Classical Greek at the WEA
A Greek manuscript accidentally "aged" with WEA hot chocolate.
I have attended many WEA courses over the years – languages, silk painting, photoshopping, website wrangling, grasshopper breeding. At present I am trying to be a good girl and diligently do my homework during the hiatus between the WEA year long courses in Ancient Greek I and Ancient Greek II. But Great Zeus! drilling oneself in Middle Voice Progressive Participles is boring, and as for Thematic Second Aorist Active Imperatives!! I can’t wait for the term to start in late February. Our teacher, Dr Alessandro Boria from Rome is a polyglot of great patience and good cheer. The dozen or so stalwarts who completed…
Continue Reading →Eugene Onegin
Painting by Ilya Repin, 1899
Tchaikovsky’s great opera (1879), with a libretto largely lifted from Pushkin’s epic poem, is a snow-filled but overheated saga of frustrated amour. TVC has never seen a live performance and has no plans to visit Russia in order to do so. The 1988 Decca DVD, directed by Peter Weigl with Sir Georg Solti conducting the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, reveals one of the enduring problems with opera as film as opposed to the Opera House. It sounds good and it looks good but, alas, not at the same time. The film treatment, while a little static, soars above the…
Continue Reading →The Flying Dutchman
Charles Temple
(Wagner) (1843) Not the Master’s best, by any means, but still streets ahead of most: strong, muscular, melodious, dramatic, Wagnerian, and able to be staged in most civilizations (Bass x 2, Soprano, Contralto, a couple of tenors). A Mary Celeste story with some soft porn thrown in, it was apparently inspired by both a stormy sea-crossing and Richard’s contempt for Parisians. (TVC team are francophiles but still: Yay!). Add to the inspiration the ghost ship source material that abounded in Wagner’s youth, such as by Marryat and Heine and you can enjoy an immature piece that is still tempestuous, eerie…
Continue Reading →Valentine’s Day
St. Valentine (from 'Picnic at Hanging Rock'
(2015 – ASO) After champagne and real Turkish delight, and the annual re-run of Picnic at Hanging Rock, it was time to head through Adelaide’s February furnace to the Festival Theatre, where Arvo Volmer conducted the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s version of a concert, curiously and incongruously entitled “Passionate Tchaikovsky”. We had the Russian composer’s Violin Concerto, with Ilya Gringolts sublime on lead violin, wearing a frock coat straight from Fiddler on the Roof. Written in 1878 to console its creator for the unfortunate and instantly-regretted decision to marry the loopy and self-centred Antonina Milyukova, the piece was not played till…
Continue Reading →No Man’s Land
(Harold Pinter) Adelaide University Theatre Guild, 2014 Clive James described this piece as akin to “a chess game being played out long after a draw should have been declared, since there are only two knights and two pawns left on the board.” Whilst this could not describe a real game, you get his point. It’s another psychodrama but with enough keen sense of modern discourse to give us (pardon us for this) pause… Pinter’s stronger characters can never resist the chance to crush their weak or shifty (usually self-delusional) adversaries. Here, two men with literary pretensions, watched and ‘waitered’ by…
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