Two Matineés
23 February

The end of February has brought increasing light in the morning and evening.

Ross's brother Sam came to see us on Friday night as his domestic arrangements are proving unsatisfactory at present. We gave him meal and a bath and a bed for the night.

Well, I've seen more theatre shows in February of this year than I saw in the whole of last year. Most often ,locally, I spot things but let them drift by finding reasons not to attend at the last minute. In this case, with The Price by Arthur Miller at the Liverpool Playhouse, the reviews had been uniformly so good that I ensured that I got a ticket. In the event, I wasn't as wowed as the critics had been.

Yes, it's a very literate play and it touches on some very pertinent and modern themes. However, its very literacy makes it feel unreal to me. My experience of life is that people don't usually argue with such dogged clarity. Also the real time format doesn't work for me. I guess the Renaissance format, which is more like a cinema script, of many scenes of shifting locations engages me more. A style which was heralded as a new realism now feels to me to be achingly artificial.

The players were pretty good though their American accents fooled no-one. I guess that the palm goes to Robin Kingsland even though his character, Victor, was a born loser, a victim writ large. It was good when I was expecting better.

Sunday took us to the Phil for an afternoon concert. To be honest, by current Phil standards, it was quite ordinary. Which is to say good but not exceptional. Mr Petrenko took us through what I thought was quite a perverse reading of Prokofiev's Classical symphony. To me it felt all pulled about as though every effect was being underlined and brought to our attention rather than simply letting the thing speak for itself.

This was followed by Respighi's Rossiniana which I found pleasant but unmemorable and three arias of Rossini given by Julia Lezhneva, a Russian soprano of diminutive doll-like stature who possesses pinging coloratura but, to my ears, not a lot of character.

After the interval, the event finished with a brusque performance of Mozart's 40th symphony. Everyone did what was asked of them. Nothing was bad. I just wasn't particularly drawn into the whole event. It was reasonable.

Ross and I also watched The Reader on Sunday just in advance of Kate Winslett getting her Oscar.

It's a very good Holocaust film without ever showing anything of the Holocaust. It shows more how people came to terms with living in Germany and living with themselves as life and time moved on.

I liked the way that everything was understated and that there were, ultimately, no good or bad people. There were people who had done some very bad things; there were people who were vulnerable and behaved imperfectly. Judgements were left to the viewer rather than being forced by the film-makers.

It was very good and Kate deserved her statuette.