Baroque Pleasures
31 May

It's been a year of Baroque pleasures with quite a few more in the offing.

Ross was away on holiday for the week so I did a few things for myself - like I attended my first yoga class in three years. It felt very good and I shall go back for more.

I also took myself off to the Buxton Opera House where Opera North were giving a performance of Domenico Cimarosa's The Secret Marriage. I was delighted by it. A good three stars' worth.

Best of the performers was Henry Waddington in the buffo father role and Richard Morrison as the suave count. Their patter duet was the best bit of the show. Wynne Evans, who was in Die Fledermaus last year, gave a good account of himself but is very cramped in his movements about the stage. Mary Nelson as the nice sister, Carolina, and Natasha Jouhl as the nasty sister, Elisetta, both had some good moments and Louise Mott as the termagent aunt, Fidalma, was very good value. It was the sort of summer show that I would be more than happy to see again on a warm evening in five years' time.

By the time Ross came back, we were set to go off and attend a Baroque concert at the Philharmonic. The contents were a pot pourri featuring Pachelbel's Canon, Albinoni's Adagio for Organ and Strings and Vivaldi's The Four Seasons with a couple of other pleasant numbers thrown in.

The evening didn't really hang together as a cogent evening of music making. It was a bit too bitty for that. But it was nevertheless most pleasant deserving of two stars but not quite the third.

I was, once again, taken aback by some of the sounds coming out of the orchestra. We think that the twentieth century had a monopoly on unusual string tone. Listen to the opening of Winter in The Four Seasons. You don't really hear sounds like that coming from a string orchestra until Janet Leigh gets hacked to death in a shower in Psycho some 250 years later.