.

Looking back in my card index I found that I'd seen the work three times before. The first time at Covent Garden on 22 March 1976 when the work was being re-evaluated and re-discovered. The production was a vehicle for Janet Baker late in her career. I saw the same production again in Manchester when the Royal Opera toured there in September 1983. Then came a Glyndebourne Touring Opera production at Sadler's Wells on 28 September 1993. One visit per decade. Feels about right.

What can I say? The production was appropriately austere and chaste; costumes an amalgam of Roman and Eighteenth Century; lighting painterly. Geraldine McGreevy's Vitellia was imperious and commanding in her fioratura; Monica Groop's Sesto was agile and full-voiced (she got the biggest cheer at the end). Otherwise the cast was workmanlike. Timothy Robinson was not in good voice for Tito. Anthony Negus conducted a brisk and airy performance.

There is some good and some beautiful music. It was premiered only 24 days before Die Zauberflöte which Ross and I heard Anthony Negus conduct with WNO in Llandudno last year. You get a little of the flavour of the Flute music in the ceremonial marches and the production gave the emperor Titus some banners with vaguely Masonic symbols on them to highlight the point.

But it's really Don Giovanni that I heard most often - or at least the music of Donna Elvira, Donna Anna and Don Ottavio. Mozart didn't stop writing opera seria after Idomeneo as the received wisdom of the musicologists would have us believe. He simply appropriated the style and used it when dramatically apposite in his comic works.