Topsy-Turvy

Posted on July 10, 2019 by leslie

Sabine Devieilhe as Maria. Photo by Tristram Kenton

Topsy-Turvy 

Review of La Fille du Régiment, Opéra Comique in two acts, music by Gaetano Donizetti, libretto by Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges & Jean-François-Alfred Bayard, conducted by Evelino Pidò, directed by Laurent Pelly, fourth revival of the 2007 production, Royal Opera House, Monday 8th July 2019, reviewed by Leslie Jones

Exuberant conductor Evelino Pidò elicited a spirited performance of the compelling prelude to La Fille du Régiment from the orchestra of the Royal Opera House. It was a portent of the riches to come.

In comic opera or farce, we are a long way from verismo. As Zoë Anderson points out, “…we know how things are likely to go” and, “We recognise the characters as types…” (‘Don’t be a Duchess’, Official Programme). Marie, played with gusto by the feisty French soprano Sabine Devieilhe, is one such stock type, to wit, the mislaid baby, brought up in this case by soldiers. This lends itself to a classic opera device, the attempt to transform her into a lady via a music lesson. And to a trading riches for happiness trope. Marie’s mother, La Marquise de Berkenfeld (mezzo-soprano Enkelejda Shkoza), is also a stock type, “a grand dame with a past”. Essentially frivolous and egotistical, she turns out to be Marie’s mother, the product of an affair with Marie’s late father. Sulpice Pingot (baritone Pietro Spagnoli, heavily made up), the sergeant with a heart of gold who found Marie on a battlefield as a baby, is another recognisable archetype. Continue reading →

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Ivanka the Terrible, Part 2

Posted on July 9, 2019 by leslie

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump

Ivanka the Terrible, Part 2

by Ilana Mercer

It’s obvious who the odd one out was at the G20 Summit. Allow me to set the scene:

Two mature women are in the thick of a policy discussion. The two heavy hitters are British Prime Minister Theresa May and International Monetary Fund Director Christine Lagarde.

Their buttoned-up, officious attire fits the occasion. It’s how Theresa May and Christine Lagarde, both born in 1956, have always dressed. The pearls, the tweed and gingham suits: these are as old-school and as dear as Margaret Thatcher’s made-in-Britain, “ten-a-penny” “humble handbag.”

Whether you like their politics or you don’t—and I don’t—Theresa May and Christine Lagarde are sharpshooting, politically hefty women.

May graduated from Oxford, which has a “jealously-guarded admissions process.” In other words, May was not admitted to that elite school for being a woman, and she did not make her way in the word of politics because she was the daughter of a celebrity. Continue reading →

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Twitter Block

Posted on July 9, 2019 by leslie

Twitter Block

By Ilana Mercer

Twice have the censors at Twitter kicked me off their anything-but-neutral platform. When these arbiters of right and wrong periodically block my Twitter account, visitors to the site will be greeted with a stark warning:

“Caution. This account is temporary restricted.” The snowflakes will be forewarned of “some unusual activity on the account. Do you still want to view it?” Naturally, the worded choice offered—to view or not to view—ultimately doesn’t exist. I am told that when you click to avail yourself of the “choice,” my account is nowhere to be seen. Once blocked, you’re invisible.

When sent to the Twitter doghouse, one is typically barred from accessing Twitter at all, except for fleetingly seeing the notice, “Your account has been blocked.” Continue reading →

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Separation Anxiety

Posted on July 8, 2019 by leslie

Célestine Galli-Marié as Carmen (Musée de l’Opéra)

Separation Anxiety

Carmen, Opéra Comique in three acts, music composed by Georges Bizet, libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy after Prosper Mérimée’s 1845 novella Carmen, revival of the 2018 Royal Opera Production, directed by Barrie Kosky, conducted by Julia Jones, Royal Opera, Friday 5th July 2019, reviewed by Leslie Jones

“Don’t leave me Carmen”, implores Don José, as he begs her to follow him and to start a new life together. In director Barrie Kosky’s production of Carmen, the rope (subsequently the dress train) is like an umbilical cord that fatally connects the doomed lovers. They seemingly cannot survive without each other. And Don José embodies the dominant ideology of sexual guilt and subservience to the mother. As Sarah Lenton observes, his character “…is more straightjacketed than naive, and his obsessive tendencies are… hinted at in his fixation with his mother” (‘Out of Character’, Official Programme). Christopher Wintle, in What Opera Means, goes even further, claiming that Carmen chooses Don José because of a death wish.

What constitutes femininity and masculinity? Kosky, throughout, accentuates gender differences. We see men, stage right, ogling factory girls, who are narcissistically cooling themselves and smoking, stage left. Carmen is ultimately doomed because she will not abide by the rules of this bifurcated, patriarchal society. She represents untrammelled female sexuality. “Love’s a gypsy”, she proclaims and so is she. “Free was she born and free she will die”. In Mérimée’s novella, Don José recalls that Carmen “walked, swaying her hips like a filly from a Cordoba stud farm”. And the matador Escamillo (Luca Pisaroni), likewise, represents another sexual stereotype drawn from what Richard Langham Smith calls the “growing hispanomania” of the 1870’s (‘Carmen’s Rocky Road to Success’, Official Programme). Continue reading →

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The Fukuyama Thesis, Thirty Years On

Posted on July 7, 2019 by leslie

Francis Fukuyama

The Fukuyama Thesis, Thirty Years On

by Mark Wegierski

Initial drafts of this response to Fukuyama’s article go back to November 1989.
Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest no 16 (Summer 1989), pp. 3-1; and Alan Bloom, et al. ‘Responses to Fukuyama’, The National Interest no 16 (Summer 1989), pp. 19-35

Fukuyama’s article caught the attention of those who study political philosophy, and who are interested in the future of the West. His article has been seen as a daring éclat on “the end of history”, but certain aspects of these matters, it could be argued, have been poorly represented in the debate. There is the lack of a perspective rooted in the writings of thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, George Parkin Grant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jacques Ellul. Fukuyama has not entered into a dialogue with these thinkers.

Generally speaking, the thesis of “the end of history” has been received in two main ways: some persons, while embracing the foreseen triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism, have expressed greater or lesser reservations about its completeness and permanence; while others argued that socialism, for example, was still a worthwhile, viable alternative.

Professor Bloom received the thesis very warmly and celebrated the future triumph of liberal democracy, albeit tempered with a curious reference to the “fascist” threat. Considering how opposed Professor Bloom was to many aspects of contemporary American life, as in his coruscating Closing of the American Mind, his embracing of full‑blown liberal democracy seems odd. Continue reading →

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Spellbound

Posted on July 5, 2019 by leslie

Rosalind Plowright, credit Janthonykaye

Spellbound

Un Ballo in Maschera, music composed by Giuseppe Verdi, libretto by Antonio Somma, Investec Opera Holland Park, City of London Sinfonia conducted by Matthew Kofi Waldren, new production of the original, uncensored version directed by Rodula Gaitanou, based on the drama Gustave III de Suède by Eugène Scribe, Friday 21st June 2019, reviewed by Leslie Jones

In a letter to his librettist Antonio Somma, Verdi alluded to the difficult gestation of Un Ballo in Maschera, notably the seemingly intractable problems with the censors, both in Naples and Rome. “I bathe in a sea of ennuis”, he complained. In a contemporaneous missive to the publisher Ricordi, he again struck a note of self-pity, stating that “we poor gypsies and charlatans are obliged to sell our labours, our thoughts, our delirium for gold…” (quoted in Verdi, by Carlo Gatti, vol 1).

However, the premiere in Rome, in February 1859, was a triumph and it coincided with a wave of patriotic fervour (the Franco-Austrian War, plotted by Napoleon III and Cavour at Plombières, was about to commence). Yet as Gatti observes, Un Ballo was no mere “succès de circonstance”, as this splendid new production at Holland Park demonstrates. The score is replete with fine arias, duets and ensemble work à la Donizetti and the plot has echoes of Shakespearian tragedy, notably of Macbeth. Continue reading →

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Leaving Sneddonland

Posted on July 4, 2019 by leslie

Leaving Sneddonland

On Michael Jackson, Margo Jefferson, Granta, £9.99, reviewed by Stoddard Martin

It is unfortunate, if perhaps inevitable, that great creators, not least of music, should morph into personalities to be analysed to death, or beyond. Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner qualify among musicians of a prior age; Michael Jackson stands out among legions in our own. Some bring the destiny upon themselves, knowing that their public craves seasoning for the feast. But music remains the main course and, without substance in it, indigestion arrives.

‘Billy Jean’ seemed an epoch-making pop song in its day; the video of ‘Thriller’ was more than eye-catching. What else remains in memory? Image and scandal perhaps most; pathos; a certain revulsion mixed with compassion, if not sympathy. So innocent, so young, so not for a brute world – these conditions spoke out of the poor mannish fellow’s face and persuaded us of their truth, whatever defiant counter-selves he may have adopted to mask them. Continue reading →

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Trump Barters for Borders – and Wins

Posted on June 24, 2019 by leslie

Ilana Mercer

Trump Barters for Borders – and Wins

by Ilana Mercer

If President Trump doesn’t waver, his border deal with Mexico will be a victory. The Mexicans have agreed to quit serving as conduits to hundreds of thousands of central Americans headed for the U.S.A. Despite protests from Democrats, stateside—Mexico has agreed to significantly increase enforcement on its borders. At first, Mexico was as defiant as the Democrats—and some Republicans. Democrats certainly can be counted on to argue for the other side—any side other than the so-called sovereign people that they swore to represent.

In fairness to the Democrats, Republicans are only notionally committed to the tough policing of the border. And certainly not if policing the porous border entails threatening trade tariffs against our neighborly narco-state. Some Republican senators even considered a vote to block the tariffs. Nevertheless, to the hooting and hollering of the cretins in Congress and the media, Trump went ahead and threatened Mexico with tariffs.

More than that. The president didn’t just tweet out “strong words” and taunts. Since Mexico, the party duopoly, and his own courts have forced his hand, the president proceeded to “retrieve from his arsenal a time bomb of ruinous proportions.” Or so the Economist hyperventilated. Continue reading →

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Eternal Recurrence

Posted on June 24, 2019 by leslie

Sir Francis Galton, by Octavius Oakley, credit National Portrait Gallery

Eternal Recurrence

Superior: The Return of Race Science, Angela Saini, 4thEstate, 2019, 342pp, reviewed by Ed Dutton

Angela Saini can skilfully encapsulate her subject in a striking yet poignant image, so that the reader feels what this Guardian journalist wants them to feel: that ‘race’ is simply a means by which white people subjugate other ‘races’, that anyone who thinks that ‘race’ is a biological reality should feel guilty, and that ‘race’ has hurt people like Angela, an ethnic Punjabi, born in Newham and raised around Welling in southeast London.

In one of the most memorable examples of this writing skill in her new book Superior, she takes us on a journey. She has travelled widely to research this book, from interviewing an Aborigine in Australia whose parents were forcibly removed from their families, to conversing with a geneticist in India who suggests that caste correlates with cognitive ability – to a long-forgotten area of Paris. In 1907, it played host to the Paris Exposition, a giant outdoor anthropology museum in which people of different races were placed in simplified mock-ups of their own homeland so that Westerners could observe them, like exotic animals in a zoo. Angela brings the scene to life, stimulating our senses so that we ‘feel’ that we are in Paris with her and then she adds:

‘To one side is a weathered sculpture of a naked woman, reclining and covered in beads, her head gone, if it was ever there at all. A solitary jogger runs past’ (p.46).

In this short paragraph, Angela connects us to the human zoo, and what it represented; decay and death, pornography, the exploitation of females, and to Ancient Greece and its worship of the human form, but also to the scientific fervour of the Ancient world. Continue reading →

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The Boyars, Back in Town

Posted on June 21, 2019 by leslie

Bryn Terfel as Boris Godunov, ROH 2019, Photo Clive Barda

The Boyars, Back in Town

Boris Godunov, opera in seven scenes, original version (1869), music by Modest Musorgsky, libretto by Musorgsky adapted from the historical tragedy by Alexander Pushkin, Orchestra of the Royal Opera House conducted by Marc Albrecht, directed by Richard Jones, Royal Opera House, Wednesday 19th June 2019, reviewed by Leslie Jones

This first revival of Richard Jones’ 2016 production of Boris Godunov is a splendid visual spectacle, in terms of lighting, costumes and sets. The split level stage, designed by Miriam Buether, is used to telling effect. In the opening scene, Boris (Bryn Terfel), looking troubled, is sitting alone on the lower level. All seems sens dessus dessous. In the brilliantly lit, semi-circular, upper tier, a mini-drama is being enacted. Tsar Fyodor’s eight year old son Dmitry is playing with a spinning top. His throat is then cut by three murderers, allegedly at Boris’s behest. This scene, presumably a projection of Boris’s guilt, is repeatedly revisited, as his thoughts return obsessively to the deed, like a finger to a scab. As he observes, “Cruel conscience, how terrible is your punishment”.

Marina Frolova-Walker, Professor of Music History at the University of Cambridge, notes in a recent lecture at Gresham College how Musorgsky invented a national style of music, a profound expression of Russian melancholy and pessimism, as in the orchestral prelude. Russian orthodox motifs, notably church bells, were incorporated into this musical palate. Continue reading →

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