I guess it’s the time of year.
With easeful death, in case anyone is wondering about the title. Actually my feelings are more ambivalent than that: it’s not that I’m indifferent but at present it is more others’ deaths than my own which preoccupy me and I’m not really in either an aestheticizing or religifying mood about it.
Children and party-goers have been on the streets in Halloween costumes. Is this a third, anthropological way? I get the impression that nobody can quite decide whether any close weekend will do – which shows that the roots of the festival are still fairly shallow here.
I’m passing on a performance of the Duruflè Requiem by the choir of St James King Street as part of a service this Saturday for All Souls. If it were just the music, I’d be attracted, but I’m getting a bit over the religion. Anyway, friends have taken pity on my home-alone status and invited me to dinner. How often does that happen these days?
But I did go last Friday night to hear the SSO, conducted by Donald Runnicles, perform the Faure Requiem (the advertised headline) and (in the first half, and more importantly, to me) Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration and Four Last Songs.
My neighbour for these to my left seemed a bit wound up. Having coughed quite liberally to clear her throat after taking her seat, she glared at me quite wildly when I essayed a much more modest (and mouth-closed) precatory throat clear. Maybe her glare was equally a warning shot, just to make sure.
She had arrived at the last moment and betrayed her age by the difficulty she had in sitting down. I’d say she was well into her eighties. After the last (death referencing with the twittering piccolos) song, she sat still. The two women to my right who had clapped between each song were impatient: “We have to get to the toilet.” My neighbour was still slumped in her chair, eyes shut. The man to her left and I exchanged glances.
It occurred to me that she might have timed things: “Wie sind wir wandermuede – ist dies etwa der Tod?” but I dismissed this as melodramatic, as indeed it was.
Neither my neighbour to my left nor the “bathroom”-intent women to my right returned after interval.
Then we had the Faure. There were some great low organ notes. Runnicles took a massive but mild approach. That’s sort of making a virtue of necessity with a big choir and orchestra. I think I prefer the smaller-forces more direct version, but that did not stop me enjoying it.
This post has been gestating for a while now.
On the actual night of Halloween I escaped any trick-or-treatery by hiding out for a night at The Marriage of Figaro. Afterwards Circular Quay was abuzz with revellers disembarking from ferries.
For some there would be an extra trick because Sydney Trains was running trackwork on the Bankstown line. We were advised over the PA to take a train to Central via St James and Museum and change there to the Eastern Suburbs line before taking a railway replacement bus at Sydenham. This did not strike me as the best advice since it is much easier to change to the Eastern Suburbs line at Town Hall.
In the wake of my recent European jaunt I have wised up to the possibilities of the smart phone and avoided the train replacement bus nightmare by taking a train to Petersham and then catching a 445 to Canterbury. OK, I guess this really means that I just took my own replacement bus at my own minor additional expense. Once I would never have dared something like that because public transport in Sydney was (and still is) so infrequent that you would have to be a bit crazy to add the extra speculative element of a change of mode – especially if you thought you might rely on a bus running to timetable. Buses still don’t run to timetable much but it can be less of a stab in the dark now that more real-time information is available – at least when the system works.
Meanwhile, the seasons are moving on. Jacarandas are just passing their Sydney peak.
On Wednesday I heard my first Christmas carols – some a capella numbers sung by a flash crowd of women on Martin Place Station. It turned out they were a group drawn from the Endeavour Harmony Chorus who had just been performing at the NSW Primary Principals’ Association Conference at the Sofitel Wentworth Hotel. On the train they filled about half of the downstairs half of a carriage. A man prevailed upon them to give a further impromptu performance of “I am woman” which he filmed on his phone from the steps at the end.