Morning all and what a bright and sunny morning it is – through my office window, grr. Maybe false spring is coming!! This will be the last time for a couple of weeks that I will be writing my blog on a Monday as next week I am jetting off to the holy land for a week. YAY!!! I will still be doing one cultural activity this week so will try and write it up before I go on Sunday – oh lucky lucky people.
So, have a real treat for all my poor readers this week – NOT an exhibition!! I know! Madness! This week I was fortunate enough to be invited by the lovely Andrew and Tom to The Elixir of Love by Donizetti performed by the English National Opera and directed by the august Jonathan Miller, who we saw standing in the foyer before the start!! He really is very hot for an old man. The venue (The Coliseum) has a lot of happy memories for me, especially before it was refurbished to its current sate of extreme Edwardian grandeur. At university, clearly being much more cultural and highbrow than I would ever dare to be now, we use to go all the time as you could get £3 tickets on the day – bargain! Alas it wasn’t quite as cheap as that this time but still excellent value for £16 – if you don’t mind the constriction of blood to your lower legs, but hey who needs toes! Interestingly we, patrons of the Balcony, are now thought to be so lowly we don’t even get the option of hiring the opera glasses they usually have in the back of the seats!! Luckily I had bought my own but in comparison to the Royal Opera House the view at the Coliseum is always fine anyway; the auditorium I think is much shallower so you never feel that far away. The Coliseum, all in all, I find to be a much less stressful and overwhelming experience than the Royal Opera House, you don’t even have to physically fight your way to the bar! It is also just so so beautiful and gilded inside.
Now, despite definite enjoyment I know NOTHING about opera at all. The singing was nice, they could all go very high and very low as necessary. The music was good. That’s about as much as I can say about that I’m afraid. Andrew kindly lent me his copy of the programme so I could have some interesting opera based things to talk about but I couldn’t understand what on earth they were going on about mostly. It was nonetheless interesting to see what I don’t understand – the list seems to be growing daily anyway. It seems opera is discussed academically like art!! Who knew!? I think it wise if I stay clear of this.
There were other articles/essays within the programme which I very much enjoyed, however, including the one discussing the use of love potions/elixirs in art throughout history. Flimsy is a word which sprung to mind. It started off well enough charting the use of the love potion as a device throughout the ages and briefly commenting on which era was particularly fond of using it, such as the 19th century (hurrah), and which weren’t. It then went on to discuss the use of love potions in contemporary arts siting such artistic highs as Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and Batman and Robin. Yes. Quite. Someone was paid for that.
For those of you interested the storyline was as follows: Nemorino is in love with Adina. She isn’t interested as she desires to remain ‘free’. Cocky young sergeant comes to town and attempts to woo her– she, wisely, isn’t interested. Nemorino, having listened to the ‘comical’ (??) story of Tristan and Isolde and their love induced by elixir, decides to accost the local crooked quack Dulcamara and purchases a bottle of what he thinks is love potion and of course is in fact booze. Full of Dutch courage Nemorino’s apparent indifference to Adina causes her to accept the sergeant’s offer of marriage to take revenge on Nemorino, as you do. Much hilarity ensues, obviously. The opera was originally set in 19th century Italy but here the events have been transposed to small town Americana in the 50s. The set was fabulous and obviously inspired by Hopper paintings but, according to the programme, was provided by the New York City Opera and originally created for the Royal Swedish Opera. I don’t know, therefore, whether they were created by Miller and he also directed this production elsewhere or whether Miller just directed and the actual performance was designed by someone else altogether. Oops. The costumes were also excellent and I particularly liked the white silk knee length pencil dress Adina wore in the second half – god the 50s were flattering.
The girl who played Adina is definitely worth mentioning. Obviously as to her vocal prowess I can make no comment but wow she was pretty!! As was the guy who played Nemorino – they were both young and both hot and definitely not fat!! A miracle for romantic leads in opera and definitely made a huge difference in involving the audience, or at least me, in the story.
I have mixed feelings about the ENO performing always in English as frankly it makes us look like ill-educated chav retards but it made a huge different to the enjoyment of the production in this instance. Often I find that even when they are singing in English you still can’t understand most of what they’re saying and usually it doesn’t matter anyway as they are just repeating the same thing over and over and then making annoying fake opera laughs. However, here the libretto (get me and my fancy opera terms) was amazing and in many places genuinely really really funny. Excellent additions for me included the use of the lyric ‘I’m a lover not a fighter’ – AMAZING!!! They also managed, at one point, to sing opera in the manner of Elvis which was hilarious. Almost the entire libretto had been altered to contain 50s vocabulary and all in all worked really really well, I thought! I very much liked listening to the damsel singing to the romantic lead to ‘get over it your crazy’. It was quite an eye opener to how relevant and accessible classical opera can/could be to contemporary society - god that makes me sound like a wanker. It was genuinely funny though and found I could watch it like I could a film, enjoying the storyline as much as the music and laughing out right. The man who played Dulcamara was excellent and another highlight was when one of the ‘cour de opera’ came out of the loo on stage with her dress tucked into her pants.
Right that’s all I will bore you with this week but in short very much enjoyed my alternative cultural pursuit and am going to attempt to introduce more opera, theatre, and preferably ballet to my cultural explorations.
See you next week xxxx
http://www.eno.org/see-whats-on/see-whats-on.php
Monday, 1 March 2010
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