Preparation Time
14 November

Things are moving forwards.

Ross and I have been clearing out the back bedroom so that we can decorate it in advance of my parents coming to stay at Christmas. We've also been mulching the garden, giving it its winter coat. And we've had workmen sorting out out pointing and flashing and guttering so that the house is battened down as well.

Finally we've also started thinking about Christmas presents.

But there's a few more things to do yet before it is totally the Festive season.

On Saturday evening, we drove over to Llandudno for a performance of Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride by Welsh National Opera. This time last year, we had opted to spend a few days on the coast taking in all three operas. This year, time and money (and, to be frank, repertory) has persuaded us to see the other works in Liverpool and to travel only for the work that does not come our way.

I'm glad we made the effort. I saw the show when it was new in 1992 and was completely underwhelmed by it. Now, thanks to Ross's advocacy of Handel and all things eighteenth century, my ears are more accustomed to the idiom and I enjoyed the music much more. I can understand how, if you were only used to florid da capo arias and opera seria, Gluck's work must have come as a direct body blow.

And the work has as much resonance now as then. It's about the aftermath of violence and its consequences. The deaths of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus are past history. Orestes is traumatised by the events and Iphigenia is the hapless priestess of a sacrificial cult. The high point of the evening came with the scene between Andrew Schroeder's Oreste and Paul Nilon's Pylade as the two friends argue which of the two of them should sacrifice himself for the other. It was drama of the highest level.

Unfortunately, not all of the evening matched this. Andrew Greenwood's conducting was too brusque. Again, like the Phil concert of the previous week, there was not enough elegance to counterpoint the anguish. And Ann Murray was not good. I last heard her in Mary Stuart. Now the voice is simply not integrated. The only way that she could sing the higher notes was to belt them out fortissimo and I hardly heard a consonant all evening.

But the production, another Leiser/Caurier show, was direct and serious, the chorus was in good form and Camilla Roberts (our Micaëla in this summer's Carmen) provided the best female singing of the evening in the short but important rôle of Diana. I think that overall it was a good rather than an excellent night out.