I made another brief visit to London.
Last month, I explained how I had accompanied Roland to London as a stand-in companion owing to Colin feeling wretched from chemotherapy. Roland asked me if I should like his ticket to see Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk at Covent Garden and I took him up on the offer. Once again, I probably wouldn't have singled out the production as one to attend under my own steam but, sometimes, it just good to go with the flow.
The only production of this work that I had seen previously was at English National Opera, the second time in June 2001. That view of the work is very brutal (setting it in an abattoir is perhaps the main giveaway). I wondered how this revival of Richard Jones's production would differ as it had been much lauded on its first appearance.
Well, I guess that the first thing to say is that the production responded to the vaudevillian aspects of the music which switches on a knife edge from rowdy gaiety to grim tragedy and then back to superficial glamour before becoming incredibly seedy. Antonio Pappano kept the riotous assembly afloat with pure élan: I would love to see how Vassily Petrenko would handle this score.
Eva-Maria Westbroek gave a tour de force performance as Katerina. She was all of those downtrodden Eastern European women who fight back from Mařenka in Smetana's Bartered Bride onwards through and past Janáček's Jenůfa and Katy'a. She was surrounded by horrible men from her drunken, oafish father-in-law, Boris (John Tomlinson), to her vapid husband, Zinovy (John Daszak), and her immoral lover, Sergey (Brandon Jovanovich).
The whole narrative hurtled towards its grimly awful conclusion with the idea of bodies being tipped out of the back of a storage container.
Fabulous, darling, fabulous.
Since I was in the capital, I took the opportunity to visit the National Gallery and its exhibition Monet and Architecture. I guess as an artist we tend to think of Monet as a painter of gardens (just think lilies) or in his earlier work landscapes and seascapes.
But it's amazing how often the idea of light playing on buildings reoccurs during his working life. Initially, it was just the bridges and churches and buildings of Paris and its surrounding enclaves but, later on, there is a whole series of painting set in Venice and London.
For me, the highlights of the exhibition were the sets of paintings from different locations capturing the same view under different light conditions. The views of the Houses of Parliament below conjure up differing times of day, differing weather conditions, differing seasons, differing moods, differing occasions. Nothing is the same twice. As the Greek philosopher, Heroclitus, has it "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man".
