From a recent story in the SMH about Brad Pitt:
Jolie’s recent revelation that she had a preventative double mastectomy has brought the couple even closer. “We knew this was the right thing to do for our family and that it would bring us closer. And it has,” Jolie said.
Opera Australia has issued a statement regarding artist contracts.
This is the central bit:
Opera Australia has put before the minority of principal singers who have been engaged on 52 week contracts a proposal to undertake more flexible employment arrangements. It is regrettable that this has been partially reported in the media. We think it appropriate to continue to discuss the proposals directly with the singers affected and their agents and union, before responding publicly to questions about any new arrangements.
There is more of the usual about the company’s financial position and the success of the company’s new strategies. The estimation of that success is in fact the whole issue.
The whole thing is bookended by the following rather amusing paragraphs:
Opera Australia would like to thank everyone who has expressed interest in the future of the company and its artists.
and
Opera Australia is continually working to respond to its audiences and improve its financial position. It is true that this change is challenging for the company and artists involved and we thank all of the company’s supporters for their concern.
My sisters and my younger sister’s son both visited me recently from London and WA. Together we went to Canberra to see our father. We also caught up with a paternal cousin who lives up the Putty Road.
He is a film maker.
I take that as the inspiration for this rustic trolly. He has a number of such little wheeled items, constructed on the top of rescued toy prams and the like.
Our family hails from the West. My father came to Sydney and my uncle lived for some years in Melbourne.
We, too, had a pack of cards like one the packs in the picture. I suspect my cousin’s pack and our pack both came from our grandmother who came from Perth by train to visit us all a number of times.
This weekend, west of the divide, to Gulgong.
Since I last posted about this town (and here), the hospital has closed. There is a kind of clinic being constructed to replace it.
This is an unconstructed bridge for an uncompleted railway at Spicer’s Creek on the Goolma road to Wellington.
Last night went with D to see Les Invisibles, a documentary by Sebastien Lifshitz screening in Sydney as part of the Alliance Française French Film Festival .
This features the reminiscences of a number of older French gay people (or perhaps more strictly glb), born (with the exception of one woman who was about 10 years younger than her partner) before WWII and so of a generation who came to adulthood at a time when gay people, though not by this time unheard of, were required to live their lives in conditions of invisibility so far as their sexuality was concerned. Hence the title.
Some were couples; some were single; some had previously been heterosexually married and had children. There’s some more background info here.
One point of the film was that it did not deal with people in the Parisian metropolis, but rather in Marseilles or what I took to be, loosely, its hinterland. The reminiscences were intercut with some historical footage, some featuring the participants in moments of public radicalism in the past and feminist, lesbian and gay-liberational demonstrations from the times they have lived through, as well as one quite sinisterly demeaning documentary (with English voice over) on gay and lesbian nightlife in Paris. (short extract here).
Of course, all such documentaries, being anecdotal, are heavily reliant on the selection of informants/participants. This is anecdotal rather than scientific history. (And yes, I realise that begs a lot of questions, but I mean: on the spectrum.)
It was a bit slow and perhaps a bit repetitive but definitely thought provoking (as slow films probably need to be) and at times moving.
There were rather a lot of nice goats and cats. On subsequent reflection, also dogs – which just goes to show I am a cat person.
The festival has screenings in various capitals but this film is only screening as part of it in Sydney – perhaps because it has got a guernsey in glbt festivals in other capitals (why not in Sydney? one may well ask). There are only a few screenings left. I’m just mentioning it now without further elaboration because if I wait till I have a chance to comment the screenings could well be over.
Unless you are bad on slow films, I definitely recommend it.
Last night with D to Opera Australia’s production of Verdi’s Falstaff.
Oceans of ink have been spilt on this opera and its quicksilver style.
As with its Shakespeare source, the plot (in Boito’s version sketched to the bare minimum) is just an excuse to bring a beloved character to the stage.
There are almost no set-piece arias and the action and dialogue are fast-paced and full of good bits from Shakespeare. Maybe that’s why there were more empty seats down at the surtitle-foreshortened front than is usually the case.
I have seen this production on, I think, all of its Sydney outings (1996, 1999 with Bryn Terfel very memorably as the big bloke, 2006). The set in the first two acts and the first scene of the last act is terrific. I still don’t think the last scene really works. The revolving set which serves for the Windsor locales slides to the back of the stage and yields to a box of verdant flats for Windsor forest. There is fog and a bit of snow falling. On a finicky note, just that afternoon Sir John was drinking in the sun, albeit with a few conceivably autumnal leaves dropping. How can the weather have come to snow so quickly? That’s just an attempt to fill the empty stage, I expect. The stage also feels too bright.
As Peter McCallum says in his latest review, this empty stage puts a big burden on the singers and, I would add, on the music – particularly when (because the chorus, as fairies and devils, are constrained by walking on their knees) the movement is also rather limited. When Falstaff responded “Oi, Oi Oi” to the various pinching and poking torments it all seemed just a bit lame and limp. I knew I was meant to be amused. Before that, John Longmuir sang Fenton’s aria well enough, but Lorina Gore’s number as Nanetta impersonating the queen of the fairies just didn’t quite get there – not just because of her but because of a bit of orchestral scrappiness. Magic, even pretend magic, can be tricky.
The title role was a great achievement for Warwick Fyfe. He has his own comic style.
Afterwards, I remarked to D that it was a pretty silly opera. D demurred. All Western operas, he thinks, are silly (he thinks Chinese operas are serious; sometimes too serious).
The assumption embedded in my remark was that tragic operas are not “silly.” I think what D had particularly in mind was the “fat lady sings” aspect of most Western operas – that is their manner of presentation, rather than, so much, their plots and any message that these carry.
To paraphrase the final fugue, it’s a joke. Isn’t that enough? In fact, I think there is a bit of a take-away message, and the key word is resilience. It’s true that when Falstaff dries himself out under the sun, a drink helps to restore him to that trilling feeling, but you know he’d get there anyway even without a drink, or at least you hope he will. That’s his charm.
And as Bardolfo, Kanen Breen got to wear a dress, yet again.
Tonight to Opera Australia’s production of Masked Ball for the third time.
The performance was being “captured” for Cinema Live. There were three cameras up in the middle about row G or H of the stalls (where the company bigwigs usually sit), another on the eastern end of row D, and an enormous cantilevered boom coming out of the front of Loge A, swinging right over the stage. This was surprisingly unobtrusive and even congruent with the Orwellian theme, but I think it may have made the audience rather self-conscious. Especially in the first half, a number of moments which might have elicited applause (and did so last time) passed in silence. Maybe it’s a Tuesday thing.
There may even have been other cameras which I have missed in this account.
Someone once told me that the first generation of live video recordings of the opera, starting in about 1983, were made possible by the ABC’s acquisition of compact video cameras for the 1982 Brisbane Commonwealth Games. These cameras didn’t seem particularly compact.
Some things remained the same from the first two times: there were just too many words for Gustavo to keep up with the pace set by Andrea Molino for “Ogni cura si doni al diletto” (the number about all meeting at the fortune-teller’s at three which is obviously written to be a catchy “hit”). On the other hand, Jose Carbo has burnished his tone to a darker hue, particularly just above the stave, where I had previously felt that an occasional lighter tone peeped through the Verdian veneer which he is in the process of acquiring.
One of my favourite bits in this opera is at the end of Act II: Amelia, Anckarstrom’s wife, has followed the fortune teller’s advice and come to gather a herb at midnight at the foot of the gallows beyond the city walls. This, she hopes, will cure her of her guilty love for the king. Unfortunately for this plan, the king has overheard the fortune-teller’s advice and come there also, and they have declared their love for each other (but not actually got up to anything else).
In the meantime, conspirators have somehow got wind that the king is there with a woman and are coming to attack him. Anckarstrom comes to warn the king. As the conspirators approach, the king slips away, but not before Anckarstrom promises to accompany Amelia (who is veiled) back to the city without lifting her veil.
The conspirators unveil Amelia, to Anckarstrom’s consternation. What’s a fellow supposed to think? In one of my favourite laughing choruses, the conspirators are grimly amused at Anckarstrom’s expense: “See, our hero, on a “honeymoon” in the midnight under the gallows with his own wife. What will the gossip be in the city when this news gets around!” It’s a moment of multiple dramatic ironies. The bit I like is not the first level sarcastic joke (why would a man need to have a secret tryst with his own wife? – or vice versa – and what a scandal not – save that the tryst was really with some other man) but the second-level one – maybe not quite part of the drama but one for the long-partnered: why would they want to?
At interval a couple of older women joined me at the table where I was standing partaking of my interval sandwiches. That is, they were older than I. Somehow, when we were discussing this scene, one of them said to me: “Do you remember the Bogle Chandler case?” I think it was the nocturnal tryst aspect which brought it to mind, though the word she used was “cavort.” I had to tell them that I was very young at the time. (I was not yet three.)
Tonight (Thurs) to the Masked Ball again. Photo: Prudence Upton
This was a spur-of-the-moment decision taken on Wednesday when I noticed a front point seat in a loge was available. That was $72: I cycled to Opera Australia specially to buy it without incurring a booking fee. I loathe booking fees: they are insulting.
On the way in to my seat I saw Lyndon Terracini button-hole a vaguely familiar looking young man . It was only later (when composing this) that I realized I recognized him from his relatively minor role in last year’s production of Lucia. LT was looking rather pleased with himself, as well he might, having just been reappointed for a further 5 years. I have mixed feelings.
I chatted to a regular, also there for the second time. He hated the production but was keen on the singing, which he described as the best since Grimes. He had also been up in the loge for the first night. I was able to put him in the picture about a crucial detail of the (meta-plot; konzeptorial) conclusion which is right at the back of the stage and not visible from the loge. He thanked me for this, saying that otherwise he would have gone to New York next week without knowing. That was probably sarcasm. He has tickets, he told me, for nine Met performances.
At the end, the audience gave vociferous applause. The fellow behind me whistled repeatedly and incredibly loudly. An older, I would guess gay, couple glanced at him disapprovingly and I felt rather the same. It did seem a very indiscriminate form of applause. I would have been more impressed if he had been capable of covering his mouth when he coughed, about half a dozen times, in the course of the second half. I wasn’t so surprised to hear, as he talked to his companions on the way out, that he sounded American. Their applause etiquette is more enthusiastic than ours – I think it’s a kind of civility akin to “have a nice day.”
I found myself more moved by the love story this time, though a former lecturer of mine whom I spoke with afterwards on the way to the station and then on the train thought it was awful and a poor fit to the libretto. Maybe he was also offended by the even greater disrespect to the historical events than the libretto already shows. We joked a bit about his definitive history of the treaty of Utrecht which never got around to being written.
One thing I notice when I go to a production more than once is that quite often musical things which are not quite right once are still not quite right when you go again. It could be that the repetition is in my observation and opinion as much as in the performance. I’m thinking of little slips in ensemble and execution, or at least as they seem to me. Of course, once I’ve spotted them, I’ll be looking out for them again, which is probably a self-confirming process not to say self-validating.
On Saturday night with D to hear/see the SSO’s concert performance of Tchaikovsky’s Pique Dame. Little did I know, when I saw it in my opera-going youth in 1979, that there wouldn’t be another chance in Sydney for another 33 years.
You can see why it might not get mounted all that often. Opera Australia seems resigned to a loss if it mounts any opera which is not Italian, and the less expensive Eugene Onegin edges out PD whenever thoughts turn to Tchaikovsky at the opera. So that’s why we have resort to “opera in concert.”
This is something approaching an oxymoron, but let that pass for necessity’s sake. When the SSO puts on an opera this way, what it can offer is casting at a superior level and a more luxurious orchestral sound. I’m not so convinced by the Philharmonia Choir as a substitute for an operatic chorus, though they made a pretty good fist of it. The children’s choir probably needed to be a bit more “shouty” to be idiomatic – especially the boys as soldiers. Surtitles (just like the opera though also, just like the opera recently, with the occasional lag, especially on this occasion at the start) freed us from poring over program books.
The main challenge of a concert performance is for the singers: without the lengthy rehearsal process and coaching that they get in an opera production, how much will they be able to bring their characters to life? The risk is that they will be buried in their books.
Fortunately most of the singers overcame this, except for José Carbo. Perhaps the Cyrillic and the lingo were all too much. In the last act he had to sing a funny song at the casino. The chorus all laughed on cue to a gesture from Vladimir Ashkenazy. Alone of his fellow gamblers, Gennadi Dubinsky, as Surin, gave a little actorly chuckle – but it occurred to me he might really have been laughing at JC’s Russian. Mr Carbo is a singer I admire. Even if the “three cards” song sits a bit low for him (though it has a high finish), I think he can do [even] better than he did on Saturday if he can manage to look up a bit more. One peril of “opera in concert” is probably worth a mention: JC sported a pair of spectacles, presumably to read the score; D was shocked because he hadn’t thought JC old enough to need them.
Carbo got some scattered claps after this song, but it wasn’t until the (amazingly youthful) Andrei Bondarenko sang Prince Yeletsky’s big number rather well that the audience was really moved to applause. If it’s an opera, I think there should be room for that response – it would be a pity if people were inhibited from applauding by the concert “rules.”
As the ratio of Russian-speaking singers crept up, things became more dramatic. Stuart Skelton managed to match them, even if his manner of sticking out his jaw made him look, to me at least, more sulky than moody. That’s just a niggle because his performance really was one you could count as a triumph. This is a role he should take to the (proper) stage. Dina Kuznetsova was convincing and (I held back at first because of the sexism, but it is inherent in the work) convincingly gorgeous.
It’s a pity that the mode of curtain calls didn’t permit adequate response to be made to the singers individually.
Given that the opera is Russian, there of course are some sad songs. I know this is a stereotype, but those Slavs, they do good lugubre! Otherwise, the nocturnal middle section, for me at least, was the best. I’m a sucker for muted strings. The orchestra had desk lamps and the stage was darkened for Act III scenes one and two. I think it could also have been darkened for Act II scene ii.
Ensemble was a bit loose when things had to be fast and crisp, especially when there were syncopated figures in the accompaniment and a lot was going on vocally. One of the faster bits in one of Hermann and Lisa’s duets got a bit ragged.
As is often the way today, the performance redistributed three acts into two, with a break in the middle of the second act. I know there are financial reasons for this, but nevertheless I think it is an unfortunate compromise. It also meant that (for me at least) things dragged a bit in the pastoral interlude in Act II scene i.
I’d gladly go again tonight but will probably have to manage with the broadcast, which is on ABC “Classic” FM this Sunday.
Afterthought:
I’m told there were no head-in-book issues with Mr Carbo on Monday night and he certainly sounded terrific on as much of the broadcast as I was able to catch on Sunday night (which for the first half unfortunately required shutting off impromptu guests in the kitchen whilst I caught as much as I decently could – including his “3 cards” narrative – in the living room).
Would that were true!
Yesterday I received a letter at work. About half way down the page I read the following:
“As a senior and important member of the legal profession, it is my pleasure to invite you to become a”
The sentence started above the fold. This was the first line. I wondered what person identifying themselves in this way could be writing to me.
I unfolded it. The sentence continued:
“…Party Patron.”
The letter was from Senator Arthur Sinodinos, State President of the Liberal Party.
He is not a member of the legal profession at all!
The enclosed bumph included an application form which anticipated that I would “enclose $950 for my first year membership.”
For once, the title to this post has something going for it.
