It was the launch of the ENO’s Opera season last Thursday. People settled themselves into their boxes, all extended neck and self-importance, honking and espying like the wintering geese returning to the bald fields of my home village. (It’s autumn. Everything takes a turn for the wistful.)
A Telegraph journalist leans over and asks me if I remember my first time. I nod tersely. I remember the pink rose satin of the duvet, the curlicued wall-paper. I was thirteen. It was my best friend’s mother.
I must admit I’ve never been an out and out fan of the baroque. You say baroque and I see great aunts in fur wafting talcum powder. You say Handel and I see those who use ‘antiquing’ as a verb. There is, of course, beauty in Bach’s effervescing eddies. One can lose oneself in the great ormulu landscapes of Vivaldi and Pachabel and Scarlatti. But for me, the baroque is as soft and slippery and inane as Bambi slow cooked in baby oil. But to Handel I went. Reluctantly. Expected 20 Cantatas for the Happy Harpsichord.
It’s hard to describe a Bruckner symphony. Imagine a Vogon Spaceship: huge and awe-inspiring but there’s probably a planning office round the back where Scherzos are signed in triplicate and the adagio (as big and soaring as a hyperspace bypass) is awaiting council red tape. It’s a place where ostinatos hang in the air like bricks don’t.
There’s a story that when Verdi, that most Italian of composers, traveled by horse and coach to Russia, he went clutching a suitcase of spaghetti. To offset the fur and the ice, his wife purportedly said. I sat on the 18 bus from an unmentionable part of zone four with a greasy wodge of pizza and a beer on my way to the ROH’s big screen presentation of La Traviata at Trafalgar square. There was no fur and ice. It was the hottest day of the year, but the sentiment, I like to think, was similar: deracination.
Too Cosi for comfort
Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte has been re-conceptualised, shelved and relaunched more times than Marks and Spencers. It has, over the years, become a testing ground for quirky production ideas: it’s been set in a scientific warehouse, a snobby hotel during the Boer War, a girl’s boarding school and a mental asylum in Melbourne. It’s also been a ‘hip hopera’ complete with nipple piercings and inner city locution. What next? Arias in Kalahari click language?