Double Puccini
6 April

Ross and I took another of our breaks down in London.

This is probably the last of these jaunts that there will be for a while. Though fun they are expensive. But we manage to pack in a lot.

The Thursday was taken up with travel and eating. Whilst Ross rested up in the afternoon, I had some time to myself to go shopping but aside from books and CDs there was little to shout about. I bought programmes in advance of the operas we were about to see.

Friday morning took us back to the Courtauld Gallery. When we went there for the first time last May, we were blown away by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. That collection has been added to since then. However, the overall impact is diminished by the addition of mostly German and Northern European stuff. What grabbed me this time was the medieval room on the ground floor. I spent a lot of time with some ivories from the thirteenth century and one particularly which depicted the life of Christ. It was just the most exquisite object, painstakingly and lovingly carved with utter devotion. Absolutely excellent for that one piece alone.

Ross and I parted company at lunchtime. He had some food at the café at The Place and then back to the hotel for some rest. I lunched in Gordon Square with UCL people and had an excellent time of it. Then it was off to the Royal Academy for Masterpieces from Dresden - a pleasant enough way to spend a couple of hours with works by Reubens, Mantenga, Titian, Veronese, Tiepolo, Velàzquez, Dürer and Cranach. Although the rôle call is of the great and the good, the overall experience was one of suppressed enjoyment. Maybe my tastes are not refined enough to be able to experience. So, it was good but not excellent.

At evening time, we visited the Coliseum for English National Opera's new Tosca. It makes the fourth production I have seen from that company since I attended the first night of John Stoddard's new production on Wednesday 4 February 1976.

We've had this visit planned since last summer and I had purposefully listened to the live radio broadcast last November. In the event, the show was up to standard. Some very nice touches. Angelotti did a double take at Caravadossi's portrait in the First Act - no wonder, it is his sister.

He was played by Nicholas Garrett who looked rather good and who probably had the best voice of the evening. John Hudson is a perfectly serviceable tenor (God only knows what the company would do without him) but, as we've said before at performances of Mary Stuart, La Traviata and La Vestale, voice and stage presence are not at one with each other. Peter Coleman-Wright has plenty of stage presence but the voice was a little dry for my taste. Our Tosca was a last minute replacement and, though Elizabeth Brice had most of the notes, her insecurity about the stage did not help the evening. Mark Shanahan's conducting was way off track. The whole evening was frustratingly less than the sum of its parts and so a moderate two stars is all that I can muster.

On the Saturday morning, we took a leisurely stroll down to the British Museum. Usually when visiting one of these great edifices, I am going to attend a specific major exhibition. Instead, we (mostly) looked at a few rooms in the permanent collection. I say mostly because we were hi-jacked into a room containing a small exhibition of drawings by Antony Gormley (he of the Angel of the North) which were very good indeed. A quick four stars and no mistaking.

This would have been good in itself but we then went off to look at the Sutton Hoo and Early Medieval rooms. I was just gobsmacked by it all. How we come to talk about all of the as The Dark Ages I do not know. Archaeologists and historians simply cannot have been using their eyes. Only a very advanced culture can possibly have spent the time creating the objects.

There was one metal bowl which had come out of the earth as metal ore, been smelted and cast into a rare object by humans some 1500 years ago. It had then been put back into the ground where it had rusted and degraded only to be taken out of the earth again and displayed in all its frailty in a temple of culture.

By the time we were in the Prehistory rooms, I was agog. I can only say that everyone should take some time out to spend a few hours in a couple of room in the national collections. Absolutely outstanding.

There was therefore the distinct possibility that the afternoon's performance of Madama Butterfly at Covent Garden would be a bit of a let down. Not at all. I was gripped throughout by the production, the singing, the acting and the orchestral playing.

Hero of the hour was certainly Antonio Pappano, the conductor, but I also really liked the Leiser/Caurier production (in fact I've like all the shows I've seen them direct - Carmen, Orphée et Eurydice and La Cenerentola).

Cristina Gallardo-Domas had clearly settled into the part of Butterfly, there was mettle, there was softness, there was breath in abundance and there was volume when called for. She doesn't look the part but then no-one ever does (and how many fourteen year old Japanese girls could sing this or would want to). Disbelief was willingly suspended.

Marco Berti sounded thrillingly ardent as Pinkerton and if he didn't do much acting well that is also appropriate for the part. As I mentioned when we went to see Butterfly last summer in Llandudno, I prefer Sharpless to be older than Pinkerton (which he wasn't here) but Lucio Gallo sang the part well. Enkelejda Shkosa was a fine Suzuki. I wept buckets at the end so four stars is inevitable.

We had a good evening meal, a little time in the National Gallery before taking in The Recruit - a vehicle for the talents of Colin Farrell and Al Pacino. Colin is certainly hunk of the moment and is not too bad an actor either. Pacino is always watchable and strolled through a rôle he's played many times before most notably with Keanu in The Devil's Advocate. A couple of hours passed pleasantly enough and we chalked up another couple of stars.

We were going to go to Tate Britain on Sunday morning but I could already tell that Ross was feeling over-tired so we paid an excess and came back on an earlier train. It was worth it. Getting home and relaxing was the best idea. We'd covered a lot already and would only have spoiled things by pressing on and we already had twenty-four stars in the bag after only three days.