Janacek - Katia Kabanova - Liceu

Janacek, Katia Kabanova, Liceu.  Buy a ticket and see it tomorrow, it’s your last chance!

I know that is not the conventional way to start a review, but after the performance that I saw last night, I am not only going to start by review with that injunction, but also end with it as well!

With a stripped-back, sparse staging comprising intersecting planes enlivened by projection and lighting it becomes a gaunt setting to highlight the singing of what is one of the most complete ensemble productions of an opera that I have seen.

I have come to expect orchestral playing of the very highest order from the Orquestra Simfònica of the Liceu, but last night’s performance conducted by Josep Pons took their playing to another level.  They emphasised that the music for this opera is the equivalent of a concerto for orchestra and the whole band would have been fully justified in taking a bow on stage for the meticulous and nuanced playing that they produced.

The soloists were dazzling with the signal exception of Aleksander Teliga playing the boorish uncle Saviol Prokofievitx Dikoi, wearing an absurd furry coat with top hat and cane and failing to reach the level of professional fullness of his accompanying cast.  Perhaps his cartoonish appearance and stilted acting was intentional as many of the other characters appeared more suited to melodrama or Expressionism than naturalism.

A case in point would be Rosie Aldridge’s chilling portrayal of the domineering mother-figure Marfa Ignatievna Kabanova, presented as a stage villain in tight fitting black bombazine and sung with the sort vicious relish that meant that when she came on stage at the end of the performance to take her well deserved ovation there were boos for the Mother’s character mixed with the enthusiastic applause for her superlative singing and portrayal!  A true accolade! 

Her character had been fleshed out by an interlude with the Saviol character where she showed herself as a hard drinking, straight from the bottle dominatrix, at one point straddling Saviol, threatening him with his own cane and producing gurgles of delight from the prone character as the curtain fell!

In another staging detail, this production chose not to include the iconic moment at the end of the opera where, after the suicide of her daughter-in-law, with the drowned body at her feet, Marfa bows to the workers who had searched for the corpse.  In this production she remains still until her right hand shoots out, demanding the hand of her grieving son, whom she then leads away from his dead wife into the darkness of the wings.  An electric - and truly horrible moment too.

Tikhon, sung by Francisco Vas, as the ineffectual and mother-dominated cypher of a husband, was initially disconcerting because of his resemblance to William Rees-Mogg, another ineffectually destructive character: lean rectitude masking dark forces!  He sung the role with the confused passion exactly matching his confused, damaged character, expertly juggling the contradictory complexities that he is too weak to surmount.

But the evening belonged to Katia, sung by Patricia Racette, who claimed the role for herself singing with the sort of confidence and assurance that allowed her, paradoxically, to portray the self-destructive repression and lethal freedom, the sensitivity, sympathy rejected and half-understood, the full passion and hesitancy with a range of expression that was breath-taking in its scope and effortless delivery.

The recipient of her love, Boris Grigorievitx, nephew to Saviol, sung by Nikolai Schukoff, was presented as a spiv-like, gigolo, Latin lover, smooth, cigarette smoking, spoilt “rich” boy who can’t get his hands on his inheritance, frustrated and bored in a provincial small town – certainly not a man to lose your life over, but superficially attractive – and brilliantly sung and confidently acted.  The attraction between Boris and Katia was convincingly displayed and the scene of the assignation when Katia takes off her coat and reveals that she is wearing an evening dress with butterfly-like gauze ‘wings’ emphasised the incongruity of the match, and perhaps the inevitability of the fatal attraction as she was caught, insect like by her investment of the light of love in Boris.

Vania Kudriaix, the other lover in this opera, sung by Josep-Ramon Olivé, is a contrast to Boris.  Vania is a writer and finds beauty in nature and expresses himself in folk song, you feel that he has more authenticity than Boris will ever have.  Olivé possessed the role and through excellent singing, spirited dancing and a rounded performance made the character appealing and real. 

 

He was matched in singing and acting by his lover Varvara, sung by Michaela Selinger, who portrayed a repressed semi-adolescent at last breaking free from the tyrannical hold of her adopted mother with élan.  These two had some of the most lyrical sung moments in the opera and were a delight to watch and listen to.  Her first appearance, returning from Church, was accompanied by a (real) small dog on a lead – an interesting coup de theatre in a live opera, and I suppose it was to show that she was a more expressive character, to prepare us for the love affair that had already started.  But would Marfa have allowed a mere dog as a plaything, something so purely decorative and useless in such a regimented household?  I am not sure, and anyway, I think that for the dog to be introduced, it should have had some sort of continuing role as a living metaphor at other points in the drama.

The chorus has a small, but essential role in this opera and their spectral voices added to the music richness of the music.

As the sets were so stark, the lighting played an essential scene setting character.  At times the use of shadow reminded me to Murnau’s 1922 film of Nosferatu with characters throwing looming outlines, large and threatening.

The climactic suicide of Katia throwing herself into the Volga was a true spread-eagled jump – no walking down hidden stairs here on the far side of the set but a full body, break taking leap.

For me, this is the sort of production that justifies opera as an art form, a true combination of music, drama, spectacle.  The production played straight through with no intermissions, and lasted a doable one hour, forty-five minutes.  A triumph.

Janacek, Katia Kabanova, Liceu.  Buy a ticket and see it tomorrow, it’s your last chance!

Another date filled

 

Well, the one good thing is that I have only missed one meeting or appointment - and I thought that I might have missed three.  But no, blood test and concert are still in the safe future, it is only the student representative meeting that has slipped me by, and the teacher concerned seemed far more concerned about my new pressure stocking than the meeting.  The lack of my attendance at the meeting apparently could be solved, or at least mitigated, by a short chat with one of the teachers.

My pressure stockings are another factor.  These are stylish (for pressure stockings anyway) free gifts from China.  I only had to pay the postage (and that wasn’t very much) and I got three pairs!  It reminded me of the trip that Toni and I made to stay in Catalonia where the flight cost us nothing – except for the landing charges.  I do not understand the economic logic of giving away a flight for nothing, but I gratefully received the largess.  God knows we have paid back that free gift many times over given the amount of travel that we have run up over the years since.  But I do remain grateful for the inexplicable gift!

The pressure stockings are perhaps easier to explain as a sprat to catch a mackerel and the assumption must surely have been that I find out that the link with the supplier is real and you stand a chance of getting what you hoped for, and you buy much more stuff - and god knows, China is the home of stuff nowadays.  Was it enough for the Chinese supplier merely to get hold of my email and start sending me information, to get me on a mailing list, that they could write off the merchandise. 

 

And again, I insist that the postage was so small that I could afford to speculate and give it a go not really worrying about losing the pittance that they had asked to get the stuff to me.  They have since asked me to comment on my purchase, but I assume this is merely a device to ensure that I am still a live customer and that any giving of stars will unleash a whole catalogue of offers too good to miss!

Give my predilection to submit myself to the blandishments of the capitalist system and buy stuff for the mere sake of it, I have steeled myself to be rude enough not to reply – even though I am wearing one of the said stockings even as I type this.

The net two months should prove to be revealing, with the possibility that I will not need to wear the bloody stockings any more.  The function of them is to increase the blood flow in my right calf so that the thrombosis will be dissolved away.  To that end, my diet (low salt, low fat, no alcohol, decaffeinated tea and coffee) added to the half a tablet of rat poison that I take daily should all be working together to get rid of the thrombosis in a gradual way.  Over the next couple of months, I am scheduled to have various tests and appointments that should enable my doctors to determine the extent or otherwise of the offending clot and adjust my treatment accordingly.

I had thought that I would be taking the rat poison for life, but one doctor seemed surprised by this assumption on my part and assured me that there was a possibility that it would be discontinued in a few months’ time.

I continue to be impressed with my treatment and the thorough way in which I have made a Grand Tour of most of the hospitals in the area for consultations and tests.  The important ultra-sound scan will be in January, so I won’t have a Christmas present of my treatment being ended, but I will settle for a late gift!  At least by the New Year I should be in a better position to know how my appointments calendar will look for the rest of the year!

Meanwhile, my book “Stephen’s Health” continues to grow as each new sheet of information, results and appointments is added to the plastic pockets.  I take it with me whenever I go to see a doctor as a sort of visible token of my active participation in my treatment.  I can also refer to any of the information about my case (downloaded from the secure Internet link) to encourage those doctors battling with their ageing computers.  In one or two instances it has been very useful to point to relevant information to help the consultation along!

I feel fine, though I am not able to walk as far or as fast as I used to.  My shooting stick has been invaluable and I am now back to my normal swim and bike ride quota for each day.

My replacement watch for my Pebble, the Amazfit takes a dictatorial view of my activity and gives me reams of information that I totally ignore.  It tells me where I have cycled and how – though I am not sure that it realizes that my bike is electric; it analyses my swim, using acronyms that I do not know; it noted my ‘run’ that I did not do – and I am still wondering about that; it measures my sleep and its depth; it takes my heartbeat; it tells me (and nags me) about sitting down for too long.  And it also tells the time.  Its battery life is nothing near the longevity of the Pebble, but it is at least four or five days between charges and I can live with that.  The text it uses is too small for me to read without my reading glasses, but I am used to making sense of the out of focus – I have been doing in for as long as I can remember – so that is not something that worries me.

I now use my Matrix watch (the one that runs by making electricity out of the difference between your body heat and the ambient temperature of the watch case!) as a backup when the Amazfit is charging.  I good, if expensive, compromise about their use!

The major problem I have is making sure that the alarms on any and all of my pieces of wearable electronics do not go off as inopportune times.  I take my half of rat poison at 8.00 pm.  That is the time of the start of the operas to which I go.  The trouble is that merely switching off the phone (which I do when I go to performances) does not always stop the bloody alarm and once or twice I have fumbled with the phone during the applause for the conductor in a frantic effort to silence the thing before the music starts.  My watch merely trembles and that can easily be turned off by jabbing at the screen.  The anticipation that an audience feels at the start of the performance is given an added layer of fear by the threat of my electronic alarm orchestra playing an unwelcome additional melodic line.

And I am looking forward to this performance: Janacek, Katya Kabanova.  Let’s see just how well my ‘education’ in the works of Janacek by WNO and Richard Armstrong with the voice of, among others, Elizabeth Söderström, will be in my appreciation of the performance tonight.  I am all anticipation.

And now to get ready.  As a point of principle, I wear casual clothes to the Opera, in spite or rather because of the fact that I will be surrounded by those who ostentatiously dress up.  I am still wearing shorts and sandals (for me Summer Never Dies) but I might wear jeans tonight.  Not because of the cold, you understand, but rather because getting out of the Liceu and walking up the Ramblas late at night can be a dispiriting experience, and if you look ostentatiously like a tourist then you might well be the target for one or more sex workers to come up to you with blatant offers of gratification!   

Better to be taken for, if not a native, then at least a resident, and hobble (in my case) my stick-assisted way towards my expensively parked car!

Survived again!

 

After a night or rain, weak sunshine at lunchtime.  I’ll settle for that!  Travelling along a busy motorway, early morning, in the dark, in the rain, is a truly depressing experience.  And a frightening one.  I am always amazed by how little Spanish/Catalan motorists modify their driving to suit the conditions, and, in spite of myself, I find myself drawn into their lunatic dicing with death manoeuvres until a more sensible me takes control again and argues that the gain of a few seconds is not worth the risk.

I have actually measured the advantage semi-scientifically by observing the behaviour of car drivers along certain stretches of the urban and urban motorway roads around us during peak traffic times.  In urban situations, traffic lights and zebra crossings stop traffic, so any gains made are usually wiped out within a few hundred metres of road.  On motorways, slow travelling lorries overtaking each other and entrances and exits from the motorways are the major causes of traffic slowing.  If the motorway is being used as a way of skirting a short stretch of urban congestions then the traffic gains of the death-welcomers is usually marginal.

St Boi is, and has been for years, a bottleneck and place of frustration for traffic trying to change from one motorway to another.  I sometimes think that I can hear the deep rumbling sounds of hundreds of motorists’ teeth being ground simultaneously as they wait in seemingly never-ending queues!

One of the links that we take every day goes from a three-lane major motorway to a single lane turn-off link road with consequent slowing.  In theory.  In practice the speed that motorists take the curvaceous, unlighted road is terrifying.

Added to all this is the Spanish/Catalan use of the indicator.  Here a flashing light means that the driver is executing the turn or movement, not that he intends to.  If you are driving along a road and there is a junction with another road joining yours with broken white lines, that is just an indication to you of where the other cars will join your part of the road, there is none of that namby-pamby waiting for a safe space to make the move.  As these two things happen all the time, there is a sort of safety in continuity.  As you know that it is going to take place you make allowances, and therefore no deaths occur.  What happens when, say an unsuspecting Brit drives along the road expecting the courtesy and safety standards at home, I do not know.  Though I would point out that the number of RTAs in Catalonia are astonishing and would occasion questions in parliament if they occurred in Britain.

Still, I have been driving on Catalan roads for a decade now, so, while I am still constantly astonished, I am also fatalistic and make sure that I allow for what I know is going to happen.

But still, none of this driving gains anything.  The most that criminally reckless drivers can hope for is a couple of car lengths advantage before they are slowed down by the built-in limitations to carefree driving!

I am obviously typing all this to reinforce my own (perceived) considerate driving and to make me feel morally superior as some cretin overtakes on the inside and veers across a couple of other lanes.

-oOo-

I have just finished reading “Fear and Loathing in La Liga: Barcelona vs Real Madrid” by Sid Lowe (2013) London, Yellow Jersey Press It was actually recommended by the Local an English language internet magazine that concentrates on Spain.  I had already taken out a subscription before I realized just how right wing the political content of the thing was, but it is useful for recipes and inconsequential information about my adopted country.  “Fear and Loathing” was one of the books suggested as “essential” reading to get a flavour of what it is to live in the country.

I am no real fan of football but I am a Barça fan.  I can name more members of the team than I was ever able to do for any of the British national teams up to and including the World Cup winning team of 1966 – where the broadcast of the match I heard on a school trip aboard the Nevasa somewhere in the Baltic!

Living in Catalonia and surrounded by a family who are ostentatiously Catalan, my interest in Barça is as much self-defence as anything else.  My interest is of course increased by the fact that Barça’s motto is famously “mes que un club” – more than a club.  This can be taken in a number of ways, but it has also been, and is now, a focus for nationalism and Catalan independence.  Politics is inseparable from the games, especially los clássicos, the games between Barça and Real Madrid.

This book, all 432 pages of it, takes what I think is a balanced view of the “loathing” and attempts to put it in a social, political and historical context.  Sid Lowe attempts to take many of the myths surrounding the game and especially these two teams and find evidence to assess them.

Although I am not interested in football, you might say the same thing about piloting a Mississippi Steam Boat or whale fishing, but it did not stop me enjoying the work of Melville or Twain.  There is something exhilarating about entering a world about which you know little relying on the competence of an expert who wants to communicate – and Sid Lowe is definitely an expert!

In his ‘Author’s Note’ at the start of the book, Lowe writes, “Part of me wanted to include footnotes throughout” in the event he did not do so, but the book reads as though he could have and the reader feels that he has documented evidence to back up everything he says.  The book also passes my ‘academic’ test by having a proper ‘contents’ page together with a bibliography and index and it has two sets of photographs in the middle!

The rivalry as revealed in this book is much more nuanced than fans on either side would have you believe.  Real Madrid was founded by two Catalans, and Barça by a Swiss (in the official history) or and Englishman in another book I’ve read, but by a foreigner at any rate.  The rise and fall and rise and fall of the clubs is more complex than I had ever realised and iconic points of conflict between the two, for example the notorious signing of Di Stéfano, are explained with new information making the final assessment much more interesting.

I read this book like a novel and when you think about it the two clubs combine money, power, glamour, politics, nationality, language and virtually anything else that you can think of in melange in which there is a fair amount of sport as well.

I recommend this book without hesitation even, or perhaps especially, for those who think that they have little interest in two over-paid bunches of kick-ballers pretending to do something important with their time!

A lot has happened in the five years between the publication of this book and the present.  I for one, look forward to Lowe’s next book with some eagerness.

-oOo-

The sun has now been shining brightly for longer than five minutes so I will go for a short bike ride (to show willing) and also to see a new sundial that has been set in place ten or so streets away from where I am typing this.

If I find it, I will include a photo of it in the next blog.

-oOo-

Please feel free to visit my poetry blog at:

https://smrnewpoems.blogspot.com/2018/11/daily-run.html