New beginnings
Nov. 14th, 2022 08:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiWe received an email last week from J, asking whether we were interested in going to see Das Rheingold at the weekend. It would have been churlish not to take advantage of the absence of industrial action on the railways. Besides, I skipped the prelude to the Ring at the Proms cycle of 2004-7, so this one I had not seen.
R went in to London earlier and met up with J at the Tate; I arrived separately, but we had distributed the PDF tickets to avoid any difficulty. In fact the only difficulty was the slow pace of entry; apparently the requirements for bag searches had only become apparent late on, and so the queue trickled in to Freemasons' Hall. It was an impressive venue combining modernism and mysticism; and felt quite an appropriate environment for the performance.
The orchestral forces of Regents Opera were reduced in number, but felt right for the venue, and at times were joined by the Willis organ in the hall. The soloists all performed well in an unusual central space, with seating along the two sides of the hall rather like the House of Commons. Props were minimal, with the audience left to their imagination. Although the style of the performance was abstract and timeless, the plot does lend itself to a contemporary interpretation, with Wotan's unfunded infrastructure spending leading to an emergency mini-budget: the Rheingold, stolen by Alberich from the watchful Rhinemaidens and forged into the powerful Ring, must be stolen again and used to repay the giants for the building of Valhalla. Of course Wagner takes rather longer to tell the tale. The performance itself ran to time, but had started late and therefore finished correspondingly late.
Afterwards we went to a nearby Moroccan restaurant, Bab Mansour. The food was good but the choice rather limited, as a number of items on the menu were unavailable, presumably more a hazard of Sunday evening than a Brexit benefit. We were fortunate in catching a train home just before a half-hour drought of departures from Paddington.
R went in to London earlier and met up with J at the Tate; I arrived separately, but we had distributed the PDF tickets to avoid any difficulty. In fact the only difficulty was the slow pace of entry; apparently the requirements for bag searches had only become apparent late on, and so the queue trickled in to Freemasons' Hall. It was an impressive venue combining modernism and mysticism; and felt quite an appropriate environment for the performance.
The orchestral forces of Regents Opera were reduced in number, but felt right for the venue, and at times were joined by the Willis organ in the hall. The soloists all performed well in an unusual central space, with seating along the two sides of the hall rather like the House of Commons. Props were minimal, with the audience left to their imagination. Although the style of the performance was abstract and timeless, the plot does lend itself to a contemporary interpretation, with Wotan's unfunded infrastructure spending leading to an emergency mini-budget: the Rheingold, stolen by Alberich from the watchful Rhinemaidens and forged into the powerful Ring, must be stolen again and used to repay the giants for the building of Valhalla. Of course Wagner takes rather longer to tell the tale. The performance itself ran to time, but had started late and therefore finished correspondingly late.
Afterwards we went to a nearby Moroccan restaurant, Bab Mansour. The food was good but the choice rather limited, as a number of items on the menu were unavailable, presumably more a hazard of Sunday evening than a Brexit benefit. We were fortunate in catching a train home just before a half-hour drought of departures from Paddington.