Category: Music

An Old Hand

How long should one work? How long is a piece of string? Some people (including me) slip gratefully into early retirement, others like their jobs so much they never want to retire.

Published
Categorised as Music

Manon Lescaut

Opera Holland Park opened their season with Puccini’s Manon. OHP has come a long way in the last 25 years.

Published
Categorised as Music

A Racehorse for Christmas

I like Peter Starstedt’s 1969 hit Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)? Here is one verse. Your name is heard in high places You know the Aga Khan He sent you a racehorse for Christmas And you keep it just for fun, for a laugh, ha-ha-ha.

Published
Categorised as Music, Sport

The Damnation of Faust

La Damnation de Faust is a problem opera. The problem is that it’s not an opera.

Published
Categorised as Music

Finding Harmony

I went back to Chalfont St Giles on Wednesday evening. My last visit was on a hot April day in 2018. This time my journey did not go to plan.

Published
Categorised as Music

Rigaud and Handel

In yesterday’s post we were in the Private Chapel of St James at Great Packington and found no sculpture worth mentioning. Actually there are two recumbent plaster images succinctly dismissed by Pevsner as “rather bad”.

Calixto’s Carmen

He is well-known in opera houses across mainland Europe; his style has been likened to Quentin Tarantino or Pedro Almodovar; he is a 55 year-old Spanish opera director from Barcelona; he is Calixto Bieito.

Published
Categorised as Music

Poofs’ Football

When I was two, in 1956, Anthony Eden was Prime Minister, Eisenhower was President and Clement Crisp wrote his first review for the Financial Times. In those days the FT, still known as the pink ‘un – at least by my grandfather – was cautiously expanding its coverage to include the Arts and even ballet.

Published
Categorised as Music

The Battle of Poltava

Yesterday evening about twenty of us took a train to Poltava. Not a place I’d heard of which exposes my ignorance. I hadn’t heard of Tchaikovsky’s opera Mazeppa either; there is a connection.

We’ll Go No More A-Roving

The Jolly Beggar was first published in a collection of old Scots songs in 1776. It’s not long so let’s read it.