Back to Llandudno
14 June

Ross and I are just back from Llandudno where we've just had a very good few days.

Last year, I spent an uneasy time of it. Ross and I were heading for five years of being together and I wanted some idea of where we thought we were heading to. Instead, we had a couple of days of not talking with the result that I felt completely stressed.

This time, I relaxed a lot more. I had none of the early risings, walking along the beach at six in the morning. I didn't feel impelled to go swimming. I chilled, read, shopped a little, watched the seagulls.

The weather was mainly kind and we made a number of trips out. Having our own car and therefore unlimited mileage, was a big bonus. Monday we set off via Betws-y-coed down to Dolgellau and thence to the Centre for Alternative Technology set high in the hills above Machynlleth.

We walked through the exhibits, took some notes as to environmentally friendly things we could do, bought some organic seeds and took great gulps of fresh air. It was a long round trip - about 150 miles - but it took us through some magnificent scenery, high scree slopes cascading stones down towards valley bottoms, mountain streams swollen with summer rain, silver lines of water running from high vertical over the black slate, purple rhododendron bushes reclaiming the abandoned slate quarries, lush green trees, early heathers, hawks, buzzards.

I was too tired to go far on the Tuesday so we stayed around Llandudno and visited the Oriel Mostyn Gallery for a show called On Home Ground which billed itself as bringing together many of Wales' most important artists of the 20th Century. It was a nice space but neither Ross nor I was overly impressed with the show. Frankly, it was mostly parochial, though there were some nice pieces. We were far more interested in an upcoming exhibition of contemporary Ghanaian art which will be held in September/October time. Maybe a return visit is in order.

We took our lunch up the Great Orme and, for a brief time, the clouds lifted enough to give us stunning views right into the heart of Snowdonia...

.. and down the coast to Rhyl, the Wirral and on to the Crosby shoreline.

Evening brought our first opera of the week, Rigoletto. Frankly, again, it was not good. Not bad. But just not good. Maybe I'm spoilt after the performance at Covent Garden last September.

The idea for this production was that it was all set in Washington in the early 60s. That didn't sink it but the singing nearly did. Chen-Ye Yuan, as Rigoletto, probably had the best voice of the three principals but sang with very little sense of character or situation to the extent of turning Rigoletto into a bland cypher. Celena Shafer as Gilda had a voice with a tight vibrato and an unpleasant curdling of tone when the voice was under pressure - her big aria Caro nome sounded as though it were being performed by the Chipmunks - but she sang with commitment and heart. She also had a feel for the words she was singing so that the colloratura was actually used for dramatic purpose and had a voice that was big enough to be heard in the concerted passages in the finale. Joseph Calleja as the Duke had the vices of both the others (blandness and vibrato) with little of their saving graces apart from a pleasing stage presence.

I've seen four productions of Rigoletto by Welsh National Opera - three of them, funnily enough, in Llandudno. None of them has been good. At least one, the 1985 effort by Pintile, was a complete shambles but probably had the best sung cast. Maybe it is a work that the company just can't get right for want of trying. Maybe they just need to trust the work and tell it like it is written.

And yet Verdi still shone through. Having recently attended both Il Trovatore and La Traviata, I am complete with admiration for the man. They couldn't be more different and yet they were written within the space of three years.

Wednesday was a pleasant day. We took a trip to Conwy to visit the Conwy Mussel Museum. Did you know that in the early 19th Century over 4 kilos of pearls from Conwy mussels were sent each week to jewellers in London? I didn't either until I read it in the guidebook. However, when we arrived, presumably because of the continuing Corinthianism in the Far East, the museum was not yet open. So, we sat on the quay. I read and Ross sketched.

And it was very pleasant. And the museum still wasn't open. So we walked a little round the town and had some coffee. And the museum still wasn't open. And we thought about lunch but it was too early. And the museum still wasn't open. So, we went back to Llandudno and we shall never know any more about those mussels.

Come the evening, it was time for our second opera, Madama Butterfly and this was a very palpable success. Last year, the highlight was another Puccini opera, Tosca. Both were conducted by Julian Smith. And I don't think that that is a coincidence. He clearly knows these works inside out and conducts them with great authority. It was he who conducted the first performance of this particular production which I saw back in 1979. He also conducts in support of the singers.

Nuccia Focile, our Cio-Cio-San, is actually a few notes short of a full performance. In larger houses with bigger companies, she tends to sing the more soubrette rôles. However, thanks to Mr Smith we were all hard pressed to realise that. He honed the orchestra to support her whilst not doing damage to the piece. And it was a remarkably sung performance of eloquent intensity.

Her real life husband, Paul Charles Clarke (a Liverpudlian), sang his part well but his voice felt trapped in the mask of his face rather than projected out. It didn't seem to ring as an Italian tenor should. Christopher Purves has everything you need for the consul Sharpless, apart from about the ten years to give him a greater sense of gravitas.

Our final full day on holiday took us back into the mountains, over the Llanberis pass into the town of Llanberis itself. We tried to go on the Snowdon Mountain Railway but they had technical troubles so we ended up visiting Electric Mountain instead. Hey so it's a hydro-electric generator built inside an old slate quarry but it was not so unappealing as this makes it sound. Little buses travelling down underground tunnels. Man-made caverns the size of a cathedral nave. You can see where Ken Adams used to get his design ideas for the James Bond movies. The best bit, however, was the most unexpected. In creating the power station, they unearthed two boats out of the lakes - a 12th Century dugout canoe and a 16th Century clinker boat. Both would have been used to ferry goods and produce up one of the main strategic trade routes in Gwynedd.

And then it was final meals, sleep, breakfast, settle the bill and, less than two hours later, we were back in Crosby. Next year, WNO bring Handel's Jephtha, Mozart's Don Giovanni and Puccini's La Bohème. We think we might go back again.