Gone Again
29 July

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Well, it's gone again.

The sun has dipped back behind the houses for another ten months.

I've also completed my final visit to the Buxton Festival for another year.

As a final offering, the festival gave us a triple bill of short works by English composers. First up was Savitri by Gustav Holst. Taken from a tale first told in the Mahabharata, this was probably the piece I liked best of the three. Even then, I can't say that I'm sure about the musical language. Among all of the exoticism, English folk tunes would out. Still, Hal Cazalet (particularly), Elizabeth Atherton and Mark Richardson sang well. I was less sure about Kali Dass's dance contribution.

This was followed by another (later) piece by Gustav Holst - The Wandering Scholar. Probably the most approachable of the three pieces, this was a sort of Boccaccio-like tale of a randy wife, a randy Catholic priest, an innocent trusting husband and a student with the cunning to get (most of) what he wants. I suppose I liked this least because of the retrogressive sexual politics of it all. Still Hal Cazalet, Gail Pearson and Kevin Greenlaw were fine; Mark Richardson's priest was less well achieved.

Probably the best music came in Ralph Vaughan Williams' Riders to the Sea. However, it was probably also the most problematic of the three pieces. Taken from a play by Irish playwright, J M Synge, it pretty much set the script verbatim. And there was the problem. God, it was dreary. And it really is difficult for singers to sing in accents not of their own. So, hats off to Clare Shearer, Elizabeth Atherton, Gail Pearson and Kevin Greenlaw but, ultimately, I wasn't convinced.

So, they all go down into the category of having been seen but not really demanding a second visitation. But then that's the joy of Buxton. But, I think, only two and a half stars to be fair.

One of its other attractions is trying to guess future fayre - how about Flotow's Martha I ask myself? Or maybe Donizetti's Poliuto or Lucrezia Borgia. Or there's not been a lot of Rossini - how about La donna del lago? Futhermore, I'd raise an interest for Thomas's Mignon or Jaromir Weinberger's Schwanda the Bagpiper. December will bring the answers for next year.

Saturday saw Ross and I clock up another of the summer's blockbusters - The Dark Knight. And, yes, Heath Ledger's performance as The Joker is as impressive as everyone says it is - very edgy and very unpredictable. But Christian Bale is just as impressive in the lead part and without his quiet contained angst Heath Ledger's antics would seem far less eye-catching. The scripting was better than most - at least a little investigation of what makes the difference between the outsider and the vigilante. But, once again, I do wish that they'd hack out a good twenty to thirty minutes. It felt as though the film had at least four endings and that the plot clambered over them to get onto the next set piece. So, good but not very good.

The weather turned better over the weekend so I actually had some relaxed time out in the back garden. I've actually got a brown torso and slightly darkening legs this year. I must be feeling more comfortable out there.

Monday took me into Liverpool. I spent some time booking tickets for the autumn. A couple of RLPO concerts (but one that Ross wanted to go to had already sold out of the wheelchair places that he likes) and a couple of Welsh National Opera performances. Also two simulcasts of opera performances at FACT.

Following on from the showing of La Bohème which we attended in May, we thought we'd take in John Adams's Dr Atomic from the Met and I'm going to go to the opening night of the Royal Opera's season with Mozart's Don Giovanni.

This latter is interesting. I was considering travelling to London for this set of performances as they are to be conducted by Charles Mackerras. However, I couldn't find a date which suited me. Now I get to appreciate the whole thing from my own city. In December, they are going to be doing a live relay of their new production of Hansel und Gretel. I'd decided not to go on the grounds of cost and time. Once again, I can pay a lot less to see the show in Liverpool.

I could see a useful trend for me emerging here. Whether this will be a useful trend for the Royal Opera, Virgin Trains and the George Hotel is another matter.

Having done the shopping and buying thing, I then did art at the Walker Art Gallery. Their major contribution to our Capital of culture year is Art in the Age of Steam. It's an interesting notion. Forget about an exhibition of one artists work like Gustav Klimt or an artistic movement like The Divisionists. Go for works on a theme. In this case trains. And it works. I'll not pretend that it was the most enlightening exhibition I've ever been to but it was certainly enjoyable. And there were some well know pieces there like Augustus Egg's Travelling Companions which is much darker in real life than in this image.

Monet's Gare St Lazare is, of course, a pretty well known image from the National Gallery and there were a couple of works by Pissaro from the Courtauld Institute.

I also liked On the Europe Bridge by Gustave Caillebotte for its starkness of composition and its reduced palette of colours.

But the work that really held my attention was Edward Hopper's Railroad Sunset which is quite tremendous in its simplicity of line and starkness of colour. So, again good but not very good.

In another room in the same building, I took a look at Ben Johnson's Liverpool Cityscape 2008. This was tremendous. I could have spent a long time poring over the intricate detail of this panorama of my home city. The photorealistic detail is breathtaking and the montage is very clever to show so many iconic buildings which would, in reality, crowd each other out.

There are other cityscapes on view including the one of Hong Kong opposite and one of Jerusalem.

In an adjoining room, there are other images of Liverpool including this print entitled Modern Liverpool created in 1907 by Walter Richards. I've told my parents that they should go and take a look. I'll certainly be back some time.

My time in the garden has resulted in a renewed upsurge in reading.

It took a while but I finished off The Classical World by Robin Lane Fox, a panoply of ancient history from the early Greeks through to the Emperor Hadrian in Rome. It certainly covered a lot of ground but I can't say that I was personally overly engaged.

More entertaining in a grizzly sort of way was The Brimstone Wedding by Barbara Vine - that's Ruth Rendell by another name. One of things I like about her writing is that, although crimes are involved and there's always some sort of mystery to be unravelled, these aren't crime stories or mystery stories in the popular sense of those terms. It's always far more to do with the humanity and the psychology and the how people get to the point were complicity in a murder is the next plausible, sensible and logical thing to do.

And in a different vein again I briskly stepped through Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald. I'm totally unsure as to whether this is a long short story, a novella, a short novel, a prose poem or what. It's certainly condensed. It certainly chooses its images with the precision of poetry. There is as much in what is left out as in what is included. I do think that it is very good but I want to read more of her work and re-read this piece before I even begin to think about forming judgements.

And, finally, BBC Radio 4 has just concluded a three-part Classic Serial adaptation of The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. Again it was very good but I don't find myself warming to the world of Henry James. It is exquisite, perfumed, crafted. But actually I find Edith Wharton more perceptive, more grounded, more acute, nastier in every way.