Wagner or not?

We went to see Tristan and Isolde performed by the Welsh National Opera on Saturday.  I have never seen a Wagner opera and have reservations about him as a person because of the anti-Semitism and him being a not very nice person in lots of other ways too.  However I thought I should give it a try so off we went.

It was a little bit irritating that we were spending Saturday afternoon and evening indoors in such glorious weather.  We got into Cardiff a bit before 3pm and we weren't due to be in the theatre till 3.30 so we sat by the Bay and had a drink in the sunshine which was lovely. 

The WNO have a man called Simon Rees who is the Dramaturge (I'm not quite sure what that is) who gives a pre show talk before each opera.  He is erudite and knowledgeable and tells you the story of the opera, how it came to be written, something about the composer and the production, and he makes it interesting and always really funny.  We had booked for the talk and half an hour later knew a lot more about Wagner, Tristan and the production. 

We then had an hour to kill so had a cup of tea and then went in for the start of the opera.

Brian says that Wagner was a genius.  He pushed the boundaries of music and set the scene for the 20th century composers to go further.  He disliked the opera conventions of opera with recitative and aria.  The story was told in the recitatives - which are sung speech really - and the arias are the songs.  In the hands of Mozart the arias also tell the story, and you can have 6 characters all telling you their version of the story at the same time while they sing their own lines and it all sounds glorious.   What Wagner did was develop something called arioso which is a sort of combination between the two.  The story is told in a continuous sung line and there are no arias at all. 

I have come out of Tristan with a better appreciation of Wagner, and a genuine appreciation of the orchestral writing.  However what I don't like and have decided that this is why Wagner has never appealed to me is the whole arioso thing.  The characters never get any tunes to sing.  All the tunes are in the orchestra.  After the performance when we compared notes, both B and I had been spending a lot of time listening with our eyes closed.  The surtitles are telling you what the German means and because you are reading the text you are concentrating on the singer and not really listening to the orchestra to the same degree of attention.  By shutting our eyes we could still hear the vocal line but we could also concentrate on the orchestra and it is in the orchestra that you find the beauty of the music.  And it really is beautiful.  (though in a 5 hour opera there is a danger of falling asleep by the end of the night).  However I want the singers to have beautiful lines to sing as well.  I found the unending sung lines with no particular shape got tedious and it just doesn't appeal to me. 

The other thing that I didn't like at all was the story.  It was so dark and dismal.  Wagner wrote all the libretti for his operas and also did all the production etc as well -  he wanted total control.  The story is a bit different from the British one - Tristan and Isolde are given a love potion so hopelessly fall in love, and then spend all their time , or at any rate most of Act 2, saying that the only way to really love is to die.  Tristan and Isolde spend a LOT of time saying "I love you - let's die".  To the point where I wished they would get on with it and put us out of our misery.   It is really dismal and there is nothing to lighten it.  No humour, nothing. 

There were lighter moments, but unintentional ones.  Tristan sang well most of the time but he was older and stout.  As the design in Act 3 had him lying on a concrete ramp (which the text said was his bed!) he did have a bit of a problem getting up again.  The fight scene was really feeble and could have been improved by any primary school. 

Isolde was stunning and had immense emotion connection but the production had the lovers standing apart from each other, singing to the audience, while the music is is frankly orgasmic.  You couldn't have sex on the stage, but you did have it in the music. 

When the dinner interval (between Acts 2 and 3) came we went out and had our picnic on the Bay, and it was fabulous.  It was still really warm at 8pm and there were boats sailing, people walking, and we had a really nice picnic too.  It was really lovely.  We had a brilliant time and were so lucky with the day, however I won't be going to another Wagner opera.  I think if I wanted to listen to another opera I would listen to a cd because the staging actually distracted me from the music.  There is little actual movement on the stage - in this opera at least - and you wouldn't lose a lot in a concert performance.

We have looked at the programme for next year and they are doing Lohengrin, but we won't be going.  However they are doing Janack's 'Cunning little vixen', Mozart's 'Cosi fan tutte' and Lulu by Berg, all of which appeal a great deal more.

Hampton Court

We went to Hampton Court last weekend.  Kate wanted to see it and we met my sister and husband, and my niece and her husband, and we had a lovely family day out.

Hampton Court is a fabulous building, dating from the 16th century though with large sections added later and it is huge.  They have arranged the public access in mini tours with a theme - Young Henry VIII, Georgian rooms, etc which works very well because people are going round different areas and stops everyone doing the same route at the same time.    The quality of the tours varied a bit so the Royal chambers were excellent but the kitchens were fairly poor, with some plastic pies and meat but not much else. 

The gardens are beautiful and extremely well kept with lots of topiary trees and colourful flowerbeds and you can easily imagine yourself wandering round in robes with Henry talking to Wolsey in the distance, Anne flirting....

History is sometimes a long way back but other times it is just round the corner.

Summer walking

 You can tell it is summer because I am wearing boots, gaiters, a fleece, cagoul and hat going for a walk today.  We wanted to seize the opportunity because the forecast for Monday is monsoons again.  It was lovely out, though a bit windy when you got onto the beach.  However one man's meat etc because there were wind surfers and beach buggies out making the most of the weather and they like the wind too.    This is me as intrepid walker!

The rest of the pics are just pretty ones which I took on the walk. 

However it must be summer because we saw lots of swallows.

Techy weekend

I spent a lot of Sunday playing with computers and gadgets.  We are having a push on the E Books service which we offer now, and to do that in a local government environment is complicated because the Co
uncil firewalls won't let you download things.

So we got a laptop which is thankfully unencrypted and not locked to an administrator's passwords.  This is after a meeting where we had an ancient laptop which was so old it didn't have an ethernet port so was useless, then we had a new one which needed admin privileges to do anything, so we gave up on that one, and I got hold of another one which I brought home at the weekend to sort out.

So after a while it connected to my internet, we got the software sorted out, and introduced it to my ereader so it would transfer books onto the ereader easily.

To download them onto an Apple mobile device (phone iPad etc) is easy once you have downloaded the Bluefire software from the App store.

I unwisely assumed that doing the same thing with the Android software would be the same.  Wrong!

I am pretty comfortable playing with computers but it took me about an hour to figure out what to do, and involved looking on Aldiko (the software)'s website which was singularly unhelpful, and then browsing round other websites till I found one that told me what I wanted.  It actually isn't that difficult but the website tells you to do something which is not in the least apparent.  It says 'go to my catalogues' and shows you a picture with a folder called 'my catalogues'.  No.  Actually the software doesn't display that, you have to go into the store and then find my catalogue instead. 

!

However at least when we are demonstrating the system we will now know what to do.

Cowbridge library got attacked by a tree yesterday when the tree was blown down in the gales.  There is now a hole in the roof, and the tree surgeon says the remaining half of the tree will have to come down because it is unsafe. 

Could have been nasty!

Mahler

We went to a concert on Friday which we had booked some time ago and was supposed to be Mahler's 4th Symphony and the other was a commissioned work for a first performance by the BBC Wales composer in residence Simon Holt  Unfortunately we got an email to say that the main singer for the Holt piece was unwell and couldn't be replaced at short notice so the Holt piece was being replaced by a Haydn symphony.

A bit of a strange replacement I thought, going from a contemporary work to a classical symphony, it would have been more understandable if they had replaced it with a more modern work.  However they did perform the Haydn beautifully, and I had never heard it before so that was lovely.

The second half was the Mahler which I have never heard live, and which was fabulous.  I had goose bumps and shivers through a lot of it.  Thierry Fischer was conducting the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and he is really very good.  Brian was really impressed by his technical skill as a conductor (stick technique etc) and I was really  impressed by the emotion and how he gave the music enough space to be itself.  There is a fashion these days to play classical music really FAST, so  much so that I listened to a piece of Swan Lake and it would have been impossible to dance to, so it is refreshing to listen to a concert where the conductor isn't playing the music so fast you feel he wants to get the early train home.

It was also confirmation that the performance of Mahler's 1st we went to in the Millenium Centre was in completely the wrong venue because the sound was wonderful in St Davids Hall and dreadful in the Millenium centre.

Pilates app

I found a Pilates app for the iPod last week and it is brilliant.  I have done enough Pilates to know most of the moves, but the only class at a convenient time for me (ie not in the daytime while I am at work) is very expensive, so I have stopped going to save money.  However this app gives you a number of routines for 15, 30 or 45 minutes and concentrate on different areas eg abs or back or whatever.  I started last week and and they are really good.  I am going to try to do a session most days, especially as my going up and down the cliffs at the beach is being rained off at the moment.

We have booked a 3 night break in Machynlleth in mid Wales in May as it is an area we don't know at all well.  At least, to be accurate, I know Aberystwyth very well as I was at University there, but as I didn't have a car then I don't know the area.  The Snowdonia National Park comes down nearly that far, and there are fabulous nature reserves and bird sanctuaries round there which will be lovely to see.  I am really quite excited about it.

April showers?

It is April, it has been raining - quite a lot from time to time.

However even in Wales the river levels are really low, the fields and paths are dry despite pouring rain, so I can see why parts of England are officially in drought.

They are talking of selling water from one water company to another - it is yet another instance of the idiocy of having de-nationalised the utilities.  A service isn't something that should make a profit, it should be there as a service.  There is a hint int he word really.