nineveh_uk

The summer feels like it has gone by in a flash, but not before I managed to Do Some Things with it. Mostly in Edinburgh, where I had the holiday I meant to have last year, before I came down with Covid on my first full day there. This year I did not have Covid and also seem to have managed to get back to about where I was healthwise last year before I got it again, which meant that I not only had a nice time with my parents and Youngest Sister, but felt up to leaving the house, if with the inevitable days of not being so good.

* A Little Night Music, Sondheim. Edinburgh Conservatoire, so students who can actually sing and a decent director. I'd never seen it before and had avoided looking up the plot, though genius was not required to work out which way things were tending. Strong performances from the leads and a solid cast in general, with good direction and ensemble pieces. I enjoyed it a lot, and it made me want to see the Bergman film/

* Legend of the White Snake. A 75 minute abridged version of the extremely long original, this was excellent, performed by the younger members of a professional Chinese company. My father boldly joined me, and we both really enjoyed it. The musical style is never going to be my favourite, but it was interesting to hear it live by trained performers. There were, thankfully, surtitles, and more humour than I expected, and some excellent fighting/acrobatics*, although that did not save it for the 10 year old boy in front of me who was silent but unmistakable in his wishing that his mother had not dragged him to this display of his cultural heritage. Having seen a piece of Kunqu opera once, would I go again? Definitely!

* An Irish Impressionist: Lavery on Location Large National Galleries of Scotland exhibition of the painter John Lavery (1856 - 1941). I'd never heard of him, but ended up liking his work a lot, he caught people very effectively, as well as landscapes. He had trained in Glasgow, then France, and worked in an impressionist style, mostly southern Europe and Morocco. Mum and I were struck by his evidently being a man with a strong sense of business, who had seized on opportunities to make his career. We were particularly impressed that, commissioned to do a large painting of Queen Victoria visiting the Glasgow International Exhibition, he had invited everyone to be in it to his studio for him to do a study of them, to make sure he got a good likeness. Only fitting for an important civic piece, of course - and meant that he got individual time with a large number of potential patrons and customers. Full marks to a self-made man.

* Yoshida: Three Generations of Japanese Printing at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. I really like father and son Yoshida Hiroshi and Toshi's work, so it added a new dimension to see them here contextualised by each other and also art by their wives and families. My favourites remain the traditional landscape styles, but some there were some interesting more abstract pieces, as well as a number of what ten year old me mentally categorised as "1960s grey gloomy things" that did not enliven a wet Sunday afternoon in Leeds Art Gallery (I was much more taken with the Lady of Shalott, and Gordon of Khartoum). I bought the catalogue.

*We also liked a more low key piece of movement of pretending to be on a boat and getting the swaying feeling across.

The Opera North orchestra performs a social distance version of Thus Spake Zarathustra, in concet dress, naturally. Imagine being the people who live next door to the timpani. It's also quite fun to spot the Ikea furniture.




In local news, I am in some dire need of new piano music, so any suggestions welcome (about grade 5 ABRSM, not too hard. What I'd really like would be 'songs from the shows' that sit between the too easy and the too difficult).


I am also starting to feel much better once again, with fever symptoms having vanished, though I could do without the morning congestion that inevitably kicks in when I have something vaguely respiratory for a while. The Guardian has what seems a good article on how to look after yourself. I really wish that the NHS website had more on this, particularly on the need for rest. I spend so much time with colds etc. that I don't rest solidly through them, and it would have been handy to know from day 1, which was several days before I stopped work, that you need to down tools early. But that would be against the national spirit. But really I continue to have got off lightly.

Now for my regularly scheduled post-lunch sitting in the garden. It is so sunny that I have even put on a hat.

Some years ago, in a minibus on the Gudbrandsdal, I spotted a memorial to what appeared to be some random Scottish solders. And later I looked it up and it turned out to be the Battle of Kringen in which some Norwegian farmers attacked, captured, and subsequently slaughtered 300 Scottish mercenaries en route to Sweden. This did not cause a diplomatic incident on account of King James VI/I being unimpressed that they were there at all, on account of how he was supposed to be allied to Sweden's enemy, Denmark. The National Archives have more of that.

Anyway, I looked it up again the other day as I am heading to that part of the world again in March and discovered there was a ballad, and coincidentally it got mentioned on fail_fandomanon and I thought I should listen, and I did and it is brilliant.

(1) In a dialect called Gøtedansk, AKA Faroese Danish with the consonants reinserted and thus more comprehensible.



(2) The metal version. Actually less metal than the previous one. This band are also Faroese. Clearly the Faroes like their ballads of slaughter, I can't complain.



There is also the community hall version - impressive knowledge of the lyrics, and the usual unimpressed teenagers. Or with female voice in Norwegian this time. Oh wait! Female voice with jazz accompaniment. Like you do.

Lyrics in Norwegian and English here and more modern here.

TL:DR Never go up against a bunch of Norwegian peasant farmers when death is on the line!

I really did. I have just discovered the official video to I Would Do Anything for Love, which looks like it is the most expensive Phantom of the Opera fanvid ever made*. It features a falling chandelier, oodles of candles, and a miserable, deformed, and hooded bloke who skulks around in the shadows waiting for a woman who appears inexplicably interested in him.**

I would have unironically adored it in 1993, had I known that it existed.



*With make-up rather like Buffy's vampires.

**Christine Daaé at least had the excuse of free singing lessons offering a rather better career, not to mention the mind games.

There is a crucial difference between Brexit and the plot of Götterdämmerung: though both have the leaders involved throwing their hands in the air and sitting doing nothing but wait until the house burns down around them, while elsewhere a bunch of people make some staggeringly stupid decisions despite the consequences surely being obvious from the start, the characters in the latter were actually gods, as opposed to just being bitter about membership of a school club. Also, a great redemption is definitely not spreading throughout this particular world as a result of their downfall. However George Osborne was present at both.*

Despite 6 hours** of Wagner feeling like a dubious decision 24 hours in advance, it turned out to be brilliant on the day. Indeed as the end approached I felt that 6 hours was far too short and it needed at least an additional hour. Nor was I alone in thinking so, judging by the comments from audience members near me at the end, and the general riveted silence.

It was a concert performance, being the only way Opera North can afford to do something like the Ring, but it felt as if nothing was lost thereby. Big screens at the back provided surtitles (good ones, thank goodness, no faux archaism. Whatever is lost in not distinguishing between du and Sie is more than gained in not sounding stupid when read in English in performance) and a degree of setting, of riverbank or water, wooden walls of a Dark Ages hall, fiery rock etc, with the aid of some coloured lighting. It doesn't sound much, but it really worked. No singer actually vaulting onto horseback and riding into the flames*** could have been more dramatic than a woman in evening dress standing in front of the orchestra in yellowing light, voice soaring seemingly effortlessly above it. And what an orchestra! I didn't manage an on-stage count, but as an estimate combined with a conservative reading of the programme**** I'd go for about a hundred (and I've just found confirmation - 101!). The orchestra of Opera North is always one of its strengths and this occasion was no exception, they were in magnificent form.

Wagner has a reputation of being hard-core opera. On the train in I was regretting that I hadn't had time to go carefully over leitmotifs etc in order to educate myself sufficiently to appreciate it. Reader, this is rubbish. Bad Wagner is probably incomprehensible torture on grounds of length alone, but good Wagner isn't hard at all. It's wonderful music that while I'm sure it greatly rewards study is very accessible without it and the leitmotifs leap up waving and shouting notice me! Alternatively, possibly I am simply well-trained in the School of Opera North, which has long interwoven Box Office certainties with more inventive repertoire. After all, Wozzeck is not only challenging and allows you to distinguish yourself as a company, it's pretty cheap to do. Back to Götterdämmerung. The plot is perhaps not one of its strength. Wotan doesn't turn up, and we get the new family to move into Eastenders (as the preliminary talk put it, very accurately). Hagen's***** Evil Plot depends entirely on his victims all being complete idiots. Fortunately for him, this is opera, and indeed mythology. It doesn't have to make sense in order to work. Hagen was sung by Mats Almgren looking like an evil thug in a Scandinavian detective drama - the more things change, the more things stay the same - and my favourite along with Kelly Cae Hogan as Brünnhilde.

A wonderful presentation of a wonderful work. I am converted, as you can tell! I wish I might have seen it all, I'm immensely glad I saw this.

Have some music:



*This would explain why each act started 5 mins late, if he was being ushered to his seat in the dark. Perhaps he might have borrowed the rather lovely guide dog I spotted stretched out on the carpet in the bar in the second interval. It's fair to say that Goldie, alone of all the beings I saw there, did not look wholly appreciative and wore a definite air of 'how long, oh lord, how long?'

**To be precise, 4 hours 40 mins of music, the rest intervals. That makes the first act equal in length to Tosca (2 hours), and the whole thing half as long again as an uncut Figaro.

***Now I need to check if that's every been done with (i) actual soprano, (ii) actual horse, (iii) actual flames. Checked! Though the examples mentioned don't specify flames...

****No need for ten anvil-players in this one, but I've never seen so many French horns (apparently some of them are 'Wagner tubas', which he invented because he needed an extra instrument...)

***** I first came across Hagen in my German GCSE textbook, which had a really good cartoon sequence of the Nibelunglied. We didn't read that bit, which tells you everything you need to know about the approach my high school took to engaging pupils in foreign languages.

I have an unfortunate habit of recording television programmes on serious subjects that I don't feel quite up to / I am busy at the time they are on, and not getting round to watching them. Slowly the DVR fills with serious television. And then on a day when I am off sick and want to watch TV* I look at the options and they are full of such things as:

* Subtitled TV drama (can't be watched without glasses).
* Documentaries on historic atrocities.
* Thing that I didn't watch at the time because actually I don't care.

Which is why in the last two days, as April continues to pretend to be winter and I have a stinking cold, I have turned to elderly videos and to YouTube and watched two films about young women finding new worlds, with bonus music.

Legally Blonde - the Musical

This was broadcast on MTV a few years ago, and some kind person has put it on YouTube, and the equally kind copyright holders haven't taken it down. It's a fairly straight adaptation of the film (a terrific comedy), very pink, and I found it a lot of fun.

Legally Blonde was always a film not only about sex, but about class. Elle is marked not only by her particular style of pink femininity, but by her West-coast-ness, her evidently very new money, her not being a 'natural fit' at ye olde establishment Harvard Law School. The major change** in the adaptation draws on this in its depiction of Emmett, from a posh bloke played by Luke Wilson who is also a partner in Callaghan's firm, to a TA who is himself also an outsider, on grounds of class. The alliance between Elle and explicitly working class characters (and working knowledge) was always one of the interesting parts of the film, and the explicit focus on it in the musical adds narrative heft to the book. Emmett and Elle's shared outsider status gives Emmett clearer motivation for his friendship with Elle beyond the film's "he's a nice person" and allows Elle to mirror the benefits she gains from his insider knowledge of Harvard and law with her insider knowledge of the transformative power of dress (and the money to pay for it).

Musically, it's not particularly interesting. The tunes are light and catchy, it moves with zip, but the music is of the kind that adds entertainment rather than depth. By far the best songs are Callaghan's jazzy Credo-like Blood in the Water and the courtroom Gay or European (2.35 for the song), which together steal not only the best tunes, but the best rhymes. Both, interestingly, are about categorisation, the first about how the (would-be) lawyer sees themself, the latter the challenge posed by the person who defies categorisation - and in its ultimate revelation of its subject as both gay and European heralds the thematic resolution of the show, in which Elle can be herself as well as a successful lawyer.

Beauty and the Beast

The 1991 Disney cartoon version, which has its own musical adaptation that I am now kicking myself for not seeing when it was touring a couple of years ago. This is an old favourite, and having not watched it with nephew in the end, I felt I would see it anyway. I can't remember if I saw it originally at the cinema or when released on video, in any case I thought it was good then and I still do. Watched on video, the age of the animation shows, though I suspect it would look less old with the sharper definition of a DVD (checks YouTube, yes it does), but the visual inventiveness holds up nonetheless. It was the first animated film to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, and while I won't claim it should have won*** it is certainly on a level with plenty of Oscar nominees over the years.

Belle is a charming heroine, intelligent, resourceful, a book-lover, and kind, and she and the Beast's cathedral-like library are clearly a match from the start. The Beast himself is a great cinematic creation, an exaggeration of every macho cartoon hero ever, bristling with muscles, hair, and temper, who must go through a process of civilization, but crucially one he achieves for himself. Disney is traditionally good at villains, and Belle's ruthless would-be spouse Gaston is a suitably monstrous contender. With pot-shots at anti-intellectualism, gender roles, fear of the outsider, and the way a charming small community can become stifling and predatory, the witty script is engaging throughout and there's not a dud song in the piece. It has become a cliché to deride the fairy tale prince the Beast turns into compared to his furry start, and it's true that the prince could never live up to him, but he's not bad, just conventional, and that was never going to win over viewers. I suspect that part might work better in the stage version, if played by a sufficiently handsome real human being.

*I have worked out why I for the past couple of years I have been reading for pleasure much less in than I used to: because I find it difficult to read when my eyes hurt. This came to me yesterday as I realised that I had read more in the last month than I have recently, and yet somehow I didn't want to read yesterday. And then I put 2 and 2 together...

**There are a couple of important minor ones as well, in the change in the finale proposal from being made by Emmett to its coming from Elle, and Brooke Wyndham's accidental public revelation of her alibi (is this also necessitated by the greater class focus of the show, given that Brooke is to some extent a snake oil salesman, whose products make her rich, but can't deliver their promise, even for her.)

***The Silence of the Lambs did. I can't remember if I've seen it and forgotten, in only clips.

****Tale as Old as Time may give the ballroom scene, but Gaston is surely the best character song.

Christmas cometh, and the family programme puts itself together. A lovely review for Scottish National Ballet's Cinderella, and it looks like I can put off being organised and getting myself to see Carol and go with my Dad and sister (2).

But most importantly, a bit of arm twisting has got everyone signed on the dotted line for karaoke! I love karaoke, because inside my reserved exterior lurks the heart of an total exhibitionist. All I need is a microphone, an excuse, and the knowledge that I'm not going to embarrass myself more than anyone else, and I'm off. My sisters were a done deal. My father simply needed introducing a youtube vid of Don't Cry for Me, Argentina with lyrics and the assurance that you can alter the pitch and the concept was sold*. I'm not sure what was said to my brother-in-law, but it worked - possibly that this was the opportunity to see my father singing Don't Cry for Me, Argentina. And so my mother decided that she wasn't going to be left out.

Now you must excuse me, I'm going to be practising Let It Go and I Know Him So Well and pretending the TV remote control is a microphone until Christmas. In the meantime, tell me your karaoke favourites! I need to come up with suggestions for Mum.

*Admittedly I did this on returning from my parents' 70th birthday meal, so the digestif might have helped.

(1) This is a rather charming little Wimseyfic vignette, a missing scene set directly after the end of Strong Poison: Aftershock, Mary and Peter (there should be more fic with Mary in).

(2) Every morning at the mine you could see him arrive... My father is prone to sing the first verse of this. If only he could remember more of it - or the internet had existed in my younger years.


(3) Not so random, a short and lovely extract from The Merry Widow.

With the possible exception of something by Abba, I think that Uptown Girl is the first pop song I remember. Yesterday I watched the original video for the first time. The song is a lot of fun. The video - is of its time. I lost it with the initial synchronised spanner use.



Today I took the car to the garage for its MOT and biannual* service. I can confidentally say that the two had nothing in common.

Also today I learnt that there's an Ashes to Ashes sequence of it. How did I not know?

In other news, I also went blackberrying and managed to catch my forearm not across a bramble, but a still very lively stinging nettle. Serves me right for forgoing my usual protective blackberrying leather jacket in favour of enjoying the weather.

*I do not do a lot of driving, and this year I did even less than usual. I am exactly the sort of person who ought to belong to a car club, except that there wasn't a convenient one when I was at the point of being interested, and personality-wise I am a lot better at dealing with sunk costs than paying each time I hire.

Or not. Because in fact I'm enjoying a blast from the past: the Sir Jack Lyons concert hall*, and Peter Seymour conducting, the only man I've ever heard make "as the bishop said to the actress" (and vice-versa) jokes sound funny, when he conducted the university choir to which I belonged as an undergraduate. Justin Bieber's "Beauty and a Beat" done as baroque music. With a counter-tenor (I like counter-tenors. I think I saw "Farinelli" at an impressionable age).



The reason behind the madness is here.



*Which unlike the man himself, has not been stripped of its title.