Family and Further
27 June

The latter part of June began with a couple of family events.

Firstly, I took my dad out for a meal at the Anchor Inn in Irby while mum went and did some shopping on her own in West Kirby. This was a treat for her as she doesn't get much time for herself these days nd was a treat for me and dad as it was Father's Day. It must be said however that he gets very uneasy when things are outside of his normal routine and he did keep asking where mum was.

Ross and I then followed this up with a meal with his parents.

The scene was then set for Ross and I to attend the pre-opening showing of Tate Liverpool's new exhibition of works by Magritte. I enjoyed this show much more than going to the Musée Magritte last summer. It was compact and therefore not exhausting; it had a goodly representative selection of his major works including a number of iconic images (like The Lovers opposite); it was local.

I liked the way the exhibition reinforced the idea of Magritte as a creator theatrical stage sets in which odd things happened. I liked the way that they emphasised his work as a commercial designer and creator of wallpaper patterns and showed how thins influenced the way that he repeated patterns and images throughout his life's work. And there were many images I just liked like these - The Listening Room, The Human Condition, Time Transfixed and The Dominion of Light.

And it was nice to see this image again, The Treachery of Images, which I remember first seeing in an "O" Level art lesson back in the late 1960s. An excellent show.

Then it was just a few days before I was down at FACT for a long Sunday session with Glyndebourne Festival Opera and their new David McVicar production of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. It's interesting for me to reflect that, just over a year ago, I was in the real town of Nürnberg myself. As I've said over the years, I am not a great fan of Wagner. However, I am enjoying the Met performances of the Ring, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre done and Siegfried and Götterdämmerung still to come, and I enjoyed this too.

Vladimir Jurowski conducted well. Gerald Finley was a fabulous Hans Sachs but I wouldn't want to hear him sing the role in a large house. I liked both Anna Gabler as Eva and, particularly, Marco Jentzsch as Walther von Stolzing. In Johannes Martin Kränzle, they found a more than capable Sixtus Beckmesser and found a way of making him all too human.

The ending too became a hymn to the healing power of all Art against disorder rather than saying that German art is best. I'm still not a convinced Wagnerite but performances like this tell me that not all Wagner is bad.