Stumbling on melons

Last Saturday back to the Opera House as foreshadowed to see Opera Australia’s revival of the Moshinsky production of this classic work for a second time. It wasn’t terribly full, despite an apparent position to the contrary on the online booking site. Above is a picture of the house just before “curtain-up.”

I’m happy to report that concertmaster Huy-Nguyen Bui was allowed a bit more time for the solo which I singled out for attention in my previous post (the hint is in the direction ausdrucksvoll – expressive – in the score) and that generally conductor Tahu Matheson seemed to have relented in his avowed “it’s get on, get off!” intention to rush things along. Some moments still seemed a bit peremptory, including the Sandman and Dew Fairy episodes, which were hardly allowed time to sink in.

My friend Ux, whose daughter I took to a performance in 1992, had been to the matinee earlier in the week. She enjoyed it, though other mutual friends/acquaintances were more critical. I sent her a link to the youtube of the 1992 broadcast and she replied:

I feel as if the 1992 production after looking at this was better – stronger or something. The father was very different. Gertrud evoked more pity. Maybe it was all just more emotional…

Subject to a suggestion to Ux that the broadcast also had the advantage of close-up shots, I agreed with her.

I love the work and am fond of the production. I enjoyed the first half and as ever felt a pricking of tears in the dream pantomime when the mother dies – I’m probably susceptible to this on account of my own mother dying in her early 50s when I was 21.

This time, after my possibly nostalgia-enhanced enthusiasm on the first night, I found myself less persuaded by the second half. It is invidious to pick on anyone in particular, but a lot of the burden of the second half is carried by the witch, and I felt that Jane Ede wasn’t threatening enough. This was probably also a matter of vocal heft.

I’ve remarked before on this blog that my golden rule about revivals is that things always get a bit coarser. In this case that was mixed with a bit of a rethink. The thing is that in what is basically a “rom-com” work it is easy to upset the balance of the elements of a production and I feel that is what happened in this case. Others have deprecated, for example, Shane Lowrencev as the father breaking out of the fourth wall for genial drunken interactions with audience members on his way in.

A nine or ten year old Chinese-Australian boy just behind me was vociferously delighted with the comedy. That was another rebalancing of the production, which felt more like a show for kids than I remember it. Like rom-com, kid-adult works involve a tricky balance. The broader comedy (not sure why Hansel needed to look around furtively before taking his matidudinal leak) detracted from the romantic elements (for the adults) at he expense of a broader comedy for the children.

It was Mardi Gras night in the city and a big night at the Opera House. In the forecourt, somewhat inexplicably to me given the competing attraction on Oxford Street, Grace Jones was performing. The thud of her performance penetrated the Opera House foyers at interval. I can’t help wondering if she was the original headline artist that Mardi Gras failed to secure for the (subsequently cancelled) party. Could be – it seems the SOH gig was announced on 11 or 12 December.

The night before when approaching the opera house (for an SSO concert) by the Tarpeian Way I notice that the Botanic Gardens had put up tarpaulins with vaguely cheerful messages which were clearly designed to prevent anyone from “stealing” a view of the performance area in the forecourt below. Shades of Victoria Park Racing & Recreation Grounds Co Ltd v Taylor but what business is it of the Botanic Gardens to prop up the Opera House’s commercial venture? I know, they are going to invoke “safety.” Feels more like unworthy collusion to me.

At the end of the show the egressing crowd was pressing as the opera and Grace Jones audiences left at the same time. (In the Concert Hall Das Lied von der Erde was still playing.) I was prevented by a security guard from taking my preferred, less crowded route up the Tarpeian Steps and indeed it turned out the steps were closed. Meanwhile, a glance at my phone had revealed that while the AOBO had been fiddling, Iran was burning.

Waiting out the crowd and also still a bit stunned by this the shocking if hardly surprising development, I paused on a low brick retaining wall about half way up the first block of Macquarie Street and indulged in a bit of doomscrolling.

I must be getting older. (Well obviously that is so.) A couple of weeks earlier, D and I had been walking in Leichhardt near the old Cyclops Toys factory (now converted to apartments) when we encountered a couple of unusually friendly cats on the street. We sat on the ground to continue the encounter. A woman driving past in a big SUV stopped and from her car asked us if we were were OK. We told her we were. We were too polite to mention that we were hoping she would piss off so the cats wouldn’t be spooked by her monster vehicle. Maybe she was a local and too polite openly to say “What the fuck are you two weirdos doing in my neighbourhood?”

This time, it was a gentleman making his way up the footpath on a mobility scooter who stopped and asked me if I was OK. I thanked him for his enquiry and told him I was fine. “Happy Mardi Gras!” he answered, and proceeded on his way.

This image came to mind in the wake of the unleashing of police violence against protesters at Sydney Town Hall last night.

D, with whom I have lived for some years, came to Australia from China.

From time to time he makes what I like to call a “Chinese joke.”

Basically, these are jokes which rely on a pun which would only appear as a pun to a Chinese person. You could say that they are jokes with a Chinese accent.

I have commented on such a “Chinese joke” before on this blog. Exceptionally, this involved not two but three languages, as D after a trip around Germany triumphantly merged “Lewisham, Petersham” with “Danke schön. Bitte schön.”

I have even ventured my own reverse-Chinese joke, referring to D’s three sisters (the youngest of whom is my age) as the “three gorgeous.” D and I both think this is a great joke but the audience for it is sadly lacking as it relies on recognising “gorgeous” as a Chinese-accented homophone for “gorges.” It doesn’t help that D’s family would only ever think of the Chinese language name for the massive dam on the Yangze.

On Wednesday afternoon I took D to our local hospital at his request. There was no particular urgency and it felt more like a check up of that paradoxical kind where you don’t actually expect anything to be detected, rather than anything particularly dramatic. So it came as a bit of a surprise when they decided to keep him in. He has been receiving antibiotics intravenously.

Hence D’s latest Chinese joke. He’s very proud of it. It hinges on his perception that “Canula” sounds like the Chinese name for “Kenya.” The punch-line is “Nigeria.” Don’t ask me how he gets there.

Despite creeping frugality, I managed to get to see Opera Australia’s production of Candide (a remounting of Victorian Opera’s 2024 production) twice.

I had already booked a cheap seat as part of my modest subscription when a kind friend, [Fy], offered me the chance of going on a company rush ticket.  That’s a bargain – $50 to be precise – not to be sneezed at.  So it was that I found myself with [Fy] in the stalls in Row P or thereabouts at the second night of the run. Thanks, [Fy]!

I went with no expectations (or so I thought), but I was shocked.  Although Candide is usually described as an operetta, so far as Opera Australia is concerned we were firmly in musical land.  What this means is that the principal singers are individually miked, and the orchestra was likewise amplified into the mixed soundstage.

There were no subtitles, so the amplification had to be relied upon to deliver clarity in the words.  Perhaps the singers were mixed with a preponderance of treble to catch the consonants.  Whatever it was, the sound was terrible, and words were still a constant effort to catch.  Eddie Perfect, as Pangloss and the narrator, was particularly unflatteringly captured.  Has his singing really deteriorated so much?

Once we got past the famous overture, the orchestral mix exposed the paucity of the orchestration (Bernstein couldn’t be bothered doing this himself) and at times. when it came to the lower parts, the musical invention.  There were moments where the amplification seemed to open up a gap between the orchestral equivalent of the right hand in a keyboard reduction and a distant bass line.

As the performance ground on, played coarsely to ocker-cheap laughs, I became more and more dispirited.  Is this really our national opera company?  “Glitter and be gay” lost all pathos, investing all in a kind of athletic parody of coloratura for the manic finish.  Cue the obligatory “now we’re at the opera” joke, which always makes me cringe.  I suppose people need to be reassured that their expensive tickets signify something. 

At another point there was a bit of bull-fighting-at-the-tea-towel business.  I groaned inwardly.  To be fair to that, all the Spanish words invoked by the easily-assimilated are a bundle of cliches so I suppose it was consistent with that.

I still enjoyed it despite all, but the prospect of sitting through it all again was not enticing.  I contemplated exchanging my other ticket for something else.  The catch to that was that my cheap seat is of a type only secured by booking very early, and it was unlikely I could get a comparably attractive seat for anything else I want to go to.  Deciding to go again all the same, I hardened myself against disappointment.  Maybe some of the amplification issues would improve.  If it was still really bad, I could just go home at interval.

Turned out I stayed to the end (as if I would have left: I have only done this twice in my life) and enjoyed it much more second time round.  And I am trying to work out why.

First reason was probably that the seat was better, at least according to my taste, mainly because I was closer and with a higher quotient of direct rather than amplified sound.  The back of the stalls, where I had been first time, is not such a great spot in the Opera Theatre, particularly because the orchestra pit presents such a narrow opening towards it.  Amplification offers a volume fix for this but for my own taste it just introduced new problems.

It’s also possible that the performance had tightened up and the amplification had been improved.

One obvious difference was that I had done all my straining to hear the words already.

But, apart from the better seat, which was definitely a big factor, I’ve come round to the view that the main reason for my improved experience was that I had aligned my expectations more closely to what I knew I was going to get.  I could even roll with the ockerism, though the “now we’re at the opera” joke still made me cringe.

There must be a lesson for life in that and I’m still pondering what it is.  Meanwhile, [Fy], if you are reading this and I cast a pall on your enjoyment of the show, sorry for that.

Of course, I still have nits to pick (why did the old lady, who explained to us at grisly length how she lost a buttock to maritime cannibalism, still sport two enormous buttocks as part of her costume?). There were also many felicities. My favourite at present is the slide up from D to F major for the last chorus of “What’s the use?” the second last number and to my mind the real conclusion of the work, philosophically speaking (albeit with reworked lyrics in this version), before the obligatory (and not entirely convincing to me despite the relief of a “Grimes!” moment of unamplified vocal splendour from the complete company) proto-Somewhere-ish uplift (dressed with Appalachian Coplandism) of “Make our garden grow.” Not so sure about the baby in the barbecue.