I was astonished to see a little notice on the table in the restaurant in Gava where we had gone for Sunday lunch stating that “Beaujolais Nouveau est ariveé!”
My astonishment was not because a French wine was being sold openly in Catalonia – though it has to be said that this area does have a few wines of outstanding quality and amazing cheapness.
No, my astonishment was more because I assumed that only the
British would be taken in by such a transparent marketing opportunity like Beaujolais Nouveau.
Think about it: this is a fairly ordinary wine made even more ordinary by being sold when it is very, very young. So young and forced, indeed, that it has to be drunk at once because it doesn’t keep. The whole affair has the grubby hands of unscrupulous wine merchants spinning a cheap wine to inexperienced indiscriminate wine consumers (aka the British) who have been caught up in the pseudo sophistication of a blatant pseudo ‘event.’
So I ordered a bottle.
Oh, come on! I can still remember buying a few cases of Beaujolais Nouveau from Bottoms Up and using the ‘drink at once’ recommendation as a specific injunction! I remember returning home after school to find my parents in my house picking their way delicately over empty bottles, glasses and other debris from the over indulgence of a select group of friends from the previous night. “Bit of a party?” my father asked as I scrabbled about trying to restore enough order for my mother to sit down. Bit of an excuse would have been nearer to the truth; an excuse to indulge! As soon as Bottoms Up started making too much profit (in my view) I stopped buying the bottles and those nights of indulgence waned. So the bottle today was to remind me of past indulgence.
Toni hated it, but his detestation of the taste of this unremarkable bottle, was lost in the importance of our eating the first Calçots and romanescu sauce of the season.
For those who don’t know, Calçots look like thinner versions of leeks and are cooked barbecue style and served with romanescu sauce. We were given paper bibs and a thin plastic glove as calçots can be a messy affair as they are best eaten in the same way as a sword swallower consumes his weapon! And I think that I am getting into a dangerous area of double entendre now!
We finished the meal with a glass of pacharan notable for the Spanish measure used rather than the parsimonious British equivalent.
Then home to vegetate on the balcony in the setting sun.
Ah!
I have now paid my first visit to the Palau de la Música for an orchestral concert.
This was given by the Orquesta Sinfónica Estatal de Dnepropetrovsk conducted by Nataliya Ponomarchuk. The programme was the overture to The Barber of Seville (Rossini) the Concierto de Aranjuez (Rodrigo) and Carmen Suite Nº1 and Suite Nº2 (Bizet) The soloist in the Rodrigo was Rolando Saad.
Fundamentally, the concert was depressingly poor. I can truthfully say that I have never heard the Rossini played as the orchestra played it. The orchestral balance was absurdly idiosyncratic with the bass drum drowning any harmony and the most penetrating piccolo dominating throughout. The strings were ragged and the horns had that brittle quality where you felt tension every time they played almost expecting duff notes.
The Concierto de Aranjuez was worse. The relationship between the orchestra and the soloist was uneasy with the first movement being particularly jagged. Saad showed little fluency in the more complex fingerings and emphasised difficulty rather than melody. Not only the dynamics of orchestra and soloist but also the weightings were faulty – the piece seemed to need much more rehearsal time.
The second movement started better with liquid strummed chords form the guitar, but that was an accompaniment to an orchestral player and the old unease returned when the soloist took the more commanding position.
The audience waited for the cadenza for their cacophony of coughing to reach a crescendo. You had to be there to hear the unreal concentration of hacking coughing to believe it! When the racking coughs subsided, extended sweet unwrapping started which only women of a certain age really know how to extend to the point of intolerability.
At no point did I feel truly comfortable with Saad’s playing and I felt depressed throughout the interval dreading the treatment of the Bizet.
Sitting in the auditorium, however, allowed me time to appreciate the hall in which I was sitting. In artistic terms, the hall was the clear winner when set against the concert even if the design did have an element of the demented about it!
I have never been in a hall like it. Just to give you the slightest flavour of the total experience, I would like to mention the vertical elements supporting the marble hand rest of the main staircase. These vertical elements (the names for which I have forgotten) were thin twisted metal rods set in a coloured glass tube – like an extended jam jar! That, believe you me, was one of the more prosaic details to notice!
The proscenium arch was formed by a massive sculpture of a tree stage right and galloping horses stage left. The sculpture thrust itself into the auditorium and, indeed, where I was sitting on the second level there was a horse emerging from the wall with splayed hoofs just above my head and a narrow horse’s face looking down on me with some malevolence!
The back of the stage is a curved wall out of which sculpted maidens, looking like sinisterly attractive gargoyles, emerge from the glittering surface.
Everywhere you look is stained glass and ceramics. The place is the apotheosis of the ceramicist’s art and, because all the surfaces are so busy the interior is strangely claustrophobic.
The centre of the roof has the famous inverted stained glass dome which is impressive, but the rest of the roof is taken up with struts beams and tiles all gleaming with the high gloss of the ceramics’ glaze.
The roof naggingly reminded me of something which I only realised at the end of the performance when the lights came on again and the roof was thrown into relief. There is a great similarity between what I have seen of some aspects of Modernista art in Catalonia and in what I have seen from the same period in Finland. I wonder if any work has been done in comparing the Art Nouveau period in the two countries. I will leave that hanging!
I now have the programme for the concerts for the rest of the year and I will have to read with care the various ways in which you can buy tickets. They say that buying a rail ticket in Britain is a complex task – try buying a season ticket for the opera or orchestra anywhere in the world.
The complexities of those artistic institutions make British rail travel look like riding an escalator.
Wish me luck!
My astonishment was not because a French wine was being sold openly in Catalonia – though it has to be said that this area does have a few wines of outstanding quality and amazing cheapness.
No, my astonishment was more because I assumed that only the
British would be taken in by such a transparent marketing opportunity like Beaujolais Nouveau.
Think about it: this is a fairly ordinary wine made even more ordinary by being sold when it is very, very young. So young and forced, indeed, that it has to be drunk at once because it doesn’t keep. The whole affair has the grubby hands of unscrupulous wine merchants spinning a cheap wine to inexperienced indiscriminate wine consumers (aka the British) who have been caught up in the pseudo sophistication of a blatant pseudo ‘event.’
So I ordered a bottle.
Oh, come on! I can still remember buying a few cases of Beaujolais Nouveau from Bottoms Up and using the ‘drink at once’ recommendation as a specific injunction! I remember returning home after school to find my parents in my house picking their way delicately over empty bottles, glasses and other debris from the over indulgence of a select group of friends from the previous night. “Bit of a party?” my father asked as I scrabbled about trying to restore enough order for my mother to sit down. Bit of an excuse would have been nearer to the truth; an excuse to indulge! As soon as Bottoms Up started making too much profit (in my view) I stopped buying the bottles and those nights of indulgence waned. So the bottle today was to remind me of past indulgence.
Toni hated it, but his detestation of the taste of this unremarkable bottle, was lost in the importance of our eating the first Calçots and romanescu sauce of the season.
For those who don’t know, Calçots look like thinner versions of leeks and are cooked barbecue style and served with romanescu sauce. We were given paper bibs and a thin plastic glove as calçots can be a messy affair as they are best eaten in the same way as a sword swallower consumes his weapon! And I think that I am getting into a dangerous area of double entendre now!
We finished the meal with a glass of pacharan notable for the Spanish measure used rather than the parsimonious British equivalent.
Then home to vegetate on the balcony in the setting sun.
Ah!
I have now paid my first visit to the Palau de la Música for an orchestral concert.
This was given by the Orquesta Sinfónica Estatal de Dnepropetrovsk conducted by Nataliya Ponomarchuk. The programme was the overture to The Barber of Seville (Rossini) the Concierto de Aranjuez (Rodrigo) and Carmen Suite Nº1 and Suite Nº2 (Bizet) The soloist in the Rodrigo was Rolando Saad.
Fundamentally, the concert was depressingly poor. I can truthfully say that I have never heard the Rossini played as the orchestra played it. The orchestral balance was absurdly idiosyncratic with the bass drum drowning any harmony and the most penetrating piccolo dominating throughout. The strings were ragged and the horns had that brittle quality where you felt tension every time they played almost expecting duff notes.
The Concierto de Aranjuez was worse. The relationship between the orchestra and the soloist was uneasy with the first movement being particularly jagged. Saad showed little fluency in the more complex fingerings and emphasised difficulty rather than melody. Not only the dynamics of orchestra and soloist but also the weightings were faulty – the piece seemed to need much more rehearsal time.
The second movement started better with liquid strummed chords form the guitar, but that was an accompaniment to an orchestral player and the old unease returned when the soloist took the more commanding position.
The audience waited for the cadenza for their cacophony of coughing to reach a crescendo. You had to be there to hear the unreal concentration of hacking coughing to believe it! When the racking coughs subsided, extended sweet unwrapping started which only women of a certain age really know how to extend to the point of intolerability.
At no point did I feel truly comfortable with Saad’s playing and I felt depressed throughout the interval dreading the treatment of the Bizet.
Sitting in the auditorium, however, allowed me time to appreciate the hall in which I was sitting. In artistic terms, the hall was the clear winner when set against the concert even if the design did have an element of the demented about it!
I have never been in a hall like it. Just to give you the slightest flavour of the total experience, I would like to mention the vertical elements supporting the marble hand rest of the main staircase. These vertical elements (the names for which I have forgotten) were thin twisted metal rods set in a coloured glass tube – like an extended jam jar! That, believe you me, was one of the more prosaic details to notice!
The proscenium arch was formed by a massive sculpture of a tree stage right and galloping horses stage left. The sculpture thrust itself into the auditorium and, indeed, where I was sitting on the second level there was a horse emerging from the wall with splayed hoofs just above my head and a narrow horse’s face looking down on me with some malevolence!
The back of the stage is a curved wall out of which sculpted maidens, looking like sinisterly attractive gargoyles, emerge from the glittering surface.
Everywhere you look is stained glass and ceramics. The place is the apotheosis of the ceramicist’s art and, because all the surfaces are so busy the interior is strangely claustrophobic.
The centre of the roof has the famous inverted stained glass dome which is impressive, but the rest of the roof is taken up with struts beams and tiles all gleaming with the high gloss of the ceramics’ glaze.
The roof naggingly reminded me of something which I only realised at the end of the performance when the lights came on again and the roof was thrown into relief. There is a great similarity between what I have seen of some aspects of Modernista art in Catalonia and in what I have seen from the same period in Finland. I wonder if any work has been done in comparing the Art Nouveau period in the two countries. I will leave that hanging!
I now have the programme for the concerts for the rest of the year and I will have to read with care the various ways in which you can buy tickets. They say that buying a rail ticket in Britain is a complex task – try buying a season ticket for the opera or orchestra anywhere in the world.
The complexities of those artistic institutions make British rail travel look like riding an escalator.
Wish me luck!
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