This post is going to focus entirely on two musical events which Philosopher and Battleaxe went to last week. Firstly, Rossini’s La Cenerentola (Cinderella) with Barefoot Opera, and a performance of Mendelessohn’s Elijah at the De La Warr Pavilion, with the Hastings Philharmonic Choir, orchestra and other assorted choirs, partly from Germany. Weather, as usual this ‘summer’, has been vile.
Firstly, the Barefoot Opera production. Battleaxe can safely say it was absolutely wonderful – one of the best things I have seen in ages. We have been to plenty of Barefoot productions before – here is a link to a post about another, ‘Orfeo’, which we also very much enjoyed. It is coming back to Rye on 19th August. Battleaxe would wholeheartedly recommend – but you might not get tickets, the performance last week was sold out.
Led by the very talented and committed Jenny Miller, part of the appeal of Barefoot is the very intimate nature of the productions – small casts, produced in venues where it is almost opera ‘in the round’, and you sit very close to the performers, who are mostly young people just starting out on their careers. This production also featured a local community choir who joined in very briefly for a chorus, and some folks from the local Seaview Project, who were courtiers.
The productions are pared right down – the scenery is minimal, and the accompanying ‘band’ is small. We had a piano, a double bass, an accordian (the player of which was very easy on the eye..) and a clarinet – played sporadically by a member of the cast. This time we had no printed programme – the green agenda, but surtitles were projected onto the wall above our heads.
I can’t really pick out any of the soloists as being better than any other – they were all very strong, and acted exceptionally well. However, if stretched on the rack, I’d say that I liked the two ‘ugly sisters’ (Elora Ledger and Jessica Wise) best – they were so wonderfully over-the-top with a great range of shirty, supercilious expressions. However, the others were all outstanding too. Of course the story was silly but so what – there was loads of Rossini-style running round in circles…
Battleaxe and Philsopher loved every minute of it, and were so glad we went out on what was a damp, miserable evening. What was not to like? Great production, nice glass of wine in the interval (in a proper glass too, see later!). I can’t think of a single thing about the evening I didn’t like. We even got seats with cushions on…
My friend Lin Ireland was in the chorus choir – here she is! Don’t expect she will be thrilled with this picture…
Anyway, a couple of days later we went to Bexhill to see Elijah at the De La Warr Pavilion. Philosopher had particularly wanted to see it because it is quite rarely performed, and I was happy to go because they advertised a choir of 200, plus an orchestra, and Battleaxe always enjoys a good blast of sound.
However, the evening turned out rather mixed… it was a horrid wet night, as is now normal. We arrived early, to be sure of getting in the car park, and thought we’d have a drink first. Fancied a coffee to warm us up, but they had downgraded the bar into a mass catering festival style operation – cold drinks in plastic glasses. Ordered two red wines. The bartender slopped two whole tins of something or other into two flimsy, flabby plastic mugs – filled right to the top – and charged us £14. When we tasted the wine it was revolting – acidic and cheap. We couldn’t drink it. If you’d been hanging round half-pissed in a packed bar tent at Glasto on a boiling hot day you might have appreciated it I suppose…
Anyway, we met zillions of people we knew, which is always good…
On our way into the auditorium we asked where we could get a programme. There weren’t any – it had all gone paperless. Apparently, they said, there was a bar code pinned up round the place which you could scan and then find the programme and follow the words on your phone. So, did that and got it, trouble was, on my phone the words were tiny…
Had good seats, nearly at the front, but then, horrors of all complete horrors, a couple with a small girl of about 6 came and sat right in front of us. Why on earth would anyone even dream of bringing a child to something like that? The production lasted over 3 hours with an interval and was totally unsuitable on any level you could think of. Anyway, you can’t blame the child but she wriggled and fretted the whole time. Either she was kneeling on her seat and staring at us, or crawling on the floor, or jumping about, or clambering onto her mother’s lap… The parents just grinned at her inanely. It nearly drove us mad…
When the singing started it was indeed a fantastic blast of sound – brilliant. The soloists were all good too. Trouble was, we didn’t know what was going on. There were no surtitles, which was very silly of them, and the story was complicated. I tried following on my phone but it was so small and I still kept getting lost. The story was very jealous and fierce Old-Testament God. Much rending of garments, smiting and slaying priests of Baal etc etc.
I felt it was a shame we could not have heard such a huge choir zap us with one of the ‘greats’ of the choral repertoire… like Verdi’s Requiem. Imagine that Dies Irae… Don’t get me wrong, Battleaxe is not averse to new things but there is probably a reason why Eiljah is rarely performed…
Then, to crown it all, a woman behind me told me off for ‘surfing on my phone’. She had found it ‘distracting’. Btw it wasn’t dark in the auditorium so I don’t know what her beef was. Amyway, I snapped furiously back that ‘I was doing what we had been told to do… following the words.’ Of course, if everyone in the auditorium had been looking at their devices, you would have had 100s of phones, which wouldn’t have been any good at all…
Anyway, we left at the interval. It was a pity, because the singing was great. But above all they needed to tell us in advance that there was no programme, and also projected up some surtitles. And as for that wretched child – for Goodness sake!
