Royal Ballet (HD broadcast), 18/05/2016

Lowell Liebermann : Frankenstein

Artists of The Royal Ballet
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Koen Kessels

Scottish Opera, 15/05/2016

Mozart : Le Nozze di Figaro -

• Overture
• "Porgi amor"

Mozart : Idomeneo -

• "Padre, germani, addio"
• Ballet music

Mozart : "Bella mia fiamma", K. 528
Strauss : "Das Rosenband"; "Ich wollt ein Strausslein binden"; "Allerseelen"; "Ruhe, meine Seele"
Strauss : Der Rosenkavalier - Suite

Kate Royal, soprano
Orchestra of Scottish Opera
Stuart Stratford

SCO, 13/05/2016

Mussorgsky : Dawn over the Moscow River
Sibelius : Violin Concerto (Tedi Papavrami, violin)
Beethoven : Symphony No. 3 "Eroica"

Scottish Chamber Orchestra
Emanuel Krivine

BBCSSO, 12/05/2016

Brahms : Piano Concerto No. 1 (Denis Kozhukhin, piano)
Beethoven : Symphony No. 7

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Thomas Dausgaard

RSNO, 07/05/2016

Bartók : The Miraculous Mandarin - Suite
Stravinsky : Violin Concerto (Leticia Moreno, violin)
Stravinsky : The Rite of Spring

Royal Scottish National Orchestra
Thomas Søndergård

Scottish Opera, 05/05/2016

Gilbert & Sullivan : The Mikado

Chorus of The Mikado
Orchestra of Scottish Opera
Derek Clark

First things first.  If you live in the UK, and were perhaps thinking of catching this show somewhere on its extensive UK tour over the next two months, go without fear.  It's a very enjoyable evening.  And now you may stop reading, because there be spoilers ahead, and some of the jokes are worth experiencing without having been previously warned.

Onwards...

Florence Foster Jenkins, 02/05/2016

Of course I went to see Stephen Frear's biopic of FFJ, what self-respecting opera lover wouldn't - especially on a bank holiday with nothing better to do!  It is worth seeing,very well played and beautifully designed, and, in its way, it's something of a feel-good movie, which you might not expect from the subject.  It didn't, however, quite hit the emotional notes of "Marguerite" (although the French film went over-the-top at the end).

There were two things I found interesting about Frear's movie.  First was the acting, not so much of Streep, good as she is, but of Simon Hellberg and Hugh Grant.  Hellberg was an adorably hapless Cosmé McMoon - rather younger than the real McMoon was at the time - channeling Gene Wilder's Leo Bloom for all his worth.  As for Grant, he was exceptional, in a many-layered role that, for me, quite overshadowed Streep's FFJ.

Second was the sense of period.  When I first heard FFJ's recordings, I though they dated from a good decade earlier.  I've certainly heard recordings from the mid-40s with a much better sound than these Melotone pressings, and it remains, still, a bit of a surprise to realise that they date from the war years.  The period is drawn vividly in Frear's film, but there is in it, visually, what I hear in those recordings - a sense of the end of an era.  Even if FFJ could have sung correctly, there's a sense that she's a relic that has outlived her time, and you see it echoed all around in the look of the film, in the tiara-ed dowagers set against the hip younger crowd, and the fading splendour of the Art Deco architecture and interiors set against the utilitarian dinginess of more 'modern' flats.

So, two down, one to go.