It's school holidays at St Britten's Boys (and two girls) and Mr Oberon has hung up his cane and dusted off the fairy chalk that stained his tweed. Mr Bottom the janitor found time to sew the buttons back on his dungarees, Mr Snug the PE teacher has been sent on extended compassionate leave following the assault of Miss Thisby (formely Mr Flute) and the board of governors has adjourned for the summer break having not reached a satisfactory conclusion to the issues raised by alumnus Mr Theseus. Regular fire drills and a new sprinkler system have also been implemented whilst Junior Head of House Robin Goodfellow has been demoted to milk monitor.
Yes, you've guessed it, ENO's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream has come to an end. It seems an age since we started rehearsing and indeed it has been. What's a little more than disturbing is that for the past month I've gone about my life as normal save for 3 hours or so each week when I've thrashed a teenager in front of 2 1/2 thousand people. (Well....2 1/2 thousand seats). I read on Twitter that our Puck, Jamie Manton is as I write sitting on a flight to New York; I just hope he got upgraded, the welt marks will be furious from our final collaboration-demi-horizontale. Now that was method acting to make De Niro weep.
With this closing of another chapter in the operatic calender I've found a moment of two to attend to the athenian-weeds that have amassed on this blog. June 9th was my last entry...my excuse lies not in being too busy - far from it, that's what this is all about, but rather that my sodding hard-drive stuck one fat gigabyte of a finger up at me before trotting off to hard-drive heaven somewhere in a data 'recovery' lab near Hendon never to whir again. This has meant a huge amount of boring re-administration and above all else a sick, stomach churning anxiety descended upon me until all corners were straightened. With most of that done and the Dream a fading memory I'll make some inroads into the blogosphere once again.
In fact, a great deal of June wasn't singing the role of a twisted latin master at all. I actually managed to take a holiday for two days to one of my favourite places on earth, Bordeaux.
If you haven't been yet or rather, if you haven't been for a number of years then you'll have a shock. Gone are the cars and gone are the blackened buildings, in their place polished limestone tramways and the most handsomely faced architecture of the 18th century. Just take yourself to the very centre and marvel at the majestic head to head between the neo-classical Grand Théâtre and the window cleaning orgy of the 19th century Grand Hotel Regent de Bordeaux. They like their Grand in Bordeaux, but it's surprisingly small as a city. It basks in the Aquitaine sun, proudly autonomous, facing not to Paris and the north but to the open sea and all the trade that that has brought, allowing it to revel in its status as the wine capital of the world.
By good fortune the trip coincided with a performance of Lully's Atys given by Les Arts Florissants (or as they're known in the trade 'Les Arts Flo' which to me sounds too much like 'Aunt Flo' from Bod). To describe the evening's entertainment as an exercise in French trilling is akin to making a mild link between the Pope and Catholicism. I'm afraid this gallic shake was the overbearing guest in the proceedings, landing like a musical mosquito sucking the blood from every stepwise movement of the few tunes that slither out of this frilly opera. As the cortege of trill-taurettes slowly progressed it gradually dawned on me why Lully stabbed in himself in the foot with his conducting pole.
That said, and as I've been unnecessarily harsh, the production (which is quite famous in France) was utterly beautiful. M'colleague and sometime cassock wearer at St John's, Ed Lyon commanded the evening as Atys in a series of daft wigs. None dafter than that of Paul Agnew, who enjoying une brève camée as Le Sommeil had been deemed only worthy of a costume reminiscent of a piece of carpet fluff trapped to a yellow Quality Street. Stéphanie d'Oustrac and notably Emma de Negri sang the tits off their roles. I'm not a professional critic so I can say that.
Something spooky happened in Bordeaux. I became, totally unintentionally, Oz Clarke's stalker. The night before we left for Bordeaux I had a show at ENO and whilst dining beforehand (read 'shoving a burrito in your face-hole 60 minutes before assaulting a load of Fairies') Mr Oz Clarke glided past the restaurant door. Nothing strange about that (although he does look like Bod). No, the reappearance of the Clarke, shiny head and all, at my hotel reception in Bordeaux 36 hours later caused me to have one of those star-struck moments where you just gawp, attention I feel Clarke hasn't yet earned in his career as authour of the second-most-read-annual-pocket-wine-guide. Still I considered bounding up to him and telling him of this unforeseen rendez-vous, introducing the idea that having been a chorister just like him (he went to Canterbury) we must have something in common whilst adding "what's more I watched you walk past me in London as I ate a Mexican only yesterday". I managed about as much as I did when I recently shook the Queen's hand, which was "Ma........". (I still haven't worked out whether I meant to say "Ma'am" or some form of "My pleasure" which would have been completely idiotic considering I was in her house). I left Clarke to the Vinexpo going on in town and scuttled off to read my horoscope - "You meet a small dark stranger with advice on 2010 En Primeur".
Presently my train home to York is nearing its destination so this, so far wild description of the last month will have to be continued............
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