Tuesday, June 2, 2009

IN CASE YOU'RE WONDERING


What's been happening? Winter's been happening. Short days and long nights, with all the summer worries and all the summer work aside for the moment. I'm reading The Discovery of France, Graham Robb (2007). France - where for centuries the country shut down in the winter months, the tribes hibernated in their shelters, ate little and slept much. I feel like I was there.






That's Fafner, my favorite log on the track. Il monte la garde.



2 comments:

Imogen said...

Have just been looking at your site a bit more and found these lovely pics of dreamy misty woods. A sharp contrast to the baking afternoon sun on the cricket pitch on Kew Green, outside my window.

I've also had a look at the Opera Australia website. Was it Neil Armfield who did the magnificent production of "Billy Budd" with an extraordinary set of a multi-level expanding and contracting gantry and platforms THING (seriously, it beggared description), which ENO acquired a couple of years ago? The THING worked superbly and the production was intelligent and coherent and deeply moving. I suspect he'll make a very interesting job of "Peter Grimes".

And Susan Gritton is singing Ellen Orford. Lovely casting. Grr. I need a couple of thousand £ spare and a month more of annual leave...

Sorry to learn that even native flora are having water problems, but not surprised. Such are the times we live in, etc etc.

Best wishes, forgive my rambling,

Imogen.

wanderer said...

Here the winters are short and the summers long and testing.

You're right about Armfield and that Billy Budd. That set designer was Brian Thompson, genius of a set, covered just about everything that was overt and covert in the whole drama, the coldness, instability, the ranking and social (dis) order, the sea, the relentless...

That set worked particularly well in the little black box we call an opera theatre, where the set was an extension of the space we were all in, all at sea (so to speak), and better I expect that the jarring contrast with however you'd describe the interior of the Coliseum.

Armfield has a good track record with Britten; there was that BB, and before that a pretty harrowing Turn of the Screw. He keeps it simple and never lets himself get in the way of the music. That David Alden, in your ENO Grimes, defined the apprentice's death as accidental is not the sort of thing you'd expect from Armfield.

We can thank the late Richard Hickox for casting like Susan Gritton (and Susan Bullock in the Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk).

Rambling and ramblers welcome.