And it was a wonderfully engaging and uplifting concert under the baton of Vasily Petrenko.
My autumn season of arts and entertainment has picked up its momentum.
There has been one concert and it was my first concert of this season. Meeting up with good friends to listen to good music has a definite sense of the gemütlich for me these days.
And it was a wonderfully engaging and uplifting concert under the baton of Vasily Petrenko.
Hindemith provided the overture. His Cupid and Psyche was a gossamer light confection.
Mozart's setting of the motet Exsultate, Jubilate dispensed a crisp, jewel-like hymn of praise to the ineffable.
Finally, Brahms's German Requiem with Louise Alder and Andrew Foster-Williams was a warm embrace of consolation.
My batteries were recharged.
There have been two operas both transmitted live from the New York Metropolitan Opera and viewed by me in the comfort of FACT in Liverpool.
I last attended a performance of Saint-Saens's Samson et Dalila in 1996: it was, in fact, only the second opera performance I had recorded right near the very beginning of this Journal.
Some weeks later, I met Ross for the first time and heard Roberto Alagna sing in La Traviata. I remarked then that his voice was already sounding tired after singing in Don Carlos.
Well, he's certainly a trouper but twenty-odd more years of singing roles a size too big for the voice I first heard in Gounod's Roméo et Juliette has certainly taken its toll. Goodness only knows how much of his vocal line was actually heard by the paying customers in the audience in New York.
I'd been hoping for tuneful entertainment and Mark Elder did his best to supply that but I'm not sure the French lyric style makes it into the best areas of his repertoire. Elīna Garan&ccaon;a was a sumptuous Dalila.
There are, I suppose, only two ways to go with a production of Samson et Dalila. There's the well trodden path of Cecil B DeMille biblical history (Covent Garden takes that route) or there's more recent route of using contemporary history in the Holy Land with Samson as a suicide bomber at the end.
Darko Tresnjak avoided both of these by choosing to make his presentation a mash-up of both styles. I really can't say that it worked. And the ballet sequence was one of the naffest things I seen on stage in a very long while.
Puccini's La fanciulla del west was great fun and treated as a Spaghetti Western opera in Giancarlo Del Monaco’s big budget, wide screen production. Marco Armiliato gave the score a really good dusting down and allowed all of the big tunes to shine out (some are in fact so good that they were re-hashed by Andrew Lloyd Webber (allegedly)).
The cast was certainly the best overall that I've witnessed with Jonas Kaufmann, Eva-Maria Westbroek and Željko Lučić giving it loads of wellie.
So, brill, brill, absolutely brill. Cinematic sets and costumes, high passions, fine voices and singing cowboys. What's not to like!!
There have been three films
The first was the biopic Bohemian Rhapsody with Rami Malek (Mr Robot) making a sterling attempt at presenting a fairly sanitised Freddie Mercury.
The film scored in its presentation of Queen's riotous rise to prominence. It seems obvious now that Bohemian Rhapsody was going to be an evergreen hit with a ground-breaking accompanying video but, at the time, it went against everything that was making money elsewhere in the pop music industry. Getting the green light for that project took some chutzpah. The other major achievement was a vivid recreation of the Wembley Live Aid concert in 1985 which re-launched Queen's stuttering career.
So, yes, it was a celebration and it told an origins story to generations who only know of the events, the people and the group as history. Otherwise? Well, I'm not honestly sure what the point was.
Rami Malek also cropped up in the remake of Papillon - once a vehicle for Steve McQueen to be heroic and Dustin Hoffman to overact in the penal colony on Devil's Island, French Guyana. This version tried to go for realism but, in reality, the realism you would need to portray the conditions in such an establishment would not make for cinematic entertainment.
Rami Malek played Dustin Hoffman whilst Charlie Hunnam (nearly twenty years after Queer as Folk) played Steve McQueen. They were joined by Michael Socha (once a werewolf in Being Human). Here are all three in the very clean communal showers displaying their very well nourished bodies to the camera. You can appreciate the level of realism as you appreciate those prime rump steaks.
I really must heed my own advice and cut back on the number of superhero movies that I persuade myself to watch.
Whatever its merits, I simply could not see the point of Venom at all.