I headed over to the Lowry for Opera North's production of Janáček's Katy'a Kabanova which was given in English and with no interval. It had all the makings of a fabulous evening.
So many things to look back in pleasure upon.
I headed over to the Lowry for Opera North's production of Janáček's Katy'a Kabanova which was given in English and with no interval. It had all the makings of a fabulous evening.
A clean, straightforward design allowed the narrative to flow though didn't make the best of contrasts between public and private spaces. There was excellent singing with good, projected diction making the side titles an irritant. The direction moved and placed characters naturally and the orchestra made the music sound easy to play.
This was something like the tenth time that I have attended the work. It is one of my favourite works in the canon. If I wasn't entirely caught up in the drama, that was the product of my fatigue not the fault of the storytellers.
It feels like more than three years have passed since Deutschland 83 was screened in January 2016 but hurrah!! it's back!!
And it's still as mordantly funny as before - this time scabrously picking over the politics of East German involvement in the Angolan Civil War.
It's says much for the madness of the age that I was unsurprised to learn that the DDR sold arms to the apartheid South African regime and sold HIV infected blood to the West. What else would they do to raise money to protect the "purity" of Socialism in their country?
Jonas Nay retains the lovely bum we all admired in the first series.
I have just cooked a dish from the BBC Book Vegetarian Kitchen which I bought in the early 1980s. The dish, called Red Dragon Pie, is one I haven't cooked for well over a decade and is a sort of mix between chilli con carne (with no carne) and Shepherd's Pie (with only a smidgeon of shepherd). The recipe shows its age by suggesting that I soak the aduki beans overnight before boiling them so they are tender. All I did was to buy a can from Sainsbury's.
Roland was exercised by the "smidgeon of shepherd" feeling that the inclusion of any would preclude it from being vegetarian. I averred that the shepherd did not die in the taking of the smidgeon and that this amounts to the same principal as if you grate part of your knuckle into a cheese sauce. It wouldn't be vegan though.
Roland put his foot down at this point. "There either is meat or there is not: the quantity does not matter." But the matter, as with so much in life, is not a simply binary choice. Hence the debates about eggs (an abortion) and milk (taken from a sentient animal). There are degrees of vegetarianism.
I'll admit that the whole area is prone to absurdities. How can you have "dairy free butter"? It's like "fat-free milk" - a contradiction in terms.
Julian, however, was transported back to the 1980s of our youth but was reticent to acknowledge that we were relating to events from over 35 years' ago. As he said "It seems like only yesterday that we had a female conservative prime minister who was intransigent and Chelsea were messing up football matches.
Nigel added to the conversation that he had once had to explain to a vegetarian friend that the Worcestershire sauce that he was using in all his favourite recipes wasn’t exactly compliant. Apparently, the poor chap's face fell like a soufflé when he was told that he'd unwittingly been ingesting anchovy for decades. But then even Verdi's Falstaff managed "six chickens, thirty jugs of sherry, two pheasants and one anchovy" - orchestrally accompanied by the gossamer thread of a piccolo I seem to remember.