Go See the ASO in 2016!

December 2, 2015 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | Classical Music, Ulalume, WAGNER |

Photo of ASO from "The Australian"

Great season ahead for ASO, in its 80th year, with newbie Nicholas Carter.  He’s a Wagner fan (yay!) and opens the season (13/2/16) with Die Walküre, Act I.  Dare we dream to ramp-up Adelaide again as a second Bayreuth?  It’s a natural fit – small, picturesque, bankrupt as the Master, and full of chancers!  But beautiful. Like the canon on offer this season – Wagner, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Brahms, Dvorák, Handel, Berlioz, Strauss, Ravel, Prokofiev, Smetana, Elgar, Mahler, Debussy, Sibelius, Delius, Shostakovich, Stravinsky,  Yes…The Varnished Culture has ranked them, not chronologically, but on merit. But see and hear what you can…

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Otello

November 18, 2015 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | Opera, THUMBNAIL REVIEWS |

Set for the 1895 Paris Otello (photo Gallico)

(Verdi) (1887) (Metropolitan Opera, November 2015) (Dir. Bartlett Sher) (Film Dir. Gary Halvarson) How can you go wrong with Shakespeare, Verdi and a Drinking Song?  A great source (though suffering from some tinkering), seamless music with some outstanding features, and tight structure, yet it lacks the charm of, for example, the less synoptically impressive Il Trovatore.  And it needs top-notch musical control, lest it blurs into mere noise. Othello by W.S. is a difficult beast because it is the most subtle hence most delicate of dramatic flowers.  Iago is perhaps the most baffling and ingenious villain (who, by the way, cops…

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What Stevie Wore in Adelaide

October 30, 2015 | Posted by Lesley Jakobsen | Annabel Lee, Modern Music, MUSIC |

"Oh, I'm getting older too" (Photo courtesy of Flickr)

Dear Annabels, our beloved Stevie Nicks stomps a bit now and she really shouldn’t turn side-on to the audience but she is pretty as and still rocks it just fabulously.   At Fleetwood Mac’s October 2015 concert, I  was close enough to see up Stevie’s two (not one or three) nostrils and so I took careful note of what the lady wore.  I  don’t think I need to say that it was (almost) all black, but Stevie wore:-   A skirt of (perhaps) microfiber, layered and good for lifting out at the sides A fitted long-sleeved velvet vest with points at the…

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Fleetwood Mac

October 29, 2015 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | Modern Music |

(Billboard magazine, 1977)

[Adelaide, 28 October 2015] The Varnished Culture saw Fleetwood Mac last night, at Hindmarsh Stadium aka Cooper’s Stadium*.  These ancient rockers sound magnificent and look marvellous, although the ravages of time, travel, art and their relationships show, especially if you are lucky enough, as we were, to have tickets that get you stalker-close to the stage. The by-play between them, borne of decades of love, hate, and indifference, gave joy to the dedicated audience, some of whom have been party to these shenanigans for their whole lives. We had seen the group a few years ago but this was our first time with the original line-up,…

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Il Trovatore

October 27, 2015 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | Opera, THUMBNAIL REVIEWS |

Ken Howard's photo of the Met production

(Giuseppe Verdi) (1853) (The Met, October 2015) The story of this opera can be summed-up in this little ditty: “Yes, Sir, that’s my baby, No Sir, I do mean maybe, Yes Sir, baby’s on the stove. What, Sir, why say ‘maybe’? Well, see, ‘cos that baby May be from another trove.” (With apologies to Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson) Sorry to trivialise Verdi’s lovely opera with the doggerel written above, but the plot of Il Trovatore, such as it is, is quite ridiculous.  A gypsy hurls her own tot on the bonfire by mistake and closes the circle in conning a lascivious Duke…

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