I've been keeping my spirits up with entertainment.
Live music has always been good for that sort of thing and any concert conducted by Andrew Manze is a draw. We began with Mozart's Symphony No32 which comprises three short movements and is an eight minute exercise in elegance much like an Ouverture. It was nicely and neatly performed.
Ian Tracey stepped to the fore bestriding the Phil's recently refurbished organ. Gigout's Grand chœur dialogué for Organ and Orchestra was the sonic showpiece it was intended to be: not much substance but an awful lot of swagger. Both soloist and orchestra enjoyed themselves.
I was less happy with the performance of Poulenc's Concerto for Organ, Strings and Timpani. It gave us all of the notes but I didn't feel (as I have in other performances of this work) any sense of the personal struggle or the resolution in faith that Poulenc seems to me to be trying to convey.
I was also less than happy about the balance of the organ and the orchestra.
The swagger was fine in the Gigout but here the massed sound of instrument seemed overbalanced: this is more of a chamber work that a symphonic outpouring. I also felt that sound and instrument were separated. The ageing, portly man on the left hand side of the stage did not seem in any way to be connected to the mighty thunderings.
The final piece was Sibelius's Symphony No1. Manze had a sense of the chill in the music and he was good with the tidal sense of ebb and flow and scurrying wind and natural growth and yielding. And yet. Something did not coalesce for me. I'm not sure that I can identify or express what I mean by that. Just that I was happy with rather than touched by the performance.
Colin and I travelled over to Salford for Opera North's performance of Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos. As with the Met Cinecast which I attended last year, I fell asleep during the Prologue even though it was (sensibly) sung in English on this occasion.
The second half was beautifully sung and most enjoyable. By and large, the concept of the production hindered neither the action not the singing and Elizabeth Llewellyn's Ariadne and Ric Furman's Bacchus were as good as might be hoped for in the final duet. A lovely evening out complemented by very easy driving both to and fro.
Lohengrin is not my favourite Wagner opera. My first connection with the piece was the first showing of Covent Garden's long lasting Elijah Moshinsky production conducted by Bernard Haitink back in 1977. I was moderately engaged by what I saw and heard. In those days without surtitles, I judged that my intermittently high levels of boredom were to do with my lack of knowledge about the piece.
Then I attended a performance in 1993 by ENO which was conducted by Mark Elder and felt like the longest week of my life. Everything, just everything about the presentation was guaranteed to induce catatonia. Consequently, I have thereafter tended to avoid performances of the work.
I did watch a webcast from Bayreuth in 2012 but I was repelled by the production's grande idée of the laboratory rats.
A lockdown Webcast from the Met allowed me to reclaim some historical virtue for the work but none which would have ever persuaded me to travel and attend the piece.
So it was with a certain trepidation that I joined Roland for a trip into Liverpool and a walk up to FACT to catch a matinée encore cinecast of the Met's latest incarnation of this work.
Bowled over would be far too strong to describe my response but I was enthusiastically engaged.
I'd put my engagement primarily down to the conducting of Yannick Nézet-Séguin which was fleet and light and airy. Closely aligned would be François Girard's production which, as with his Parsifal from 2020, was uncluttered, direct and spiritually secular.
Thirdly, the cast was more than up to the task.
Of the five principals, Christine Goerke took the palm as Ortrud. However, Tamara Wilson as Elsa and Piotr Beczala as Lohengrin were not far behind. Evgeny Nikitin as Telramund and Günther Groissböck as Heinrich der Vogler were stalwart in their support.
I was much taken with the experience though I still would need a lot of persuasion to travel and attend a live performance at a distance from my home base.
One further reflection on Nézet-Séguin's conducting. Although the orchestra was 50% bigger than it would have been in Wagner's time and the instruments have been greatly enhanced in the subsequent 173 years, it did feel as though I was listening to the sound-world of an opera given its premier in 1850.
That was the same year as Schumann's Genoveva, the year after Nicolai's Die lustigen Weiber, three years after Flotow's Martha, eight years after Lortzing's Wildschutz, fifteen years after Schubert's Fierrabras and, most importantly for Act II Scene i, thirty years after Weber's Die Freischütz. (A quick aside: Apart from Cornelius's Der Barbier von Bagdad and Wagner's own works, you have to wait until Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel in 1893 for another opera in the German vernacular which has established any position in the wider repertoire.)
I think that Nézet-Séguin has the trick of it. Just as Bizet's Carmen is a work conceived as Opéra comique rather than full scale verismo, Lohengrin is a work which may well work best when treated as a child of the mid-century romantic German quest for identity rather than a work which can carry the burden of guilt-laden heilige deutsche Kunst.
There were no such issues when it came to English Touring Opera's performance of Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia which I saw in Chester with Colin once more. Over a decade ago, I saw and was thrilled by the work at Buxton Festival. This occasion didn't reach those heights but was still excellent entertainment.
Big tunes, powerful conflicting emotions, a sturdy production and costume design that expressed and did not hinder the action, voices that rode over the orchestra and wrung out the notes in moments of high passion and a dénouement that was chilling. Such experiences are not to be sniffed at.
Sex can also be a great source of entertainment to buoy up the spirit.
In retrospect, I'm not sure how I ended up organising for Jack and Jamie to end up on a bed together with me. They had worked together on a previous occasion and so I guess it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Anyhow. Though there was some enjoyment to be had out of the occasion, Jack really let the two of us down with his lack of preparation and well selfishness really. I put it down to experience but not money well spent.
Much greater entertainment was provided by teenage footballer Gavi, who plays for Barcelona, and whose butt was an outstanding feature of last year's Copa Mundial.
In the heat of a recent, closely contested game, he was bundled to the turf and a combination of friction and momentum caused the lad's shorts to be pealed away from his body.
That's quite some cleavage for an 18-year-old.
It would appear that the wardrobe malfunction was caused by an opponent treading on his shorts. I don't suppose that many would mind if it were to happen more often now.
Humour also is a great source of entertainment to lighten the mood.
Many gay friends have enjoyed the levity of the design idea presented below. A couple have said that they are storing the idea away for future use. Hem.
I think we'd all guessed that Matt Hancock was in the "I'll do anything for ready money" phase but the Pope joining up with East 17 was a bit out of left field (even if the image of the Pope in a Puffer Jacket did turn out to be an AI creation).
This interpreter for television deaf viewers went into overdrive when given the task of delivering the gist of Boris Johnson's defence to the Privileges Committee hearing which considered the possibility that he had deliberately misled the House. He certainly gave a two track reading with hands signifying the words and face signifying an informed reaction.
As this baptism by water pistol demonstrates, people showed a lot of ingenuity during Covid lockdowns.
Talk about "I name thee John Wick".