Tag Archives: opera

Sledgehammer to crack an opera

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That sinking feeling at Brancaster Staithe

Just stopped watching Wimbledon because it look as if Serena Williams is going to win easily (she did), which is about as boring as you can get. The Nadal-Murray match was something else. Nadal played probably the best tennis I’ve ever seen, and still Murray was an ace away from winning the second set. No shame in losing that one.

It’s been a warm week. The MX5 went in for a service and MOT, and one day stretched into three, because (a) the MOT centre’s computer went down, (b) the car failed on tyre tread that the garage had thought OK and (c) new tyres had to be obtained. So not a cheap day out by any means.

On Wednesday we had Heather, Sam and Simon round for an evening meal which I turned out to be cooking because there was some compelling tennis on TV and the house also needed cleaning. Chicken turned out to be good and we had a very pleasant evening. HSS brought some prosecco to celebrate the publication of Heather’s textbook, and Sam is recovering well from his atypical pneumonia which apparently only one in a million people get. He had a hard time with it.

On Thursday a triple whammy, starting with lunch with Aunt Josephine, Kathleen, Paul, Phil and Joy at the Oaklands Hotel carvery. Good food and an intriguing discussion afterwards about what churches should be doing nowadays. A surprising amount of agreement, considering our backgrounds and the distance we’ve moved. Later in the day Linda came round to cut out hair, and then we went to a PCC meeting at the vicarage. Again, a convivial atmosphere and general agreement. Nice when that happens.

Yesterday Dot went to Dickleburgh school, and I met InPrint poet Lisa D’Onofrio in the city for coffee at Jarrolds. She’s in England for a couple of weeks before returning to Australia, where her mum is very ill, and where she is now living at Castlemaine, north of Melbourne. She is the international arm of InPrint!

In the evening Dot and I went to the Claxton Opera, an annual event which takes place in a theatre in someone’s house. It holds just over 100 spectators and is a remarkable feat of engineering. Our friend Ruth is their leading soprano, and she had the main role in Le Pauvre Matelot, which someone had unfortunately translated into English, thus exposing the poor libretto and plot for all to see. Ruth was superb, but the rest of it was pretty terrible, and Richard White (the owner and impresario) should have been glad the Press failed to turn up. The second half of the programme, Trial by Jury, was wonderfully performed, but of course Gilbert and Sullivan is wonderful to start with, and Le Pauvre Matelot emphatically isn’t. Towards the end the wife kills the sailor with a sledgehammer, which was the only good idea in it. To get to the house/theatre, up a narrow lane, you have to park at a farm on the “main” road and are then transported by bus.

Today we stirred ourselves early and went to North Walsham, taking flowers to the cemetery and dropping in on Jessie, who we transported to Wroxham, enabling Dot to see Frank. I went for a short walk while this happened, and on the way home we called at The Rosary and put flowers on my parents’ grave.

6 July 2007

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A fuller view of the refreshment hut mentioned last time: a truly amazing agglomeration of cast-off building materials, it also contains a library, or maybe a secondhand book shop. It was hard to tell which. It is situated just behind what used to be a shingle bank at Cley, and its continued existence is truly remarkable. Perhaps it was washed up by the sea some time in the past, or repeatedly.

The weather has continued very wet, although I managed to get into the city and back yesterday, and managed a two-mile walk the day before. I now have my watch back with its new battery and accompanying reassurance. Existing without a watch is a very odd experience: it’s easy enough to find out what the time is, but mostly you don’t bother. Days seem to last longer. I also got some euros for Ireland, in the hope that further terrorist cock-ups don’t shut down the airports. Last week failed car bombs in London and an attack on Glasgow airport that didn’t work.

Last night I had what was probably a unique experience: I went to an opera and loved every minute of it. I steer clear of operas because the language and the plot are usually so banal, and you can’t hear the words anyway, but we went to this one because a friend was singing in it. It was The Night Bell, a one-acter by Gaetano Donizetti, and it was put on by Claxton Opera. This is a group based in a small village near the River Yare, east of Norwich – really out in the wilds. We had to park in a farmyard and were driven by minibus up to a large house (The Old Meeting House, but someone actually lives there), where the inside had been re-formed to provide a small concert hall holding about 80-90 people. The orchestra were on the ground floor beneath the stage, which was therefore on the first floor – level with one set of seats. We were in the second-floor “gallery” – front row, with a great view down on to the stage.

The production was highly professional, from stage sets through costumes to acting and direction. The first half of the programme was Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale – not an opera, but an acted-out story with a narrator (the brilliant David Newham) and of course Stravinsky’s music, which was rather in the style of Kurt Weill. The acting was excellent and the story not too bad, but there were rather tedious lulls where the music took over and there was nothing for the actors to do – so we had dancers prancing around rather pointlessly.

The Donizetti was stunning, however. Our friend Ruth was Serafina, one of the leading roles: I knew she could sing, but her acting was a revelation – some beautiful comic touches. The whole thing was extremely funny, and the two leading men were both superb, as were the chorus. Maybe it was the acoustics, but you could actually hear what people were singing.

Needless to say it started raining as we left Norwich and continued all evening. There was a bit of hanging around waiting for the minibus afterwards, but we had umbrellas, and we managed to have a chat with Ruth and with a woman in the chorus who we’d known long ago, when Dot taught at Surlingham.