I reacquainted myself with two works this week.
We were to have had Richard Farnes to conduct this concert but Mark Elder fell ill and Farnes was asked to cover for his duties with Death in Venice at Covent Garden. So there was a shuffling down the line and we had Andrew Gourlay instead. I was prepared to be disappointed but I wasn't.
The concert was good English fun all round from an affectionately floated performance of the Cockney romanticism of Elgar's Cockaigne Overture through a very peppily bucolic take on attic comedy in Vaughan Williams' Overture and Suite for The Wasps to a rip-roaring, lusty May festivity with Britten's Spring Symphony after the interval.
A big choir and luxury singers with Elizabeth Watts, Victoria Simmonds and Allan Clayton gave us a rollicking, celebratory peæn to longer and warmer days when the sap can rise in us all. The last time I heard this work live, Paul Daniels was conducting and I left at the end without feeling buoyed up. I fairly bounced out of the Phil at the end of this.
I took Colin with me on what has become these days an infrequent jaunt along the M62 to The Lowry at Salford for Opera North's Giulio Cesare. It says a lot for how my operatic appreciation has changed over the years that I now happily seek out three hours of operatic Handel to sit through.
Tim Albery's production was sober and serious, very, very serious - which made it seem quite a lot longer. Full marks to the cast and Christian Curnyn in the pit as they all gave their utmost. Standout performance for me was James Laing's Tolomeo.
I've also been making a reacquaintance of quite a different sort.
It's been a couple of months now since Nutkin left us to go hunting elsewhere. I've just vacuumed the front room for the third or fourth time since then and I've still picked up half a bag's worth of fluff.
This will start stopping soon, won't it?