....and Opera Nights.

I  am a long way behind chronicling our opera trips this year, but for what it's worth -

First up was Sydney Opera House and an Elijah Moshinsky production of The Barber of Seville. It's not one of my favourites, but it's worth seeing with good singers and a good production. This had both. I'd never seen an EM production before although I had read about his genius for staging opera, and I have to say this was very enjoyable, although very busy. Always something, and usually several somethings, gong on in every part fo the stage, which is fine some of the time, but when you have a big aria, you probably don't want to be distracted from the soloist by six different vignettes of the servants doing funny things in six different places on the set. Still you got o Sydney Opera House as much for the experience of being there, as for the opera itself.

 

 

See what I mean about busy?

 

Next up was Scottish Opera's Rusalka in Glasgow, which was outstanding. Although it would never make  my top ten, I do like it very much and this was an outstanding production with excellent singing and a set that looked as though it came straight out of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. The OH was adamant he had never seen it and I was equally adamant that he had, and was dure he wouldn't like it, but it seems I was wrong on both counts. He adored it, and given that, then he cant have  seen it before or he would have remembered it. I know I saw it years ago when Opera North did it in Leeds but I must have gone with somebody else to see it.



And finally for now it was Scottish Opera's Mikado. For me, this struggled under three great difficulties.

1 I'm not a huge fan of Gilbert and Sullivan.
2 We went to see it just after I had suffered the 'you have all the editing and referencing skills of a lobotomised gnat' comment from my supervisor
3 Just after the beginning of Part 2 the fire alarms went off and we all had to troop out nto the steets of Glasgow while the Fire Brigade came and confirmed what we mostly suspected, that there was not a fire in the building.

I know the production got rave reviews but I didn't enjoy it. It couldn't decide whether t wanted to be 'genuinely' Japanese, or some sort of spoof Edwardian end of the pier show and the uncertainty took its toll.

Here are the firemen going away to rousing cheers - cheers for their swift appearance rather than the fact that they were going I think!


And here's a picture of the costume mash-up.

We'll be going abroad for some more opera very soon, and the next SO production we see will be Madam Butterfly, which I am hoping will tend to the Rusalka, rather than the Mikado, end of the scale of personal approval.