Author Archive: Peter Jakobsen
Don Giovanni
"Tu a cenar meco?" (Painting by Fragonard; image by Rama)
(State Opera SA, 30 May 2015) TVC had only seen the disastrous ENO production but not this version which originally featured Teddy Tahu Rhodes as the Don. What a relief to find staging and performances generally faithful to the 1787 work; in fact, superb staging, a simple hall, doubling as a courtyard, bounded by masonry with balconies (which, unfortunately, wobbled a little) but the simplicity of this setting, varied by good use of lighting, emphasized the pyrotechnics of the finale when the far wall collapsed to admit the Commendatore’s statue and a team of demons ferry the Don to the infernal regions (or…
Continue Reading →The Idyll
Tribschen as Arcadia (photo by Josef Lehmkuhl)
(Ensemble Le Monde, Elder Hall, 29 May 2015) ELM gave us a varied programme, with Serenade in C Major for String Trio by Dohnányi. Played in 5 short bursts, each part crowded with disparate moods, ideas and tones, this unfamiliar (to TVC) work is of great interest and showed the versatility of violin, viola, cello. During the soft, still moments, the cello acted almost as a harp. A larger portion of the ensemble gathered for Richard Strauss’ tone poem Till Eulenspiegel einmal anders! TVC is willing to give Strauss points for his operatic and several symphonic works, but it is hard to underrate this one,…
Continue Reading →Magna Carta (800)
"You want me to HONOUR this scrap of paper?"
On 15 June, 1215, at Runnymede, a reluctant King John, under coercion from unruly barons and the ruly Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘signed up’ to Magna Carta. John was a crafty bastard: a couple of years earlier, with French wolves at the door, the King submitted to Papal authority and bought himself some miraculous breathing space. That summer morning in 1215, the King rode to the meadow, absorbed the terms and agreed on the spot. He needed time (again) and may have not intended to comply. John was dead (of dysentery – ecch!) by the next year, and by then, no one was getting specific…
Continue Reading →“Trust but Verify”
In the past few weeks, we have discovered (in John Gerarde’s 1598 book The Herball) a true contemporary portrait of William Shakespeare….Apparently! An excellent new book of poems, by a promising newcomer, called Waiting for the Past…This promising newcomer is, perhaps, unlikely to win any awards, but he is full of promise nevertheless. Les femmes d’Alger (Version O) (1955), one of Picasso’s ugliest, ickiest, run-of-the-Matisse grotesques, sells for $US179m, proving again that money can’t buy brains. And one of Pablo’s intrinsically worthless and ugly series of ceramic tiles was expected earlier this year by Christie’s London to fetch up to £50,000. O Tempora, O…
Continue Reading →Essence of Dick
"Let Me Make Something Perfectly Clear" (1970 photo of Nixon by Jack E Kightlinger)
“A place in the national firmament… Greatness is more than government. To make exciting mischief or dull salt; Hazard the chance of ruin, lay on fault, Set the highest stakes through piracy But who the hell to handle it, to cut free; To build me a mad image, up to anything Other than domestically, one who’ll thus bring A welcome beard. Under my dark sun, hold hard! The one you serve was dealt the bleakest card.” (What serves power, if one’s form at flood Is splendidly bedight yet daubed with mud? And the ‘new King’…
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